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God bless you. One of the exciting aspects of what God is doing with the doctrine that He is bringing forth right now is that it is opening up the Prophets. All of these mysterious Scriptures that bless us because the anointing of God is on them, but have remained closed or remained a mystery to us in many areas (because the prophets wrote in symbols), are being opened up.

 

The prophets wrote in symbols, and it is possible to understand the Prophets on a certain level. One can understand on a level to a certain degree, but to really understand the deep hidden mystery that the prophets were bringing forth, we must first be able to interpret the symbols.

 

The message that the Lord is bringing forth in this hour is interpreting the symbols. We can spend months bringing forth a doctrine that will interpret one symbol in the Scripture. As I continue to go on with the Lord, studying as He leads me, I find that the Prophets are just opening up to me in a new measure that I never saw before.

 

MICAH, CHAPTER 1: 1-16

 

I would like to start to work with you on Micah, Chapter 1, and we will just get as far as we can go, as far as the Lord lets us go. I will read the whole chapter and then we will take it from there. I am not going to comment on every single word, but I am going to pick out the phrases that are symbolizing some of the teachings that the Lord has brought forth here, and we will take it from there as the Lord leads us.

 

Micah 1:1-16

 

"The word of the Lord that came to Micah, the Morasthite in the days of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, which he saw concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. Here all ye people, hearken O earth and all that therein is, and let the Lord God be witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple. For behold the Lord cometh forth out of his place and he will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth, and the mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft as wax before the fire, and as the waters that are poured down a steep place.

 

For the transgression of Jacob is all this, and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob, is it not Samaria and what are the high places of Judah, are they not Jerusalem? Therefore I will make Samaria as a heap of the field, and as plantings of a vineyard and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley, and I will discover the foundations thereof, and all the graven images thereof shall be beaten to pieces, and all the hires thereof shall be burned with the fire, and all the idols thereof will I lay desolate, for she gathered it of the hire of a harlot, and they shall return to the hire of a harlot.

 

Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked, I will make a wailing like the dragons and mourning as the owls. For her wound is incurable, for it is come unto Judah, he is come unto the gate of my people, even to Jerusalem. Declare ye it not at Gath, weep ye not at all in the house of Aphrah. Role thyself in the dust. Pass ye away thou inhabitant of Saphir, having they shame naked: the inhabitant of Zaanan, come not forth in the mourning of Bethezel, he shall receive of you his standing. For the inhabitants of Maroth waited carefully for good, but evil came down from the Lord unto the gate of Jerusalem.

 

O thou inhabitant of Lachish, bind the chariot to the swift beast, she is the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion, for the transgressions of Israel were found in me. Therefore shalt thou give presents to Moreshethgath, the houses of Achzib shall be a lie to the kings of Israel. Yet will I bring an heir unto thee, O inhabitant of Mareshah: he shall come unto Adullam the glory of Israel. Make thee bold and poll thee for they delicate children, enlarge thy baldness as the eagle for they are gone into captivity from thee."

 

We see in Verse 1 that this prophet is speaking to the kings of Judah concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. It is very easy to determine from this paragraph that God is angry, that God is pronouncing judgment. What we find typical in the carnal church, or the typical reaction of the carnal mind is to say this is a fearsome God that takes vengeance without mercy and has no pity on His people.

 

I want to declare to you that there is always a way of escape, but this way of escape seems to elude the carnal mind of men. God spends verses and verses and verses speaking about judgment to us, and the promise of restoration may be one verse in a whole chapter. Does anybody know where the restoration is in this chapter? Did anybody see it? I would like you to start to train your eyes to look for the positive amidst the negative.

 

I will help you, it is in Verse 15, "Yet I will bring an heir unto thee, O inhabitant of Mareshah: he shall come unto Adullam the glory of Israel". Hallelujah, and we are finding this throughout the Scriptures. Man is in a fallen condition, man is in a desperate condition. The only hope for the resurrection of mankind is the judgment of our soul.

 

I know the Scripture says that Christ in you is the hope of glory, but what that Scripture does not make clear is that when Christ is formed in you, He will judge your fallen soul which is filled with all of the sins described in Micah 1. All of the sins that God has indicted Samaria and Jerusalem and the kings of Judah for, exists in our soul.

 

We must try to understand that every sin that appears in this world, every sin that appears in our personal life, every sin that may appear in our flesh in the form of infirmity or some form of disaster that comes upon us, every evil in your country, every evil in your local town comes forth from evil that is in the mind of man.

 

Everything that we see is an image of that which is invisible, which is in our mind. As we go through these Scriptures, starting with Verse 1, I want you to bear in mind that this is God's pronounced judgment upon the carnal minds of men, but He has not left you without a way of escape.

 

Before these judgments begin, He will have deposited His seed upon your heart, and His Christ will have begun to be formed in you, so that at the moment of the downfall of your soul, His Son, Christ Jesus shall be right there, ready, willing, and able to move in and take over this job of sustaining the flesh of your existence.

 

It is essential that we understand this, not just for ourselves but for those that God sends us to minister to. This message of "hell and damnation" in the church has broken the hearts of many people that have looked upon their own soul, and said, "There is no way I can be without sin. There is no way that God can receive me, because I see the sins of my heart."

 

Recently, a measure of maturity has come through the church whereby the preachers have realized this "hell and damnation" message can not be true. Our God is a loving God, our God is a good God, our God desires to restore us, therefore there must be some kind of misunderstanding of the Scripture.

 

They realize this but they have not yet received the understanding that the judgment of our carnal mind is essential for the mind of Christ to become our personal God, ruling over our mind and our vessel and our very life, and that it is essential to judge and wound and ultimately destroy this existing fallen mind.

 

Therefore we have a doctrine in the church today that is largely lopsided. It preaches the goodness of God, it preaches the promises of God, but it gives no explanation for the judgment spoken of by the prophets. It gives no explanation for the Scriptures that speak about judgment.

 

People will come to you and they will want these two aspects of the Scriptures reconciled. How can this God of the Old Testament, who was waging war without mercy, be the same God of the New Testament who says that if someone smites you on one cheek, give him the other? How will we ever witness to the Jew who knows his God of vengeance, and rejected Jesus largely because of His unwarlike position, nature and character, and the nature of His ministry which was unwarlike?

 

God must pull all the Scriptures together for us, brethren, and He is doing it. I am not going to tell you this is the last message, I cannot tell you that, but I see in this message, a connecting link that really excites me. For almost every Scripture we endeavor to understand, we must comprehend that God is a strong judge to the unrighteous carnal mind which is fallen, which is sin, which is death, and which is killing us, and He is a God of strength and nourishment to the Christ in us which is coming forth.

 

As an added witness to this principle, if you do any kind of in-depth study of the Hebrew language.... I use a supplemental lexicon to the Strong's; it is called Gesenius Lexicon of the Hebrew and the Chaldee language. When I first started studying it, I was very confused because there could be twenty translations of one word, ten translations that are positive, and ten translations that are negative, for the very same Hebrew word.

 

However, the Lord has showed me that when this word is applied to the carnal mind it is negative, and when it is applied to the mind of Christ, it is positive. Many people cannot understand how Christ who is supposed to be love, and who is in fact love, can come with a harsh rebuke to somebody. The answer is that Christ will harshly rebuke sin. This love, love, love, that is through the church, which justifies the sin of man is not the doctrine of God, and it is not a doctrine that will produce full stature.

 

We must be sanctified. Sanctification is the separation between our carnal mind and the Christ in our mind. Brethren, if we do not acknowledge the sin in that aspect of us which we were born with, our carnal mind, there is no hope for us. We have to acknowledge that now that Christ is being formed in us, there are two of us, and we must be sanctified, we must separate, we must pull apart in our mind.

 

We must cleave unto the righteousness in our mind and join with that righteousness to judge the wickedness in our own heart. This is our only hope, brethren. If we declare that we are without sin, there is no hope for us because what that means is that we have refused to cleave with the righteousness in our mind which says all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

 

We have refused to do that. We are justifying our sin, which means we are still in our carnal mind, and therefore we are still in our sins, and have tread Christ underfoot and exalted the carnal mind in our mind. We must be sanctified, if we wish to partake of this resurrection of the dead.

 

Let us try Micah, Chapter 1. I point out to you in Verse 1 that the prophet is indicting the kings of Judah concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. We see a Scriptural example of evil kings. When I first started reading the Scripture, I thought all the kings of Judah and Israel were good, but we see that it is possible to be a king in God and not be good. It is possible to have the Holy Ghost and not be good. It is possible to even have Christ being formed in you and to think and do evil.

 

I am curious to know if this doctrine is coming around in Nigeria. In the United States we have many saying, "We are incapable of sin." Are they teaching that here, that he who is born of God cannot sin? Christ cannot sin, but, brethren, you are Christ as well as your carnal mind and in this hour we are all probably more carnal than Christ, and we most certainly can sin.

 

We see an indictment against the kings of Judah who typify the coming Sons of God, which we are, and the indictment is concerning Samaria and Jerusalem. I want to suggest to you that Samaria typifies the separated nation of Israel. Samaria is the capital of the separated ten tribes of Israel. The prophet is indicting the kings of Judah, who typify the Sons of God, with regard to Israel, which is known for the sin of.... does anybody know? The outstanding sin of idolatry, idolatry, the number 1 sin.

 

The golden calves of Samaria were set up by their unfaithful king, Jeroboam. Their own king sold them down the river. Do you use that expression "sold them down the river" here? I do not come to turn you against your ministers. I ask you to be faithful to them as you can be, but I do come to tell you that it is possible that some ministers will sell you down the river. You must know this. If someone is selling you down the river and you see this truth, that does not make you unfaithful to them.

 

The prophet is also indicting the kings of Judah with regard to Jerusalem, Jerusalem being the capital city of Judah. We are told in the Prophets that Judah, whom God called to be an example unto Samaria, did the same sins as Samaria. Why? Judah had the God appointed king, King David. Judah had the Levite priests (most of them went back to Judah). Judah had the sanction of God. Judah had no idolatry initially, she had the temple.

 

The whole reason why Jeroboam set up the golden calves was that under the old covenant Jews had to appear in the temple in Jerusalem for the feasts: the Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. They were required by the law to appear in the temple and Jeroboam was afraid that if they made their journey into Judah, they would get a revelation that God never ordained for them to come out.

 

I know that God said to Rehoboam that the separation is of me, do not go to war, but initially God never ordained for the separation. Did I confuse anybody with that?

 

Jeroboam was afraid if his people came down to Judah, they would see the temple, and would get a revelation that the priests.... that the God ordained king is here, and that something is wrong. He decided to enslave his people by putting up walls. These were spiritual walls that he put up.

 

He did not forbid them to physically go there, but he set up his golden calves and he ordained priests, we are told, of the common people, and he said, "Worship here, this is your God," and the people said, "This is king Jeroboam, God must have set him up to lead us. Let us not seek God for ourselves, let us not read the Scriptures."

 

Behind it all really, was pride. At the bottom of their decision-making process was pride which said, "I really do not want to make that trip to Jerusalem. I would really much rather just worship the golden calf, and there is something about the choosing of the priest from the common people that makes me feel important." They exhibited pride and rebellion against God's order.

 

What I am suggesting to you is there can be a minister who will sell you down the river, but every time this happens, there is always a remnant that does not get sold down the river. Three quarters of the congregation might go down, but there is always God's faithful who put God ahead of their own desires, and they make it out. God has made a way of escape for them.

 

Let me just clarify that the kings of Judah in Micah 1 typify the up and coming Sons in the church today. Brethren, let me point out to you that Judah consisted of the tribe of Judah, the tribe of Benjamin and most of the Levite priests. Israel consisted of ten tribes, many, many, many more numbers than Judah. Israel had many more people than Judah.

 

I want to encourage you today, not to be discouraged that your numbers are small compared to the Traditional Church world, and even compared to the Pentecostal Church world. You are the kings and priests unto this church world. We do not know whether they have not come unto this knowledge because God has not offered it to them, or whether He did and they have refused it.

 

It does not matter, but there is a separation in the church today, and the God ordained king is here. You must know that you have a ministry to these people. No matter how much they attack you, no matter how much they blaspheme you or persecute you, you are sent to them, as God leads you on an individual basis. Know who you are.

 

I see a reversion in the Kingdom Church of a return to the observance of pagan holidays. Ministries which have been refusing to observe pagan holidays for ten, fifteen years, are going back to this observation. If there is anybody here that engages in this, let me tell you this. If God has not convicted you to cease a practice, then He is winking at it. Nobody is entering into the Kingdom overnight, it is a process.

 

He is coming to you and He is convicting you of an incident at a time. He is convicting you of a sin at a time, and He is telling you individually how He wants you to move forward. If you are sitting here and you observe Christmas and Easter, do not be condemned by what I am telling you, if God has not convicted you of it yet. I know that some of you have been convicted of it and you have given it up.

 

To have given it up and then gone back to it is a much greater sin than to have not heard the call of God to come out from under it. Does anybody not know what I am talking about? If you are sitting here and you celebrate these pagan holidays, I ask you to pray about it, because that is what they are, they are pagan holidays. It has nothing to do with Christ, but you must be convicted by God that it is time for you to give it up. I am not condemning anybody.

 

Verse 2, "Hear all ye people, hearken O earth and all that therein is and let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple." "Hear all ye people and hearken O earth...." which means "Listen O earth and all that is therein." This verse is not just referring to the people, to the carnal people. He is talking to the souls of men when he says, "Hearken O earth...."

 

He is talking to your soul, and what he is saying is that there are people that may not have an intellectual ability to understand this deep doctrine, but their souls are capable of responding to the call of the spirit. Some people are illiterate and they just have the word of God in their heart.

 

I heard a testimony from a British gypsy once. He was a part of a community where nobody learned to read or write, and the Holy Ghost fell upon the whole community. Eventually they learned to read and write and about five years later, when they were all literate and started to read the Bible, he found out that they had been blessed with the full nine gifts of the spirit, and were moving in a strong manifestation of Christ. They had never read a word of the Bible but they had the word of God in their heart.

 

God will meet you right where you are, you do not have to be educated. This is a pretty lofty word that we have here, it is a high intellectual word, and right now God is raising up His firstfruits company. This word will eventually go to the most uneducated person in the world. God will give it to them, how ever He does it. I cannot tell you how He is going to do it, but He is going to do it and He is going to do it by His Spirit.

 

We see the prophet addressing men and he is also addressing the souls of men, "Let the Lord God be a witness against you, the Lord from his holy temple...." We know that we are the temple of the Holy Ghost. "Let the Lord God be a witness against you,"

 

I want to suggest to you that this witness is against the primary, number one sin of man, idolatry. It is the sin of the church, and even more so, the sin of the kings (let judgment begin at the house of the Lord and at the elders thereof), and we are going to find out that idolatry is much more than worshiping an idol.

 

I guess I will talk about it here. The true idol is the image which is engraved in your soul. The spirit which is your head, the spirit which is your god, has engraved his image in your soul and in your spirit. The image which is engraved in your human spirit is referred to as a molten image, because your spirit is typified by gold, "molten" referring to the metal image.

 

The nature of the spirit which is your head, is engraved in your spirit, and is your molten image. He is also engraved in your clay soul, and he is also engraved in your wood body. Our body is typified by wood, likened to that which has been carved out of a tree.

 

I want to declare to you that in this hour the spirit that is generating this human race whose image is engraved on all three levels, is Satan, the unconscious mind of man. That is a hard word but I am telling you the truth. The witness that I give you is that your heart is filled with evil.

 

If you are honest with yourself, you are aware of the evil whispering in your ear that is coming from your own heart. You are aware of your ability to manifest in ungodly behavior to your friend. You are aware of an ability to make an unrighteous judgment which means there is a weakness in your conscience.

 

You all have a weakness in your conscience which is your spirit, weakness in your soul which is your emotions and weakness in your flesh which is subject to infirmity. Why is this so? It is because the head or the god of this creation in this hour is Satan.

 

We must come unto the place where the Scripture (Revelation Chapter 20, Verse 4) which says, "And I saw those souls which were beheaded for Christ," is a reality in our life. When John saw those souls which were beheaded for Christ, he says in the next verse, "And this is the first resurrection." We must lose our head, brethren.

 

Do not let any wrong spirit in your heart manifest condemnation by what I say unto you, because I am not giving you this news without hope. I give you this news with a way of escape. The spirit whose nature is engraved in your spirit, soul, and body, is Satan, the unconscious mind of fallen man, but God has made a way of escape for you. Christ in you is the hope of glory!

 

Verse 2 says, "The Lord will be a witness against you...." I declare unto you that God is not judging the world, He is judging the church, and the reason for this is that the Lord will not bring judgment upon you until the provision to save your life is fully and firmly intact and set in its place.

 

He will not begin to destroy your carnal mind until Christ is fully and firmly rooted in you. Christ has to be growing in you and prospering to such a degree that the Father is convinced that at the moment you are beheaded, His very Christ in you will be full well able to jump up on your body and be your new head, or jump up on your soul and be your new head. Hallelujah!

 

Take authority over your mind. If there is any thought in here of fear, or condemnation, or rejection of God, take authority over it, and rebuke it, for there is a way of escape.

 

I declare unto you that your soul shall be beheaded whether you agree or not, for the Lord God desires you. He desires you and He will have you. Therefore receive this word with gladness, as one to whom the truth has been imparted and not as one to whom the Lord will approach as a thief in the night without understanding. Amen.

 

The Lord who is within you, will be a witness against you. The witness against you is Christ in you, Christ in you. God does not witness against you until His Christ is in you. This is called the White Throne Judgment. The White Throne Judgment is executed by your personal manifestation of Christ in you. He will judge your soul. He will open or reveal the book which is your soul.

 

Is a book not something that you write on? Is writing not an engraving? Even the printed page is an engraving process. In earlier times we etched letters in stone and in wood. Our soul is the book that is written upon, and when Christ begins to grow in you and is firmly rooted in a form that will go on unto full resurrection....

 

I do not want to get off my subject, but there is an immature manifestation of Christ (did I tell you about this in this meeting?) that was killed at the beginning of time, but this is a mature manifestation of Christ that will put down deep roots into your soul, and will not pass away. He will open the book of your soul and it will reveal that what is written on this book is the nature of Satan.

 

Brethren, there is no one single sin that will bring trouble into your life; it is your whole nature that is the problem. The nature of Satan is written on your soul and your conscious mind, which is the devil and hell. This world system (and your body is a part of it), and your unconscious mind which is Satan, shall be cast into the Lake of Fire which is the Christ in you, who has revealed the sin of your fallen nature, and you shall forever be with the Lord.

 

You shall die unto sin, you shall die unto hell, you shall die unto unrighteousness, but you shall be forever with the Lord. This is not in some far away planet, but right here on the earth. Paul said, "I live, but yet not I, but by Christ who lives in me." He said, "I am crucified unto the world."

 

Paul was saying the Christ in him was crucified unto the carnal mind in his own mind, and he died. That man that was born of a woman died, but he was living, his flesh still lived, because he had the mind of the Son of God. This is what God brings to you in this hour, this gift of resurrection life. He brings it unto you.

 

Verse 3, "For behold the Lord cometh forth out of his place and will come down and tread upon the high places of the earth." I remind you that the pagan worshipers of idols and foreign gods commonly worshiped on a high hill. They thought if they climbed to the top of a hill it would bring them closer to god, but spiritually speaking we find that the high place of our spiritual existence is the human spirit. Why do I say this? Spirit is higher than soul, spirit is higher than soul. We must worship God in spirit and in truth, in spirit and in truth.

 

Satan says I want your spirit to worship me, not in truth, but in a lie. Our spirit is that which is involved in every spiritual work. Our human spirit is engaged in worship, it is engaged in every spiritual aspect of our life. When our human spirit is joined to our current head which is Satan and we (I am not talking about those of us who have Christ in this hour, I am talking about the average man) yield ourselves to spiritual activity, the name of that spiritual activity, no matter what form it takes, is called witchcraft. It is spiritual activity which God has not authorized.

 

When our human spirit joins with Christ, or with the Holy Spirit and we engage in spiritual activity, this spiritual activity is authorized by God, and it is called the power of God. It is really the only true spiritual power. When we read in the book of Revelation that there will be a false prophet trumping up people and encouraging them to worship the beast, we must know that any human being that has yielded their human spirit up unto this false worship, is engaged in this activity.

 

We are back again to the same message. Christ is being imparted to you and his overriding, overall function is to give you the strength to bring your human spirit, your soul, and your body into submission to Christ. It is a warfare, it is a process, it is an overcoming. Do not let your own mind, or anyone else condemn you, if you do not succeed overnight.

 

Do not let anyone condemn you, do not let your mind condemn you, if you try to overcome a quality of your personality that you acknowledge is ungodly and you fail. Seek God and try again, seek God for instructions and try again. If you are willing to engage in this process, eventually you must take the victory, you must take the victory. If you will fight, you must take the victory.

 

We see the Lord is coming out of his place and He is coming down and treading the high places of the earth. Right now the high place of the earth, that within us which is spirit, is our heart or our mind.

 

In the Hebrew, it is just one word, heart and mind, it is just one word, but the Greek breaks it down into two words. Basically the word "heart" means "center." It is that which, either your physical or your spiritual life is built around. Your mind is referring to the ability of that spiritual center to engage in rational thought and supervise the lower nature of man, which even the heathen acknowledge.

 

We have a lower nature, we have a libido, we have an id, whatever you want to call it. It is capable of every crime known to man and our conscious mind must discipline our unconscious mind, so that we are restrained from doing evil. We have authority in this world that restrain you from doing evil. If you murder somebody you go to jail, if you steal you go to jail.

 

We know that right in this natural world there are things that men are capable of that we must restrain ourselves from doing, or there will be a reaping of what we have sown that will be unpleasant. There are spiritual sins that may not be sins to the policeman of this world, but they are sins unto God's kingdom. The Lord in this hour is reaching out to us to try to help us to understand that we must, by the Christ in us, start to discipline ourselves and take authority over our carnal mind that would think a thought that is illegal in God's kingdom.

 

Christ is training us, just as our parents trained us up in this world, "Do not steal, do not hit, do not take a knife to that young boy because he took your toy...." whatever we teach our children. Just as our natural parents trained us, Christ in this hour is training us to resist the desires of our soul which may not be illegal unto the police here in your world, but are illegal in God's kingdom, and will keep you out of his kingdom.

 

That is what the Bible is all about. It is not there to teach you about a sin that will burn you in hell forever. It is there to teach you about sin that will keep you out of the kingdom, and God wants you to enter into the kingdom. He is saying, "Discipline yourself, discipline yourself, I call you to spiritual manhood. I call you to spiritual adulthood, you must learn to discipline yourself."

 

You must go to school, you must eventually get a job. You must learn how to negotiate your finances. You must learn how to relate to other people. You must have a social education. For everything that you learned as a child, there is a corresponding learning in the spirit which will prepare you to not only live in the kingdom, but function in the kingdom.

 

Would you want to be a cripple in the kingdom? If you are going to get in, do you not want to function there? Of course, you want to function there. You want to able to walk there, to talk there, to prosper there; you want the best of it. We have entered into the kingdom in a measure, but this is not enough. We want the whole thing, and we can only enter in to the degree in which we have learned how to function in it.

 

This is a great mystery, but we can have just a small part of our soul in the kingdom and get benefits up until that point. In order to gain more benefits or more entrance in to the kingdom, we must learn how to function in an increased amount in the kingdom. The degree to which we enter into the kingdom is directly proportionate to the degree to which we know how to properly function in it.

 

We have Christians today who are illegally functioning.... they are not really in the kingdom but they are illegally functioning in the realm of the spirit. They think it is God, but they are really exercising the spiritual power of their carnal mind. A correction must come and it is going to be coming from the kings of Judah, as soon as we get it ourselves.

 

The Church is in desperate need of correction. They are going off to the left and to the right, and in all kinds of wrong directions and disaster, and they cannot understand why they are not entering into the kingdom. They cannot understand why the curse is not broken on them.

 

If you are in the Lord fifteen years and a curse is still operating in your life, the Church does not think that it is possible that there is something they do not know. Instead, they think that there must be something wrong with you.

 

If you are in the kingdom fifteen years and you are not healed, they do not think it is possible that they do not have enough power, or there is something they do not know. Instead, they think it must be something wrong with you. This must stop, this must stop. This condemnation of God's people must stop.

 

We see that when Christ begins to be formed in you, He will come out of His place. He will come down, that means He is coming down from the realm of the spirit into your soul. First your spirit is quickened, but then your spirit comes down to your soul. When the mind of Christ, which is typified by fire, comes in contact with your soul, which is filled with sin, this is the casting of the devil into the Lake of Fire.

 

There will be conflicts, there will be trials, there will be difficulties, there will be problems, but the end is that your soul will be purified from sin and you move more deeply into the kingdom. As that soul is purified, you are passing into the kingdom.

 

The Lord will come forth out of His place and come down from the spirit to the soul and he will stand upon the high places of the earth. I hope I have established that spirit is the high place.

 

In this hour, our human spirit is illegally joined to a spirit which is not the Father. She illegally joined to Satan when she received his temptation and agreed with it in her mind. She separated from God and joined unto Satan. She became his wife, if you will, and she bore his child, and his child is the carnal mind.

 

The mind which is in us is the offspring of Satan, and this is why we must be beheaded and get a new mind which will be the offspring of the Father and his name is Christ. The way God has chosen to do it is to let you have both minds for a season. The two minds are at war with one another, and we must throw ourselves in line with the righteousness of Christ, no matter what the price to our own pride is, which is the bottom line.

 

Every time that we deny righteousness to protect a self-interest or to protect pride, we sacrifice something. If I have a problem with another brother, and he has done something that is wrong, he made a mistake, we all have the opportunity to confess that mistake openly and do what is necessary to resolve the problem.

 

However, if one of the parties in the controversy is more inclined towards pride than towards righteousness, he would be likely to not confess his part in it, and make himself look innocent. If you are guilty, there is only one way you can make yourself look innocent and that is to make the other person look guilty.

 

When this happens, the man that is manifesting pride justifies this by saying, "Well, I really do not wish that brother any harm. I am just trying to save face," but I want to give you a deep spiritual word brethren.

 

The way God looks at this is that you have sacrificed your brother so that your self-righteousness can be maintained. God looks at this as if you have murdered your brother. We must know this, we must know this. Does anybody not know what I am talking about?

 

We are told that everything in the Old Testament is a type so that we could understand spiritual things. Well, what is the sacrifice a type of? Have you ever heard this teaching before? What is the sacrifice a type of?

 

I declare to you that every time any man agrees with unrighteousness for any reason (it does not matter what that reason is) they have sacrificed the person who is truly innocent. If you agree with unrighteousness in your mind (it is either for your self-preservation or for the self-preservation of a loved one), you have sacrificed the person who is truly innocent.

 

In this hour the Lord is saying to us, "Stand for righteousness and sacrifice your own fallen soul that would have you to sin. Do not sacrifice your brother, sacrifice your fallen soul, stand for righteousness." The Scripture that says, "If you love your brother you would lay down your life for him," (or something like that) is talking about this. If you study that Scripture in the Greek, that is what it is talking about.

 

It does not mean you have to physically die for him, it means you stand for righteousness even if it would be embarrassing to you. If you did it, admit that you did it, and do the best you can to make it right. That is very simple unless you are bound with pride. If you are bound with pride, it is very hard to do, and most men have pride to some measure.

 

We see the Lord is coming out of His place and He is treading or walking on the high places of the earth, high place being spirit. In this hour, our human spirit is in three parts. I should not say our human spirit, I should say our heart, which is spirit, is in three parts: our human spirit, Satan to whom she is joined, and the offspring, the carnal mind. This three-part heart (they are really one, they are all joined) is called the carnal mind or death.

 

This is the heart that we are born with as a human person. This is the heart that is filled with sin, that is causing us to die. This is the heart that is destined for crucifixion unto Christ, through which crucifixion we shall be raised from the dead, because when Christ is crucified to the carnal mind, the mind which dies is the carnal mind. Christ does not die, and in the death of your carnal mind, Christ becomes your head.

 

It is a simultaneous action, the beheading of your soul and the replacement of it with Christ. The process or the procedure or the event in which this exchange is accomplished is crucifixion, not of your body, but of your mind. The Scripture says that God came down and He tread upon the high places of the earth. The New Testament says, "Shortly, the God of peace shall tread Satan under your feet." Hallelujah.

 

Verse 4, "And the mountains shall be molten under him and the valleys shall be cleft as wax before the fire, and as the waters that are poured down a steep place". Let us talk about the mountains, let us find out what the mountains symbolize.

 

You may know this, this is not too deep a mystery. I know there have been books written about it. Mountains typify nations in the Scripture. God talks about "my holy mountain" meaning "Israel" and we find in Revelation 21 that the angel took John to see a high mountain in a great sea. It is spirit, the mountain typifies the spiritual life which is in the person.

 

The earlier verse just said that the spirit is the high place and a mountain is a high place. Therefore, the mountain is typifying the spiritual being of that person, or the nation, the individual spiritual being or the corporate spiritual being. God is dealing with the individual and with groups.

 

The mountains shall be molten or melted under him. The God of peace shall shortly bruise Satan under your feet. Then we go to the book of Peter and he tells us that the elements shall melt and come down with a great crash. What elements?

 

If you look up these words, "elements," "principalities," in the Greek, it is speaking about the spiritual foundations upon which we are built. Have you not read that Jesus Christ is our foundation and without him there is no foundation laid?

 

There is a lying foundation that God does not even acknowledge. It is a foundation of sand, and it is acknowledged in parable form. There is a foundation of sand that does not stand when the storm comes in.

 

If you are a fallen man, as we all are, our foundation is not of stone, but of sand. What is the difference between stone and sand? Jesus is the rock, one solid rock. In Him we are all one spirit. He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit, but in this hour, this fallen soul is divided.

 

We have been ground to powder, we have been divided. The foundation is sand, meaning that even though we are lumped together, even though we are one people, we have individual human spirits because God has divided us, God has divided us. He divided us when He cursed us at the tower of Babel.

 

The Scripture says man was of one mind and of one accord. The Scripture says in the Book of Genesis that (in whatever form mankind was appearing at that time) they had one speech and one language. Can you imagine no arguments, no disagreements, no debates, no need for trials or any form of legalistic debate. No need for lawyers, everybody agreed. This condition of our disagreement even when the spirit is a right spirit is a perversion.

 

You can disagree and be disagreeing in a Godly spirit, it is a pursuit of truth, and that is okay, but even this condition of disagreeing in a Godly spirit is a perversion. We are one flesh, brethren. God created one Living Soul. We are the planting of the Lord, we are one, but something went wrong somewhere. We are told in other studies that the Living Soul separated from God. How are we alienated from God? In our minds.

 

The Living Soul went off, we are told in the book of Zechariah, and she set up her own military base. You would not find that in the Scripture, that is an alternate translation that we did in a deep study. I think it is Zechariah 4, I am not sure. She separated from God and she went away from Him and she set up her own military base, from which she has been operating without him.

 

She thinks she does not need him, and God has divided her at Babel. He divided her into different nations, different languages, different races, different religions. Even within your own group of your own nation, your own language, there is division everywhere, there is division in every household.

 

That is why God has established the law that exists in the curse. Brethren, you all know this whole world is cursed. Everybody here knows that the whole world is cursed. As a result of the curse we bite at each other and devour one another and therefore God has said, "Let every man have his own wife, and let the wife submit to the husband. Let the husband be the head of the household. Let the gray-headed one receive respect," because without this law, we would be as animals.

 

You do not have to be a Christian to have this law. This law is in the heart of men across the world. I do not care where in the world you go, they may have never heard of Christianity, but most societies (there may be a lawless society here or there) live in some measure of harmony and order because there is a law imposed. There is a king, there is a president, there is a tribal ruler. There are rules, there are families. Is this not true?

 

No matter what you may think of the rules, no matter how unfair you might think that they might be, no matter how much you would desire to improve them or change them, there is an order for civilized existence in every society everywhere, with perhaps one or two criminal exceptions that I do not know about. This need for law and order and rule is established by God in the hearts of men. Why? This is because it was not His intention when He divided us to destroy us.

 

It was His intention that we would survive, bound by chains of darkness until.... does anybody know? The judgment, until the judgment. Peter said it, "....reserved in chains of darkness until the judgment," which the carnal minds of men say are going to torment you forever, but which I say will deliver you from the bondage of your carnal mind. Hallelujah! Glory to God, what a message!

 

I said all that to say this. That mountain which Christ is landing upon, that mountain which Christ is treading under His feet is the carnal mind, the corporate carnal mind of man. When Christ is formed in you to the degree of maturity that He overlays your carnal mind, your carnal mind is going to break apart into the three parts that I just told you about, your human spirit, Satan and the carnal mind.

 

The carnal mind, which is part spirit and part soul will dissolve. Satan is coming under total authority to Christ in a new form. He will no longer have the ability to tyrannize men, he will be weakened. The Scripture says he will be castrated, the Scripture says that right now he is a raging wild bull but he will be made into an ox. An ox is a castrated bull. The human spirit will be joined unto Christ in marriage, and that is how this exchange of mind is taking place and this is how your soul shall be saved.

 

Just by way of review, Christ must be conceived in you, He must begin to be formed in you and He must grow up in you. It is a process, and He must overcome your carnal mind in you. Get your eyes on yourself, the war is right here.

 

"And the mountains shall be molten under him and the valleys shall be cleft as wax before the fire and the waters that are poured down from a steep place." The valleys typify our soul. We dwell or exist in the valley of the shadow of death, that is where we are. It is referring to our soul.

 

What does this mean? A valley is concave, is it not? It is not supposed to be that way, it is supposed to be convex, it is supposed to be like this. I do not have a black board, can you see what I am doing, it is supposed to be like this.

 

We are pushed in, we are perverted, brethren. Our spiritual being is deformed, we are deformed, we must know this. Our spiritual being is deformed. We have gone inward and in this hour, when we examine people who are having emotional problems, the more emotionally disturbed the person is, the more introverted they are.

 

The more convoluted they are, the more concerned or sometimes even obsessed they are with their own selves. They are concerned about their well being, they are concerned about their future, they are concerned about their past, they are concerned about their day. In every situation, no matter what is happening, they are relating it to themselves.

 

Somebody is lying on the floor, God forbid, having a heart attack, and instead of rushing to the aid of that person and thinking of what they can do to help, they are standing there saying, "What if it happened to me, who would take care of my children?" This introversion prevents them from being a Godly, giving, helpful, fruitful human being, down here in the valley of the shadow of death.

 

To be so selfish is not a good condition of your mind. It will cut you off from your fellow man, people will get tired of you always thinking about yourself. Life is an exchange, life is a give and a take. In every relationship you expect something back. If this person only thinks of themselves, if every time you sit down and you tell them about a problem because you need a comfort, and all they could say to you is, "Well if that happened to me...." why would you even go to talk to them?

 

This is your hour of need, this is your hour that you need comfort. You have comforted them fifteen times, and you come to them at the moment that there is a sickness in your family and all they could think about is, "What if it happened to me?" This is not a good condition to be in, but the most mature human being alive, compared to Jesus Christ, is in this condition. All we think about is ourselves.

 

In this world, if you do not know Christ, if you do not do think about yourself, you might not survive. We are not condemning anybody that is in this condition. We understand that it is a perverse condition that is a result of our fall but is also necessary for survival in this world. However, for those of us who have been called to Christ, there is a new way.

 

When Jesus said, "Submit yourself to one another," when He said, "Put your brother ahead of you," when He said all that unto you, He was saying, "Come out of this convoluted condition, come out of this valley of the shadow of death."

 

When He said, "Give and I shall give unto you," He was saying, "Do not think about yourself, arise to a higher condition of mind and I will supply your every need." But even more so He meant, "Stop trying to provide for yourself and start to seek me."

 

Let no one hear my words and think that I am telling you not to work or not to take care of your family! The carnal minds of men twist these spiritual concepts. Of course, you must work. Of course, you must provide for your family.

 

However, if you seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (do not forget the righteousness), and then you rise up and you go out and put in your job application, or you rise up and you pursue your education, He will direct your path, if in your heart you are truly seeking God's will.

 

When a choice is to be made between two jobs, between two potential wives, and you ask, "Father which one is your choice?" this is the coming up out of the spiritual selfishness which is killing us. This is coming up out of making decisions because of self-preservation or pleasure, making decisions based on our carnal mind (which is sin), not because of righteousness.

 

God wants us to live out of His mind, because in His mind is life, and in our carnal mind is the pleasure of sin for a season and death. He wants us to trust Him to make the right decision for us, but we humans, we want to control our own lives. We must turn that control over to God.

 

However, you never become passive. You do not sit passively and do nothing, waiting for a miracle, waiting for God to drop money on the floor. You get up and you go looking for a job, you start walking. God meets you along the road.

 

I do not mean to insult you, but so many people have misunderstood my words that I have gotten into the habit of saying things like this over two or three times. I also do not know who will be hearing the tape.

 

If you do not hear from God personally and there is a necessity, then you do what you think is best, saying, "God I have prayed to you and I have not heard your response, so I am doing what I think is best. If this is not your will for me, then you correct me."

 

We have many people that feel they are called to the ministry. Maybe they are called to the ministry, maybe they do hear from God correctly, and are called to the ministry, but maybe they are not called now. Brethren, if you think you are called to the ministry and you have no money to feed your family, you better go get a job.

 

I have seen this. I have seen it in the United States and I have gotten letters from men in Nigeria. If God is not providing for your family, either you are not called to the ministry or you are not called to the ministry now, or you are called to the ministry now and God wants you to work two full time jobs, the one that provides your food and shelter and the one that is the ministry. I did it for three years.

 

Do not be deceived. I met a man when I was in Nigeria last year, he had no money. He was going from.... I do not even know where he was living. He may have been living on the street because he did not want to tell me. He was part of a team that I was evangelizing with and whenever we would go pick him up he would meet us on a corner somewhere, so I really do not know where he was living.

 

Finally, the Lord led me to speak to him, and I said, "Brother, what is this problem. Why do you not have any money?" He said, "I am a minister of the gospel." I said, "Has God not provided an income for you? Do you not see that you are begging? This is not of God."

 

As I questioned him, I found out that he had, had a position as an assistant in one of the big churches in Lagos, but he had fallen out with the pastor of the church, who was his boss, and he said to me, "God has not provided another job." I said, "Perhaps the Lord wants you to go back and make it right with your pastor." The last I heard, he went back and he repented and he is working and he has a salary again.

 

If you are looking for a job and God has not provided one, neither has He provided an income for you, it is very likely that He has directed you some place that you have not gone because the pride of your own mind has separated you from God's blessing. Is there anybody that does not understand what I said?

 

Okay, we are going very slowly.

 

"And mountains....", they are going to melt when Christ comes on top of the carnal mind, our carnal mind is going to break apart, "and the valleys...." the soul is going to be cleft, that means they are going to be cut. What that is probably referring to is that our soul will be separated from the mind in it, to cleave is a separation. The soul will be separated from the carnal mind.

 

First the carnal mind will melt, it is going to break up. The result of it is that the carnal mind will be separated from the valley, which is your soul, "....as wax before the fire." That lines up with the Book of Peter. The separation is going to come from fire, "....and as the waters that are poured down from a steep place."

 

Verse 5, "For the transgression of Jacob is all of this," all of what? All of the carnal mind, and all the ungodliness that we have just been talking about. God sees all this as idolatry, "....and for the sins of the house of Israel. What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria?" For the transgression of Jacob all of this judgment is coming to pass. All of this burning and all of this fire and brimstone is coming to pass because of transgression.

 

Brethren, the mind of man is inclined to believe that God's judgment is unrighteous. This is what Job has said in his petition called the Book of Job. "What have I done that God should do this evil unto me?" Brethren, we talked about this earlier. When you declare in any given situation that you are the offended party, whether you know it or not (you are going to know it now because I am telling you), you have declared the other party the guilty party.

 

If you have a conflict with somebody, and you maintain 100% innocence, you have declared the other party guilty. If you are not even willing to negotiate, if you declare that you are righteous and you have been offended, you have declared the other party guilty. Man is continuously calling God guilty. We even accuse Him of putting us in this terrible condition because He wanted to experiment or something.

 

We are in this condition because man has sinned, and God has cast us down to this place called hell, bound by chains of darkness, we are told by Peter. If you look those words up in the Greek, you will find out that those chains of darkness are Satan and his carnal mind. We are bound to them.

 

Our true reality which is spirit, our human spirit, is bound to the chains of the carnal mind and Satan, until the judgment which will set us free. I remind you that Paul said that he was bound in chains by the Lord Jesus Christ. A spiritual chain is the spirit that you are joined to.

 

God is doing all this because "of the transgression of Jacob and the sins of the house of Israel." Every time you see two different words that seem to mean the same thing, know that God is not just repeating Himself, He always has a reason. There is a subtle difference between transgression and sin.

 

What is a transgression? We are told that Jacob has transgressed. A transgression is a crossing over a line. If this line here is the border of your property and I step over this border, I have transgressed on your property. I have gone further than the law allows me to go.

 

We find as an example, somebody who has authority, for instance, the teachers that teach your children have authority in the school. They have authority to a certain point and beyond that point, if they try to discipline your children, they have transgressed. They have entered into the realm where it is the parents right to train up their children. If the teachers in your schools try to tell you what religion your children should be, they have transgressed on your authority as parents.

 

We have many people transgressing, and they honestly do not understand that even though what they do on this side of the line is legal, as soon as they step over the line it is illegal. Over here it is legal for me to discipline my children as I see fit, but when I come into your house and I do it to your children, it is not legal.

 

It is not legal to equally discipline all children; my children, yes, your children, no. We find some people who cannot understand that a particular behavior is illegal under a certain set of circumstances. Jacob transgressed God's law. She went too far, that is what the Lord says.

 

"The sins of the house of Israel...." Israel sinned, she set up the golden calf. This was outright sin, the formation of idols, the worship thereof, the taking down of the Levite priests, where the law is written clearly, "Thou shalt not make a graven image or worship it."

 

We are much more likely to transgress because we do not understand, than we are to sin. Judah should have known better. Judah had the appointed king of God, had the priests, had the temple, had everything possible to pursue the covenant.

 

What is her transgression? She went beyond that which God allowed her to do. She went beyond that authority which God gave her as a fallen nation, and she started doing things out of her carnal mind. That was the transgression.

 

We see this all the time in the church. Judah in the church transgresses frequently. A prophecy comes forth, the person knows the prophecy is of God, and everyone witnesses to the validity of the prophecy. However, the person that brings it forth, keeps on going and interprets it, and the interpretation is not of God.

 

We see this a lot in the United States, I do not know if it is going on here or not. That person, that believer has transgressed the privilege that God has granted them by letting them bring forth this prophecy. "Thus saith the Lord...." I am not prophesying, this is just an example. "Thus saith the Lord, thou shalt enter into Israel and the glory of God should be found in you."

 

"Sister, you are going to natural Israel, get ready, pack your bags." (Laughter) It is okay to laugh, but I have heard it. "I saw a vision of you, a bride dressed in white with a beautiful veil, and the most handsome bridegroom." "Get ready for your wedding!" No, you are the bride of Christ. Maybe God is telling this lady that He has a human husband for her, but maybe He is not.

 

Unless it is the spirit of God bringing forth the interpretation, you are damaging this sister and that is a spirit of witchcraft that has sneaked in on the tail of the Spirit of God, trying to call itself God. Therefore, we must begin to police our own souls so that we are not transgressors.

 

"What is the transgression of Jacob? Is it not Samaria?" Samaria, let me remind you is the capital city of Israel. Let me also remind you of the circumstances upon which this separation took place. Solomon died and his son, Rehoboam, became king and he was an immature king.

 

He had a choice between taking the counsel of the elders and the counsel of his young friends.The people had come to him and said, "We are hurting, the taxing is too high, we cannot live. You are a young king, would you not have mercy on the people and give us some relief?"

 

Rehoboam chose the advice of his young inexperienced friend, and said, "You think it is tough now? Wait until I get through with you, you will know what tough is. You will know what tough is when I get through with you!" and Samaria separated from Judah.

 

Samaria did not raise up arms against Judah, they just withdrew. Rehoboam was going to wage war against Israel and God said, "Do not do it, do not kill these people." Did you ever wonder why?

 

God was saying, "Look at how you treated them!" The separation was not right, it was not God's best, but He said, "Do not kill these people because they did not stand for your oppression. Let it be, I will be glorified in it."

 

God says that Judah, through King Rehoboam, abused his authority. Is that not another way of expressing the example that I just gave you about the prophecy and the misinterpretation thereof? It is an abuse of authority. An abuse of authority is a transgression.

 

We must be careful, brethren, for when God gives us His Spirit, responsibility comes with it, and I do not hear this taught very much in the church, I really do not. The Spirit of God is power. There is power in Christ, power to forgive sins, or not forgive sins.

 

I want to tell you a mystery. The more spiritually developed you are when you come to Christ, the more spiritual authority you have in Christ. Let me explain this.

 

A human being is capable of being spiritually developed. You can receive that spiritual development either through heredity, because your ancestors were engaged in the practice of spiritual works, which were illegal, or because you yourself have been involved in spiritual pursuits.

 

If you are spiritually developed and you come to the Lord he will take that spirituality. God will apprehend that spiritual development as a spoil of war. He will put you, establish you, right in his kingdom with spiritual authority in God. Does anybody not know what I am talking about?

 

Listen to this, this is very important, especially here in Nigeria. A lot of you are spiritually developed, that means you were born with a spiritual authority. It is there, and there is no such thing as not using it. Either you use it for God or you use it for Satan.

 

When you choose righteousness, you use it for God. When you yield to a sin that is coming out of your carnal mind, it is going forth in spiritual authority. Do you hear what I am saying?

 

This is no small thing. Jesus said that when you hate your brother, you have killed him. The degree to which you kill him when you hate him, is dependent on the spiritual authority which is resident in your mind. 

 

If your mind is not strong enough for him to drop dead, disease can come into his life, or a job can be lost. Some people call it a curse, but what we must know in this hour is that this kind of cursing can come forth from our mind without us knowing it.

 

You do not have to make an incantation to curse your brother. When you are in Christ, and you permit an evil thought of envy or hatred to go forth, if you do not cry out to God to deliver you from the thought, you have sent forth cursing unto your brother.

 

You have to say, "Father I see it, and I confess that it is sin. Bless my brother, let me not be envious of him, let him have his gift. Have mercy on me, and do not let me be a source of shame unto you because of this sin that is manifesting in my mind." If you do not cry out to God, but you relieve that thought, thinking that nobody will know but you, you have sent forth cursing unto your brother.

 

I do not want to frighten you, but you have got to know this. This knowledge should encourage you to rise up in Christ and begin, or continue, or intensify that warfare against your carnal mind, because if you do not do it, you are not controlling your beast.

 

That is how Jesus sees this; that we all have animals, or you could say a horse, that we ride on (some of the brethren in New York have had dreams that we had lions on leashes), He sees it as you not controlling your beast.

 

Your spirit man is supposed to be ruling your whole vessel. If cursing is coming forth from you unrestrained because you think nobody knows and, either you are getting a pleasure or release from yielding to this thought because you really hate them at that moment, or for whatever reason you are just letting it flow, you are not controlling your beast.

 

Get that thing on a leash. You have got this beast and he is doing whatever he wants. It is like owning a big guard dog and giving him run of the house, and letting your guard dog tell you what to do. Spiritually speaking this is your condition.

 

Most people do not know this, but now the Lord has told you, and because He has told you, if you do not at least attempt to move in this, it is sin unto you and it needs to be repented of. If you have done this and you can acknowledge it, just repent, the Father is faithful to forgive you, but you must know this, that we are dangerous. The Lord sees us, fallen man, as biting fiery serpents, that is what we are.

 

As Christ increases in you, your spiritual authority will increase. Therefore you cannot be ministering in the power of Christ one day, with miracles and signs and wonders, and yield to a thought of envy the next day, without that envy going forth in the same spiritual authority as your ministry in Christ, in the same measure of power.

 

The development of Christ in you is increasing your spiritual power day by day. Your spiritual power is increasing, and you must know that you have a loaded weapon in your mind. Take the bullets out and lock it up in the closet, because somebody could get hurt.

 

The transgression of Jacob is that he abused Samaria. "And what are the high places of Judah? Are they not Jerusalem?" I am not sure what that means, so I think I am just going to go past it. It could be the translation, but we know that Jerusalem is the capital city of Judah and it is the place where the temple was, and it is a place where everyone had to come once a year to seek their God.

 

Am I going on for too long? Is everybody okay?

 

Verse 6, "Therefore I will make Samaria as a heap of the field, and as plantings of a vineyard, and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley, and I will discover the foundations thereof." I have not looked these words up in the Hebrew but what "I will make Samaria as a heap of the field," means to me, is (this is on my heart so I am going to say it), that it is a grave, a sepulcher, a mound that is buried over a dead person. He will make Samaria as one who is buried.

 

Was Samaria not killed? Samaria was scattered, and we do not know where the ten tribes are today. I will also make Samaria "....as plantings of a vineyard: and I will pour down the stones thereof into the valley and I will discover the foundations thereof." He is talking about Samaria. To "discover the foundations" means to "turn upside down." If you rip a plant out of the ground and expose its roots, that is exposing the foundations thereof .

 

In the earlier phrase, He said, "I will make her like a vineyard and then I will expose the foundations thereof." He is talking about turning her upside down. He says he is going to make the stones fall down. Let me just check that out, "I will pour down the stones thereof...." of Samaria. He is going to tear her down and he is going to turn her over, and that is exactly what happened to her in the natural. She disappeared off the face of the earth.

 

In the spiritual, Samaria is our carnal mind and she is going to be uprooted like the planting of a vineyard. The roots are going to be ripped out of our soul, because a mind has roots that are growing in the earth of our soul. He is going to rip your carnal mind out, glory to God, and He is going to turn her over.

 

He is going to "....pour down the stones thereof." We talked about this earlier. We said that stones typify spirit, and that the heart of fallen man or the three-fold spirit of fallen man is called the carnal mind. It is made up of our human spirit, Satan and the carnal mind, and the three together take the name the carnal mind.

 

Christ is tearing down your carnal mind, He is uprooting the roots of it, and she is going to disappear just as natural Israel disappeared. She will disappear because she will be thrown into the Lake of Fire which is Christ, Hallelujah.

 

Verse 7, "And all the graven images thereof shall be beaten to pieces." We have already talked about the graven images, they are both in our spirit, and they are in our soul. They are going to be beaten to pieces. That is God's way of saying the image is going to be erased or wiped out.

 

If you are talking about your spirit which is likened to metal, to take the image out of metal, you have to melt the metal. That is why we are going into the Lake of Fire, to accomplish the melting of our spirit so that we can separate from the carnal mind.

 

Even wood, if it was wood, you would have to take a plane and smooth the wood piece out because an image has been carved, and if you wanted to erase it you would have to level the wood.

 

Do not worry about getting the mark of the beast, you were born with it. You already have it. Someone told me six months ago that they were planning on joining the United States army. However, they decided not to because they heard a rumor that if the mark of the beast comes out while they are in the army, they will be forced to take it, so they are not joining the army.

 

Brethren, you have already got the mark of the beast! It is in your heart and it is in your soul! You have got to get it erased, and you have got to get a new engraving. You need the engraving of the man with the writer's ink horn that we read about in Ezekiel 9. He has to come and put the mark of Christ on you.

 

Who do you think the man with the writer's ink horn is? It is us, it is us, it is those of us who will be doing the greater works. Christ, as soon as we are prepared, is sending us out to engrave the nature of God upon the Church, not upon the heathen, upon the Church.

 

How do we engrave the nature of God upon the Church? Through judgment, judgment, the exposure of sin. Where does sin appear? It appears in one's thinking, therefore sin is exposed in the mind. How will we do this? Will we be hiding in our prayer closet, binding and loosing? No.

 

God said to Ezekiel, "Oh, son of man, go and tell your brother his sins, if he hears you or if he forebears, makes no difference to you, his blood is off your hands. Once you tell him he is mine." Jesus said unto the Pharisees, "If I had not told you, it would not be sin unto you."

 

You must go for no other reason than because God sent you. Do not let anyone misunderstand me. God must send you to this specific person at this specific time with such a specific word about a specific sin in a spirit of righteousness.

 

If you send yourself or if you go because your carnal mind has sent you, you are judging before the time, and it is sin unto you, and you shall surely be judged. God will lead you into this, God will lead you into this. He will teach you, He will start you with simple experiences.

 

If you make an honest mistake, He will go easy on you but you will learn from your mistake. He is not here to be viciously punitive to you. He is waiting with bated breath for this company to stand up and start bringing corrective judgment to His Church which is floundering, which is dying, which is sick and powerless, because they cannot discern the body of Christ.

 

They cannot discern it in their own minds (they are in submission to their carnal mind), and neither can they discern it in you. The judgment of the Church has to take place; confrontation in the spirit of righteousness, which will bring forth change, has to take place. What change? The change of one's nature (which is thinking ungodly thoughts because that nature is carnal), unto the nature of God, which change will result in the corresponding godly thought being imparted to the person.

 

"And all the graven images thereof shall be beaten to pieces...." this honor have the saints, "....and all the hires", my King James says in the margin that, that word "hires" means "idols," "....and all the idols thereof shall be burned with fire."

 

I remind you that God is never burning wood with fire. Why? Because fire destroys wood. The Levitical law says that the spoils of war will go through the fire if they are metal, and those objects which are made out of wood will be washed with water.

 

"And the graven images thereof shall be beaten to pieces and all the harlots...." that is all the individual human spirits, "....shall be burned with fire," the human spirit, Satan, the unconscious part of the carnal mind, and the carnal mind are going into the Lake of Fire, which is Christ.

 

"And all the idols thereof will I lay desolate....." Did you wonder why God says idols and idols? Do you see how He says idols twice. The first word is "hires" but the margin says it means "idols." It is probably a different Hebrew word, just a subtle shade of difference.

 

What it means is that one idol is in your spirit and the other idol is in your soul. When there is just a subtle shade of difference in the word, it usually means one refers to the behavior or manifestation upon your spirit and one refers to the behavior or manifestation upon your soul. If ever you see a word that looks like it is repeated twice, that is most likely what the situation is.

 

"And all the idols thereof will I lay desolate...." means the carnal mind is going to be laid desolate, is going to be rendered impotent. The carnal mind would not be used anymore. Your spirit is going to be burnt, your carnal mind is going to be made desolate.

 

"For she gathered it of the hire of a harlot, and they shall return to the hire of a harlot." There is a big teaching in that phrase.

 

Let me just catch my breath here.

 

We discovered that the phrase "she gathered it," is referring to incarnation. We have a study called Mystery Babylon that deals with this. I believe it is Revelation 17 or 18, which talks about all of the spiritual elements which are gathered together to incarnate a human being, and the result of it is a baby.

 

You know that when you want to make a cake, you gather your ingredients, butter, flour, sugar, and you blend them all together and you have a brand new product that does not look like butter, flour, or sugar.

 

We are spiritually built, and the spirit that is gathering to bring forth a human child, gathers spiritual elements. To be honest with you, I do not understand it completely. I just know that this is the teaching that came down, and it makes sense to me.

 

We know that when a human baby is forming in a woman's womb, it is literally built in the womb. I believe the first organ to be formed is the heart, and then the flesh is laid on, and the other organs are formed. Over a nine month period, this baby is literally being built, almost like someone working with a papier-mâché.

 

Do you know what papier-mâché is? Do you have that here? When I was a kid (I do not know if they are doing it anymore), they would make a paste out of flour and water and put strips of paper in it and wrap the paper around a pole, a wire frame, in layers. Each layer would build out the object on the pole or frame. They could mold it into a doll, or something like that. It is a form of sculpture.

 

As we can see, human babies are actually built. Spiritually, when God prepares to incarnate a human baby, there is a spiritual gathering that results in the spiritual being of this baby. We go into that in detail on tape #32, Mystery Babylon, if you would like to pursue that further.

 

"For she gathered it of the hire of a harlot". What this is saying is, the carnal mind that is being torn down and destroyed, was gathered, or was formed, or was incarnated, by a harlot. This, in one phrase is saying that our father, the father of the fallen human race, is not God.

 

I am going to try and give it to you, and I think after this we will call it quits, if I can get through this.

 

God called the original creation a Living Soul, and he designed to put His mind in this soul. The spirit of God intended to join with the soul and produce an offspring.

 

Jesus said, "My father is God, I am the Son of God, and I am the son of man." He was not confused. He was saying, "My father is God, and my mother is the Living Soul." He is saying, "The mind that was in me was conceived of the seed which is the Father, and of the human spirit of the Living Soul; they joined together."

 

The male seed of the father and the female seed of our humanity or of His humanity that He inherited from His mother, joined together and a mind was born. This is the mind of Christ, the Son of God, Christ the Son of the living God. That is what Jesus was saying.

 

This creation, this Living Soul was created to be God's wife. Is the Church not the bride of Christ? It does not matter whether you are in a male body or a female body, the Scripture says there is no male or female in Christ Jesus. Unto God we are all female. There is nobody that is male unto God. Male refers to the authority; everyone that is under that authority is female unto the authority. There is no greater authority than God.

 

If you are in the army and you are a lieutenant, you are male unto the sergeant, but you are female unto the captain, in function, can you see this? God is female to no one. He is 100% God in all things, at all times, in all situations. For eternity, He is God, and the Living Soul is female unto Him, and was designed to be his wife and produce his Son, Christ, the Son of the living God.

 

That Son was to be the mind which would inhabit the soul, but there was a problem at the beginning of time. God's wife, the Living Soul got mixed up with a spirit which was not God, and she brought forth an illegitimate child called the carnal mind.

 

The spirit of Satan, male, joined with the human spirit, or the female seed in the soul, and brought forth an offspring that was a bastard. In this short phrase God is saying that this whole fallen creation was brought forth of a harlot. The Living Soul is the harlot.

 

We have committed adultery with a spirit other than our husband, and we have brought forth a bastard offspring called the carnal mind. That is why we are dying, and that is why we need to be adopted, because God who is great, loves us despite our error. He is determined to take us back, to cleanse us, to marry us and to adopt us.

 

In the book of Nehemiah and Ezra, when the Hebrews that were in captivity started to go back to Jerusalem, the law was read to them and they were told that they would have to choose between God and their natural Babylonian ways and ungodly children.

 

There was nothing wrong with the children but under the Hebrew law, their covenant with God is passed through mother. If a Hebrew woman married a Babylonian man, the child was a Jew, but if a Hebrew man married a Babylonian woman, the child was not a Jew.

 

Therefore, they were told they would have to choose between going back to God or staying with their Babylonian wife and children who were not considered Jews. They left their wives and their children. The Scripture says they cried, their eyes filled with tears when they left their beautiful children behind, but they chose God over their children, and they went back to Jerusalem.

 

We see in this hour, we are the spiritual harlot of Revelation 17. We, in our fallen condition, are the spiritual harlot. We have committed adultery with the spirit of Satan and that makes us the harlot. We have brought forth this child, which is the carnal mind, which is the reason that we die. Does anyone have a question on this before I go on?

 

Our father, the father of the fallen creation is Satan. That is how Jesus could say to the Pharisees, "Your father is the devil." He was not just insulting them, he told them the truth. If the Jews, a nation that had received a covenant with God, had the devil for their father, surely the rest of the world has a devil for their father. Amen?

 

You can sing the song, "Our Father is God and we shall praise him," all you want, He is not your father yet. He is your father by promise. He has promised to make you His son, and He has promised you His spirit of adoption. He has poured out the spirit of the promise upon you. What is the promise? It is that you shall be adopted, but there is a procedure.

 

If you adopt a child, there is a legal procedure. You have to go to court, you have to get papers. There are all kinds of things you have to do, and when you finally receive the legal documents for the child, you have the child of another man which still has the nature of its natural father.

 

However, when God adopts you, this is not acceptable to Him. He has you signed, sealed, and delivered in His possession. He owns you, He is guiding you, He is teaching you, but He will not permit you to keep your natural father's nature. You must give it up, and He is coming with fuller's soap and with fire to erase that ungodly nature from your soul.

 

You have run up to the altar and said, "Adopt me father," have you not? You now must submit to the chastening and the cleansing, because you cannot be a shame unto your father. You cannot bear the name of Christ and sin against your brother.

 

In this hour, there is no Christian who is incapable of sin. Why? This is because our nature is that of the one who originally begat us, Satan, and that nature is the mark of the beast. The nature of our father must be erased, and we must receive the mark of our Father in heaven, and we will be 100% His when we look like Him, when we think like Him, when we talk like Him, and when we walk like Him.

 

Therefore do not sing, "My Father is God," to me and mistreat me, because I will tell you to your face that your father is the devil, and I do not say it with condemnation. I say it so that you should be convinced of your sin, and fall down in dust and ashes and repent before God, asking Him to do this work in you that will impart the honor of the Father's life unto you, which is your inheritance.

 

We all want it, but our fallen human nature does not want the discomfort that is involved in the exchange of nature. However, I have news for you, brethren. If you ran up to that altar call and you said, "God take me," He is taking you.

 

He did not give you all the details but He is still taking you, and there is no turning back. If He received you, you have been received, and if you are a son, you shall surely be chastened. He scourges every son that He calls, no matter how hard you yell. When He chastens you, know that it is God, know that it is God.

 

If you go through a trial, and your heart is hurting and you need to express it, do not hesitate to express your pain. That is acceptable to God, but do not indict God. Be a good soldier, endure hardship and receive the inheritance that the Lord desires to give to you, even more than you wish to receive it.

 

I can hear somebody saying, "Oh, but I wish to receive it!" The truth is, you are limited in your human ability to wish to receive it. He, in His perfection, desires to give it to you with a much greater strength than the greatest ability you can muster in your fallen humanity to wish to receive it.

 

Verse 7, at the bottom says, "For she gathered it...." who gathered it? "....She gathered it of a hire of a harlot...." This creation was gathered as the result of the harlotry of God's wife, "....and they shall return to the hire of a harlot." I am not sure what that means, "....and they shall return...."

 

Sometimes these translations are not too good. I just know that when I read the Prophets, there has got to be a positive result of all of this hell fire. Therefore, when this says, "....and they shall return unto the hire of a harlot," I would venture to say....

 

I would expect it to say something along the lines of this (and I want you to know that I have not studied this in the Hebrew), "....and the many members of the Living Soul that have been incarnated because of the harlotry of their mother, shall return unto Zion." Hallelujah! This has got to be a wrong translation. Glory to God.

 

Are you all okay? You all seem to have woken up. I was losing everybody for a while, you were all sleeping and passing out. I am now set to finish and you are all awake, so I guess I will go on.

 

Verse 8, "Therefore I will wail and howl...." My King James Bible says in the margin "wail," and it means "weep and groan." "Therefore I will weep and groan, I will go stripped and naked, I will make a wailing like the dragons and mourning as the owl."

 

Just to put it simply, this is talking about the tribulation. That verse is speaking about the tribulation. I am not here to lie to you. It is a travail, and there will be tears, and you have to know that, because if you do not know it, when the fiery trial comes upon you, either you think that God abandoned you, or, in some way, your mind is not adequately dealing with the trial.

 

Brethren, we have to go through, just like a woman who is in labor. There is no way you can run off of that labor table. Where you going to go? You have to go through, the baby has to come out. There is no place in the world that you could run, you cannot fly to another country. You cannot call your husband, you cannot call your mother. There is only one thing on your mind, and that is getting that baby out, right? Right. There is no place to run.

 

This is that which was prophesied in the Prophets. "We shall see a strange thing, a man with his hands on his loins as a woman in travail." There is no place to run. I have seen people try to run. I have seen them run to another ministry, I have seen them run to another country. I have seen them run in several directions, but there is no place to run.

 

God will find you just like Jonah. Wherever you are, there is no place to run. If God has called you, you are coming. You can go the easy way or you can go the hard way. Therefore, when the travail comes upon you, know what it is, so that you can deal with it in intelligent prayer. Hallelujah.

 

With all of the trials that I have been through (and I have been through some very severe trials, there is no way to say which one was the worse, they were all terrible), but three years ago, I fell ill. I have had many infirmities over the years, and God had healed me supernaturally of every ailment, and some of them were quite serious, but I fell ill three years ago, and I was not getting any better.

 

I waited until the point that I was almost dead, having taken what I thought was a Godly stand, but it turned out to be a very religious stand. I said to the Lord, "If you do not heal me I will die; it is up to you." That is what I said. "If you do not heal me, I will die. It does not make much difference to me."

 

A believer who was a nurse spent a week with me, and she said she had never seen anybody hang on that long without running to the doctor. I was dead serious, I was ready to die. I could not understand why I was not getting better this time.

 

I was laying in the bed, and I was swollen from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet. My whole body was edematous. Fluid was accumulating in all my cellular tissues. I had water in my lung cavity, I had water in my abdominal cavity. I could hardly walk because my legs were swollen; they were so wide.

 

The Lord sent someone to me.... actually He sent someone to me six months before this, but I did not like what they said, so I ignored them. Do not do that. The Lord had sent someone to me and they said to me, "Pastor Vitale, this time you are going to have to go to the hospital." I said, "No, not me!"

 

If I had received the word of the first prophet, I would have avoided a lot of distress and pain, and trouble, but I chose not to believe it. The pride of my carnal mind said, "God would not do this to me." That is a dangerous way to think because He will do it just to show you that you cannot tell Him what to do. He will do anything he wants to you; we are clay in His hands.

 

I cried out to God again, and he sent another person to me, a man of God, who said, "I really think you should go to the hospital, at least get a diagnosis." I went to the hospital, but I never stopped to ask, "Lord, which hospital?" This was because I really did not want to go to the hospital, so I did not pray it through adequately. I did not believe it.

 

Listen to what I am saying, listen to my mistakes. I did not believe God could do this to me, could send me to a hospital, so I did not adequately pray it through. As a result, I went to a local hospital, and the resident doctor gave me a report that I did not like. I felt he pronounced a disease upon me after taking a simple blood test. I felt that was very irresponsible, and I would not commit myself to him, so I went home.

 

He could not believe that I went home because I was dying, but I packed up and I went home. I hung out for another couple of weeks, but things were getting worse, and the Lord started giving me dreams. He spoke to me in a dream and He told me that He would show me the way in the darkness. He was so faithful to me, and I give Him such glory, because I was disobedient because of my pride.

 

God could treat us in a consistent manner for forty years, and if He wants to change the way He deals with us after forty years, who are we to say that He cannot change the manner in which He deals with us?

 

We must be ready to make changes in any area of thinking, or any physical area at any moment. We must be living in a spiritual tent, and we must be ready to get up and move at any moment. Never say, "God will never do that to me," because if you are saying that, he is probably doing it to you.

 

The Lord sent my unsaved niece to me, and she told me to go to the doctor, and I was annoyed at her. Then, the next day He sent my nephew to telephone me and he told me to go to the doctor, and finally I said, "Maybe this is God." I prayed for a while and said, "I think I should go to the doctor."

 

I had not been to a doctor in thirty years, so I did not know which doctor to go to, and I did not know how I would get there. I could not drive because my legs were so swollen with fluid that it was going to be difficult to lift my leg to hit the brake. I would have had to lift it up with my hand, like that. If you have to lift your leg up to hit the brake, with cars coming in your path, you have got a bit of a problem.

 

My nephew called me up said to me (I did not ask him), "Go to my doctor," so I said, "I guess that is the Lord. Okay, I will go to my nephew's doctor." As I sat there and prayed, asking, "Lord, how will I get there?" the phone rang and this sister said to me, "Pastor, do you need something?"

 

She said she was driving along the street and saw a truck with "Vitalis Oil" on it (we have an oil company by the name of "Vitalis Oil" in New York). She said she saw that truck, and could not take her eyes off the name, Vitalis (my last name is Vitale), and just knew she had to call me. I asked her if she could take me to the doctor and she said she would be right over.

 

God had sent someone to take me to the doctor! The doctor examined me and took blood, and said he would telephone me with the results. Two days later, not quite 48 hours later, at 9 o'clock in the morning he called me, and said, "Mrs. Vitale, if you do not go into the hospital now, you will be dead within two weeks."

 

I hung up the telephone and said, "Since I decided that God told me to go to the doctor, I guess I should do what the doctor says." I called a friend to ask her to drive me to the hospital, but the Lord spoke to me and said, "No, call an ambulance." I called an ambulance and I went in. I was in there for three months and five days, and the whole time I was convinced God had turned me over.

 

I told you this testimony, to tell you about the mistakes that I made. This whole time that I was in there, I thought God had turned me over. I could not imagine what I could have done that would make him abandon me, but I went to sleep every night, saying, "God, make it quick, let me die in my sleep," and every morning I would wake up, open one eye, and find out I was not dead.

 

I could not figure this out, and wondered how this could happen to me? He did it to me. My carnal mind got in the way, because I thought God could not do this to me. Not only did I end up in hospital, but I wound up with three different surgeries.

 

I screamed and I yelled and I cried, "I do not want this, I want you to heal me!" I....I....I....! He had healed me for fifteen years. He healed me of everything that was wrong with me. I said, "I do not want them cutting me open," and I made such a fuss.

 

I want to tell you at this point, that I was in such a low spiritual realm that I really could not hear from God. I could not read my Bible; no one in the hospital knew I was a Christian. I could not reach out to Him, but just before the surgery, I made such a scene that He finally spoke to me. He said, "You have got to go through," one phrase, that is what He said, "You have got to go through."

 

He gave me no explanation. He just told me He was not going to change, but I did get a measure of a miracle. The doctors had prophesied disastrous things upon me. They told me I would need the same surgery again in six months, and that I would need blood, and that my x-rays were so bad they did not know what to expect when they opened me up.

 

When they opened me up, however, everything was in the right place. Everything was perfect for the surgery, and I did not get any blood transfusion and I did not need the surgery repeated. They were bringing all the doctors around to look at me, and they could not quite figure out how it happened. They told me they were lucky. They said, "We had some luck." I recovered so rapidly, they told me that they had never seen anyone recover that rapidly. But I had to go through.

 

Never let your carnal mind lie to you and tell you that God has abandoned you, because He has not abandoned you. He is letting you go through something that is designed to build His nature in you, and I remind you that to build His nature in you, your carnal mind must be wounded.

 

You cannot have two minds. Even for this season of perversion that we have two minds (this is an in-between season), only one mind can be prevailing at any given second. You will have one mind as your predominant mind, and in every situation and at every given moment, only one mind can be prevailing.

 

Your carnal mind must be wounded and this is the purpose of the fiery trials and difficult experiences. It is a crushing that will convince you that you have lost power over your whole life.

 

If I tell you, "I pronounce upon you that you have lost power over your life, yield unto Christ," you would not believe it and you would not do it because you are incapable of it. We found Scriptures in the Book of Revelation and in the Prophets that say that man will learn righteousness by judgment.

 

We must have our carnal mind wounded and that is why God permits the fiery trials upon us, not because He hates us. It is a crushing which convinces us of our powerlessness and forces us to turn towards God to get our needs met.

 

That is what this is all about, God's motive for hurting us is righteous. God does evil but His motive is righteous, and the fruit of the evil that God does, is the production of righteousness in us which is Christ.

 

Man does evil for evil motives, and the fruit of his action is death. God can do things that we cannot do and that is why we find the Scripture that says there is no law for the one who follows after the spirit. That is why we find a man under the influence of the Spirit of God, doing things which are illegal for the rest of us.

 

For example, we see God asking the spirits, "Who will be a lying spirit in the mouth of the prophets?" God sent a lying spirit because it was his intention to expose sin and it is righteous to expose sin.

 

The carnal mind of man says, "But love covers a multitude of sins." Brethren, the love that covers a multitude of sins is the Christ covering your carnal mind, and the reason God sent a lying spirit to expose sin, was so that your carnal mind could be wounded. Do you see the difference? Glory to God.

 

Verse 8 is talking about the tribulation, and it is not in the Middle East. It is in your life.

 

Verse 9, "For her wound is incurable, for it is come unto Judah, he is come unto the gate of my people, even unto Jerusalem." It is not anti-Christ and it is not the devil; it is the Lord that has come to the gate of your mind, and He is tearing it down.

 

Did you ever hear it preached in the carnal church, that we are charging into hell to get all the people out? Do they preach that around here? No, brethren, we are not charging into hell. We are in hell, and we have to break through the gates to get out. We are locked in here, brethren.

 

We do not have the option of whether we are in hell or heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ has the option. He is dwelling in our fallen souls, but He does not have to be here. He is a glorified man, He does not have to be in hell, but His Father sent Him to save us. We do not have the option, we are locked here. We are bound with chains in hell and we cannot get out.

 

You have heard it preached about eternal torment; it is not something of the future, we are in it now. If the Lord Jesus Christ did not seek to come and save us, this Living Soul which is a many membered man, would continue to abide in this realm of eternal torment forever.

 

We would have a series of endless lives and deaths, not like they teach you in reincarnation, but through the birth of babies and the perpetuation of the generations. This spiritual man would continue in eternal torment forever.

 

Eternal torment is the device of the devil, it is not the device of God. Is that not just like the devil? What he does, he attributes to God. God is not the author of eternal torment, God is the author of eternal life. Hallelujah.

 

"For her wound is incurable...." this word "wound" is very interesting. (I do not remember what I told you and what I told the other group, so I will just talk to you as if I have not mentioned it before.)

 

We did mention that as a natural example, if you wound your flesh, if you slash your skin, that which is within comes outside. The blood which is within comes outside. If you wound deeply enough, you can find bone splinters and organs on the outside.

 

What happened at the beginning of time was that Satan was inside of the creation, locked up, and incapable of doing any harm. She was forced into a function which was benign to the creation. Did anybody not understand what I just said?

 

Satan had a function in the creation that was positive, for so long as she was under the control of the mind of Christ. She was not only harmless, but she was beneficial and had a productive role in the creation. Should I say it again, is everybody okay?

 

Satan at the beginning of time was an element of the creation that had a positive function in the creation. She was under the control of the mind of Christ and had a positive function in the creation. She became dangerous and murderous, because she transgressed; she went beyond her allotted function and brought death into the creation.

 

This is the way the Lord described this to us; we can liken it to an avocado seed. Do you have avocados here? Just as the seed of an avocado is at the very center of the avocado, sealed in by the flesh and sealed in by the skin, so it was with Satan.

 

Satan was locked within, sealed within, and was under the control of the mind of Christ, but she pierced through and she came to the outside, and went beyond his authority. She transgressed, and that which was inside came to the outside. She pierced the border of the creation.

 

The creation was spiritual, it was not physical like we have now, but it was visible. It was a visible spiritual creation which existed within the realm of time and therefore had a beginning and an end, or had an external border, an external edge.

 

Satan transgressed the place where she was allowed to be, and she pierced through to the outside, and in that piercing through, the Lord said, she wounded the creation. She made an opening in the edge. The sealed edge can be likened to the skin that contains all the organs and tissues of this body.

 

The Lord says the creation received a deadly wound, when Satan pierced through, when the creation was exposed to that which was inside. Satan was positive while under authority, but became dangerous when she was outside, without any restraints.

 

It can be likened to exposing the body to infection. If you slash your person, and your tissues and your blood are exposed and you do not take measures to close it up, you could possibly die if you do not receive treatment.

 

That which was within went to the outside, opening the protective seal of the creation, and exposing us to spiritual infection, and we died. The creation died, death not meaning a cessation of existence, but death meaning a death to righteousness.

 

We died to righteousness, and we fell down to hell where we are bound to Satan and the carnal mind, chains of darkness, until the judgment which will result in a resurrection. Part of the process which is known as the resurrection involves the wounding of the carnal mind. This is a great mystery.

 

When Satan came to the outside, she flowed to the outside and covered over the whole exterior surface, just as blood coming from within us if our body was pierced. She clotted and formed a scab which resulted in her becoming the exterior, and that which God ordained to be external becoming the interior.

 

Let me say it again. God set up a creation. Just for understanding, we will describe it as a circle. He set up a creation, a circle, and the outer edge of the circle was a seal, just as our skin seals in all of our organs, tissues and blood. It was a seal of protection.

 

Within the creation, there was an element that was poisonous, but when it was within the seal, it had a positive function in the creation. It was not dangerous when it was within the seal, but this poisonous element transgressed, and went beyond its allotted authority.

 

She pierced through the protective seal and became the outer layer, forcing that which God ordained to be external, within. Now that God has intended to raise us from the dead, He is reversing the procedure.

 

Is righteousness not within? Is the kingdom of God not within? Is the Holy Spirit not within? Is Christ, the hope of glory, not within you? Righteousness is within and the wickedness of our carnal minds is on top of it.

 

The Holy Spirit enters into our heart, which is our carnal mind. He enters into the heart that we are born with, that is our carnal mind, and Christ begins to be formed within the carnal mind. That which is righteous is within and that which is unrighteous is on top, giving it power, giving it authority.

 

The Scripture of Revelation 14 describes it as the grapes on the vine. The skins must be pierced and wounded so that the flesh can be pressed into wine and the wine, the life of God, can flow out freely.

 

This seal which is of the carnal mind must be wounded. God is going to do to the carnal mind, what she did to the early creation. We read in some places in the Prophets, "....and God shall do unto her and wound her as she has done," and it sounds very violent, and we have a lot of people saying, "What kind of a God is this?"

 

"An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," and His promise is "....to wound without mercy, to rip the unborn children out of the women's womb." What kind of a God is this?

 

Brethren, He is talking about your carnal mind. He is going to do to her what she did to you. She killed us, brethren, she killed us. God is going to recompense her, not as a senseless punishment, but because this is necessary to restore things to the way God ordained them to be.

 

God does not punish senselessly; Satan does that. Mortal man is capable of doing that. Human beings do that sometimes. Someone hurts us intentionally or unintentionally, and we punish them out of vengeance.

 

The vengeance of God is not the vengeance of man. The vengeance of God can be likened to the twelve sons of Jacob going to rescue their sister Dinah who had been taken captive. It is the kind of vengeance that liberates. The vengeance of man just destroys, there is no life in it, brethren, there is no life in it.

 

God is about to wound your carnal mind. He is about to recompense this wicked harlot for the evil that she has done, but it is a recompense that is done out of love and mercy for us, who have become victims because of this wicked work. He is rising up from the center, and He is passing through, and He will wound her.

 

He is going to wound that external layer, and He is going to flow out on the surface and do exactly what she did. He is going to force that which is now outside, inside, and He will seal Himself over her. She will come under his dominion. This is the wound that the Lord has promised to inflict upon us.

 

"For her wound is incurable...." and the carnal mind says, "What a wicked God!" Thank God, this wound is incurable, she will never do this to us again. Her wound is incurable, there is no way she will ever revert to the exterior and force us underneath her authority again. Her wound is incurable, she has been wounded.

 

This Living Soul is a mighty soul. Look at what we have accomplished as a world unit. Looking at the world as a whole, look at what we have accomplished. Can you imagine what we might have accomplished if God did not divide us at the tower of Babel?

 

My personal opinion is the reason God did that, the reason he separated us and set us against one another at the tower of Babel incident, is that the undivided Living Soul with a fallen mind was so spiritually powerful that it could have waged an active warfare against God that would have been so serious that the Lord would have had to destroy us.

 

His righteousness would have required Him to destroy us, but He loves us too much, so He broke our spiritual power by dividing us. He took the rock which we were, and ground it into the sands of the sea, and set us against one another. He established different languages, different races, and different cultures.

 

He put the male at enmity with the female and the children against the parents. He let a spirit of rebellion reign through the earth. He said, "Alright kids, hit each other, sock it out, and I will let you exist in this condition, until the judgment that will restore you unto righteousness." That is what He did.

 

Did you ever wonder why He has such compassion sometimes on the most wicked people? Did you ever wonder how God could have such compassion? If man is left to his own devices, he would punish a certain situation so severely, and yet God lets them off easy?

 

We are just His kids, we are just His kids, and it is His intention to grow us up. He said, "When you train up your children in the way of the Lord, when they are old, they shall not depart from it." That is what is happening to us right now.

 

We are being trained up in the ways of the Lord, so that when we become mature spiritual beings, we will not serve Satan, but we shall serve the living God, and we will not depart from His service.

 

"For her wound is incurable, for it is come unto Judah...." not the world brethren, the wound is unto the Church. The judgment is unto the Church, beginning with the elders thereof. The judgment of the Church has begun.

 

If you open up your eyes and ask the Lord to give you spiritual sight, you will see that it is not Satan attacking God's elect. It is God attacking God's elect. This is very important, because if you think that it is Satan hurting you, you will not repent.

 

We must know that it is God wounding us, so that we repent, because brethren He will not stop wounding us until we repent. You cannot negotiate with God. There is no negotiated peace, there is no negotiation, it must be100% His way.

 

Job said unto God, "Why would you afflict me like this?" There was a whole trial, and Job maintained his integrity. He said, "I am innocent, I do not deserve this." If you recall the teaching that came forth about an hour ago, Job, by justifying himself, sacrificed God.

 

By justifying himself, Job declared God unrighteous. This is the sin of pride. This man suffered, he suffered through these trials. He lost everything including his health, and he sat there and said, "It is not my fault."

 

The prophet said, "The blacksmith's fire is burning with heat, but the wicked are not plucked out." Brethren, do not be in the fire and not have your wicked plucked out. If you yield unto self righteousness, brethren, you are going through all this for nothing.

 

Let your bands be burnt off in the fire. The prophet says that the blacksmith's fire is at its hottest and yet the wicked are not plucked out, and the Lord has called them reprobate silver. The judgments of God have not accomplished God's purposes in the lives of the people in this category, because they have declared themselves not deserving of these trials.

 

Do not go through it for nothing, brethren. Let the glory of God be found in you. Declare yourself unrighteous and God righteous. Even if you do not understand at the moment why you would be going through such a particular trial, know that God is righteous.

 

If He permitted this to come upon you, He must have a very good reason, because He is perfect and He would not punish you unjustly. This must be our attitude, if we are to stand up. Stand up brethren, put on all the armor of God, and do everything you can to stand, and having done all, stand, stand. God wants you to stand.

 

"For her wound is incurable, for it is come unto Judah, he is come unto the gate of my people, even unto Jerusalem." He is come unto the Church, and He is come, not only externally, but unto the souls of the people. It is affliction, not only in the flesh, but also in the soul, in your emotions.

 

He has come to judge the emotions of your carnal mind. He has come to judge your behavior, and he has come to judge the hidden sins of your heart, the pride, the envy, the hatred. Most of us (hopefully all of us, but I am not that naive, most of us, talking about the whole church world), have ceased from stealing, and have ceased from fornication and adultery. These are obvious sins. He has come to expose the hidden sins of your heart.

 

He challenges you in this hour to repent when He reveals them to you. You should fall down and repent and not justify yourself before God, neither should you justify others. I declare to you this day, brethren, that if you justify other people's sins, you are partakers of their sin, and the judgment will fall on you too.

 

If you justify other people's sins, if you do not call sin, sin, there is something in you that is protecting yourself. That is what the Lord wanted me to say. Justifying other people's sins is a manifestation of pride. What it says is, either I know that I am capable of doing the same thing, or perhaps one day I might do the same thing, or perhaps a sin will be exposed in me, and I would hope that there would somebody, somewhere, that would justify my sin.

 

However, I declare unto you, when God exposes your sins, there is no cover for you. If you cry out unto the rocks to protect you and to cover over your sins (rocks typifying demon powers, or carnal minds of other men), God will expose your sin. Did I make that clear?

 

If you justify other people's sins, it means that pride is manifesting in you. It does not even mean that you are such a nice person, who is trying to make excuses for everybody so as to keep things smooth. No, it is self-preservation, it is for your own good.

 

God does not want us to condemn our brothers, but the exposure of sin in the spirit of truth is of righteousness. Of course, you must then act accordingly, and forgive them. If you are in a position to help them, you must help them. If they need information, you must impart the information. Hiding someone's sin is death unto that person and unto the person hiding it.

 

Verse 10, "Declare ye it not at Gath, weep ye not in the house of Aphrah, roll thyself in the dust." I will skip through these next verses, but I do not really think there is much I could say about it, except this concept of rolling in the dust. What it is saying is, roll around in your carnal mind, you know it is not going to do you any good.

 

Verse 11, "Pass ye away thou inhabitant of Saphir, having thy shame naked." This is very interesting. We have a tape on Revelation 16, where God exposed this concept of spiritual shame and nakedness. We have a lot of symbols in the Bible about nakedness and many people who have spiritual dreams are very shocked at the nature of their dreams. They may not even be sharing them with other people.

 

Many women have come to me, and said that they have had dreams where they are naked or they are naked from the waste up, or such dreams. I declare to you, if you are having dreams like that, that this is how God speaks to us. Do not be embarrassed. There is a spiritual nakedness, and we have spiritual private parts.

 

As we know in our humanity, there are certain parts of our body that we are supposed to cover when we are in the presence of other people. We have spiritual parts which are not to be exposed, brethren, and the name of that spiritual part it is our womb, our spiritual womb.

 

It is the carnal mind, and it is not to be shown to everybody. It is not to be shown to everybody, it must be covered over. Christ must be covering it over. Christ is the only one that can justify you, Christ is the only one that can cover your sins.

 

When man justifies your sin, he is really doing it for his own good, but when Christ covers your sins, He will kill it and root it out of you. Man cannot cover sin, he must deal with it in righteousness. If you do not know what that means, you seek the Lord over every individual situation.

 

If you see somebody sin, it does not mean you run out to them and attack them. You may go home and pray about it, and say, "Lord, how do you want me to deal with it. Is there anything that you want me to do? When do you want me to do it?"

 

Maybe God would not send you to talk to that person. Maybe you will forgive them and pray for them, and God will send someone else to talk to them. You have to seek God about everything.

 

It is a shame to have your carnal mind exposed, brethren. Paul talks about the loins of your mind; we have reproductive organs in our mind. You do not show your physical reproductive organs when you walk down the street.

 

You are not supposed to be showing your spiritual reproductive organs. They are supposed to be covered, and if they are not covered, it is a shame unto your spiritual man. Do not take condemnation, instead get a revelation of what God is requiring of us.

 

If this little baby pulled his pants down, you would not be ashamed if he exposed himself. You would just pull his pants up and tell him not to do that. As he gets older you would explain to him, "You are supposed to keep yourself covered, you do not walk around like that in public."

 

This is what God is saying to you today, "Spiritual children, it is not polite to walk around with your genitals showing, your carnal mind must be covered. Put some underwear on." That is what God is saying in Verse11.

 

Verse 12, "For the inhabitant of Maroth waited carefully for good, but evil came down from the Lord unto the gate of Jerusalem." I do not know if you have it here in Nigeria or not, brethren, but in the United States, all of the public ministries on TV (anyway, most of them that I have contact with), are all praying for revival.

 

They are waiting for good from God, but, in much sadness, I declare to you there is no revival coming in the United States. I do not know enough about your church in Nigeria to relate it to you, but there is judgment coming upon the United States.

 

The Scripture says they waited carefully for good, but evil came down and it came from the Lord and it came unto Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the soul (remember, there is a Jerusalem that is beneath and there is a Jerusalem that is from above). Jerusalem is the soul, and the judgment that falls on your soul will eventually manifest physically.

 

What is affliction to your soul? If you do not have enough food to eat, that is judgment.... it is judgment on your body, but there is grief unto your soul. If your human needs are not met, it is affliction unto your soul. The judgment will reach into the soul.

 

Let me just make it clear why there is no revival coming to America, why there is judgment coming. Brethren, America has received the word of God. The word that is going out there, the materials that are available there, the Spirit that was poured out there, have been enormous, incredible, but what has it produced? Has it produced righteousness? It has not produced righteousness.

 

The Holy Spirit and its outpouring has not produced righteousness. The message that is in the average church has not produced righteousness and, I have news for you, even this message on the intellectual level, has not produced righteousness. Judgment of your carnal mind shall produce righteousness. The Church pronounces itself innocent and declares that the judgments of God are for the heathen that cannot tell their left hand from their right.

 

Because you are thinking with your carnal mind, your carnal mind must be wounded, so that you can think with the mind of Christ. There is no blessing that God can give you that will produce righteousness. Judgment of your carnal mind is what will produce righteousness. Judgment is all that is left for the United States, but it will be a corrective judgment, I have faith that God will wound and tear down and then he will rebuild. Hallelujah.

 

Verse 13, "O thou inhabitant of Lachish, bind the chariot to the swift beast, she is the beginning of the sin to the daughter of Zion, for the transgressions of Israel were found in thee". This is interesting, this concept of the chariot. In our studies we have found out that the chariot typifies the soul.

 

Right now, we are a creation which is in three parts, body, soul, and spirit, and this body is likened unto the horse, the chariot is likened to the soul and the spirit is likened unto the rider, which is on the horse. You may recall in the Book of Revelation, that there appeared a horse, and it was pale green, the color of death and its rider was indeed death, and hell followed after it, this world that we live in.

 

The horse typifies humanity. I do not recall whether that Scripture mentions a saddle or not, but there is saddle on the horse, or a chariot, which typifies the soul. The rider is either the spirit of death or the spirit of life. We see this mysterious Scripture which says, "....bind the chariot to the swift beast." The swift beast is the carnal mind.

 

God is putting the saddle on this wild stallion that has been unbroken, and has been doing its own thing for thousands of years. She is being caught, and ropes are being cast about her neck. She is being courted in and she is being bound to the rider who is on the white horse in Revelation 20, I believe. The rider is the glorified Lord Jesus Christ, with many crowns, the many crowns of our minds having been brought into submission to him.

 

The command to bind the chariot to the swift beast is the command to bring that carnal mind into submission. It is God's command going out to the Sons of God saying, "Bring that carnal mind into submission, as well as the body that she commands." "Swift beast" refers to the carnal mind; the body is just a slave, it just does what the mind tells it to do. Did everybody understand what I just said?

 

Bind the soul of Christ to that swift beast, "....she is the beginning of the sin to the daughter of Zion", sin originates in your carnal mind. Bind the chariot or the soul of Christ which is your new man (that would be a term that you would be more familiar with), to your old man. Crucify your carnal mind, let Christ be crucified in you.

 

Let Christ be joined in crucifixion to your carnal mind. If you recall, such crucifixion will not damage Christ but will kill your carnal mind, and in this crucifixion, the carnal mind will be cut off from your soul and simultaneously, Christ will be instituted as your new head. That is what that phrase, "crucifixion of Christ," means.

 

The carnal mind is the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion. Zion, brethren, is speaking about the city of God. If I am not mistaken, Zion is the mountain that is in Jerusalem. Jerusalem typifies the soul of God's people and Zion typifies their spirit, yet the Scripture calls her a daughter. We are supposed to be male. If our mind is Christ we are supposed to be male.

 

How come the Scripture calls her a daughter? It is because she has Christ but she is living out of her carnal mind. She has Christ and she is not using Him to bind the chariot of Christ to that swift beast. She is not bringing her carnal mind into submission, so God calls her female.

 

It has nothing to do with your body, we are talking about minds. A male mind is Christ and a female mind is carnal. That is how there is no male or female in Christ Jesus. That is how come women can teach the men, that is how come physical women can teach physical men if their mind is Christ.

 

That is how we get out of that religious bondage that the carnal church tries to put us in, that if you are a man that does not know the first thing about the Bible, and you are amongst ten women that are in this category, the physical man should get up and teach. You know that is ridiculous, something has to be wrong in the teaching. Amen?

 

The carnal mind is the beginning of the sin to Zion who is not operating in her manhood. She has the ability to be a man. It has been internalized in her and she is living as a woman. Did you ever know a young man that just does not want to go on to manhood? I do not know about Nigeria, but we have it in the United States.

 

They do not want the responsibility, they just want to hang out. They do not really want to go after a career, they do not want to work, so their father has to come down on them. He says, "Look, you have to do something or you go live some place else. Either you go to school or you get your act together." Hopefully the young man responds and goes on to school.

 

Brethren, the Church does not want to go on. God has called us to manhood and we do not want to go on. Why? It is because we love our sin, we love our sin, and it is not such a crime to say it. It is the truth, the truth will set you free.

 

I remember the time I went before the Lord after he had convicted me of a particular sin that I never knew was a sin. It was a hidden sin of my heart. I read it in this Bible that it was a sin, and I went before the Lord, and I said, "Father, I love to do this sin, I enjoy it, but I read your book and your book says that it is a sin, and I would like to please you. Help me."

 

And he brought conviction and he brought deliverance and it is pretty much gone. I do not do that anymore, this hidden sin of my heart. I do not think that way anymore. 

 

We do not intend to embarrass you but, some people cannot change unless they are told, and sometimes even though they are told, they have to be told again and again. You have to keep telling them until counsel starts to root in their soul and war against the ungodly thinking.

 

God is never condemning you, do not receive condemnation. I say this because it happens sometimes that we are condemned by people when our sin is exposed. For those of us that receive this word and humble our selves before God and start confessing our sins, it is almost typical to expect at some point to come up against a Pharisaical Christian who has not entered into this walk with God, who will see our sin exposed and condemn us for it. Do not let them do it, do not let them do it.

 

It is likened unto the shame of Jesus hanging on the cross. They say He was naked on the cross; it is that kind of a shame. Do not let anyone condemn you. It could be shame without being condemnation. Brethren, the sin in our carnal mind is a shame, but there is no more condemnation in Christ Jesus.

 

"She is the beginning of sin to the daughter of Zion for the transgressions of Israel were found in thee", who is "thee"? The transgressions of Israel were found in Judah, and we already established that the major sin of Israel was idolatry and is idolatry. Today it is spiritual idolatry, the idol in your heart, the worship of self, choosing self preservation over the righteousness of God.

 

Spiritual idolatry, choosing to sacrifice your neighbor or to sacrifice God, to make yourself righteous. This is all unconscious, but this is the reality of what the carnal mind does. The sin of Samaria is also the sin of Judah. It is the sin of the Kingdom Church, brethren. It is the sin of the most mature believers in God's Church, wherever they may be existing.

 

God says we are all guilty of idolatry, of the worship of self. We put our self first in every circumstance. Paul said in another place, "Why are you not willing to suffer the loss? If somebody is stealing from you, why are you not willing to suffer the loss?"

 

I do not think this Scripture is very well understood. Obviously, we are not to give away all of our possessions (unless we should receive such a command from God), and leave ourselves and our family with nothing. What Paul is saying is that in a controversy, why not give it up? He is not even necessarily talking about money, he is talking about pride.

 

He is saying if there is a controversy between two brothers or between two sisters, why not yield it up and say, "Alright be at peace, let it be your way." It is because of pride, brethren, it is because of pride. He is saying, "Why not give it up and leave it to God to do righteousness?

 

If there is an argument over this toy truck, if you have a possession and there is an argument over who owns it, why not give it to them, let them have it, believing that God will restore you? Mind you, I am not talking about emptying out your savings if you have savings.

 

You have to believe that your desire for reconciliation, that your desire for peace, that your desire for righteousness will be honored by God. The only example that comes to my mind is when God was raising me up.

 

I was part of a very vital ministry for five years and there was a woman there who had a lot of influence on the pastor, and every time he tried to bring me into the ministry, she interfered, except in one area where she could not do what I could do, so she yielded that up.

 

One day I was so sad in my spirit that I went before the Lord, and said, "Father I will not fight to minister in this Church. There is a world full of people that need your ministry. This is not right, she can have it all, I would not fight for it."

 

I never preached in that Church, and I never taught in that Church. All I did was, I edited some books for this man, because this woman tried to do it but she could not do it. She did not have the skills. I did nothing in that Church, but God has given me this ministry.

 

She is still in that Church, she is still an assistant. The Church is not prospering and every time she hears about what God has given me, she goes into a rage.

 

Do you hear what I am saying to you, I do not promise you anything, but look at what God has done. I said, "Lord, there are too many people that need you, I would not fight for this," and He sent me to Nigeria. Do you see what He did?

 

Of course, if somebody is going to shoot you, you do not just stand there like the Buddhist, and let them shoot you. I hope you understand what I am saying.

 

In another place in the Bible, Paul talks about these kind of things. He talks about controversies in the Church, envy in the Church, striving for position in the Church, positions that will call the eyes of the other brethren unto you, that will give you prestige in the eyes of man, and he clearly states that all such desires and strivings are carnal.

 

They are to be resisted on every level. Whether God restores you in another place or not, no good thing could come out of such behavior.

 

Verse 14, "Therefore shalt thou give presents to Moreshethgath, the houses of Achzib shall be a lie to the kings of Israel," or a snare to the kings of Israel. I am not really sure what that means, but I know that the carnal mind within our self and within our brother, shall be a snare unto us.

 

We touched on this yesterday, and we spoke about the prophet who God sent to rebuke Jeroboam. God said to that prophet, "Go and deliver your message to him, deliver your prophecy, and do not go back the way you came. Go back another way; do not stop to eat, go right home".

 

The prophet came, and he prophesied. Can you imagine prophesying to a king, prophesying with such power that the king's arm withered? You could lose your life for that. He did such a brave feat; he was not destroyed by the evil king. However, when he was going home, when the other prophet of God stopped him on the way and said, "Come and eat with me", he went into confusion.

 

"But I thought God said, I should go straight home." Does that not sound like what Eve said? "But did God not say.... I thought God said," and the other prophet said, "I am a prophet of God too, God speaks to me. Come and have dinner with me."

 

We see one prophet of God taking an ungodly authority over another prophet of God and the first prophet of God submitting to another prophet when he knew that God had told him otherwise.

 

We have problems in the Church, brethren. We have people going to the other extreme, people that feel that they would not take any word from any prophet unless the prophet is in full stature. That is ridiculous. You have to discern Christ wherever He is. You have got to discern the spirit. You have got to listen to every prophet, and you have got to discern the spirit.

 

At the very least, there is going to be a snare unto the kings of Israel.

 

Verse15, "Yet will I bring an heir unto thee, O inhabitant of Mareshah, he shall come unto Adullam the glory of Israel." We touched on that at the beginning, that in the midst of all of this gory judgment, we see the Christ, the Savior of Israel.

 

The last verse of chapter 1, Verse 16, "Make thee bald and poll thee for thy delicate children, enlarge thy baldness as the eagle, for they are gone into captivity from thee." This expression "make thee bald and poll...." or cut your hair, "....for thy delicate children...." who is a delicate child? Brethren ,we are the delicate children. We break, we break, we damage, we die. Our condition to God is perverse.

 

We are not supposed to be breaking, there is a fault in us that makes us breakable. This is not normal, disease is not normal, death is not normal. By God's standards, there is a fault in us brethren. Therefore the Lord says, "Go into mourning, shave your head, because of the delicate children", because of us.

 

"Enlarge your baldness as the eagle for they....", who? the carnal man "....has gone into captivity from thee". This verse is not too clear, I would be inclined to believe if I looked it up in the Hebrew, it is probably a negative interpretation of God saying that the carnal minds, the individual carnal minds are going into captivity.

 

Let there be mourning, it is the carnal mind that is mourning. In Revelation where it says, "The sun shall be covered with sackcloth and the stars shall cease from their shining," these are all indications of mourning, but it is the mourning of the carnal mind. Let her mourn, let her hang her head in mourning, let her cover herself with sackcloth and sprinkle dust and ashes over her head. Let her mourn, for her father has been cut down.

 

I just want to make one more comment. I would like to go back to Verse 14. The example that I gave you was about a prophet that was sent by God, but I see here that this verse is speaking about the kings of Israel. This prophecy is saying that the kings of Israel will be snared, or that snares will be sent to the kings of Israel. There has to be a reason why God says Israel and not Judah.

 

I think this is what He wants me to say to you. Remember, Judah is the element of the Church that has the God-ordained king. Christ is the God-ordained king, so those of us in whom Christ is being formed, are Judah. That element of the Church who have not yet conceived Christ (they may very well have the Holy Spirit, but have not yet conceived Christ), are Israel, and they are the idol worshipers.

 

This is because if Christ is not in you, you are definitely worshiping your carnal mind. You may go to Church and sit in Church, and you may say, "Praise you, Jesus," but, brethren, the true worship, the true worship, is submission. The true worship is submission, so if Christ is not being formed in you, you are submitting to your carnal mind. You only have one god.

 

I do not care what kind of declaration of Jesus Christ or Christianity you make, your god is in the midst of you. The promise in the Book of Revelation (I think we just found it in Chapter 21, if I am not mistaken), that your God shall be in the midst of you, is the promise of your deliverance. Before then, the one who is in the midst of you is the carnal mind, and you worship the god which is in the midst of you.

 

Even if you have heard about Jesus Christ, it is just the beginning of the process of your deliverance. God starts to draw you that way, He tells you a story about Jesus Christ, but the reality is the one who is your god is in the midst of you, and the one who is in the midst of you is your god. So when you hear the message of Jesus Christ, and the only one who is in the midst of you is the carnal mind, your god is the carnal mind.

 

You are betraying the carnal mind and in the process of transferring to another God, but your god is the carnal mind. The true worship is submission, so if you do not have Christ, there is no way you can submit to Christ, Therefore, the Church in whom Christ has not begun to be formed, even though they have the Holy spirit, are Israel, and they are 100% idol worshipers.

 

Those of us that are in Judah, we have Christ, but do not forget, the Scripture says you too have gone the way of Samaria. But this particular verse that says that lies will be sent unto the kings of Israel, is saying that those that do not have Christ formed in them are sure to be snared, because our very defense is Christ.

 

Only Christ in us can recognize Christ in somebody else. Only Christ in us can discern the true anointing on the prophet. Therefore the kings of Israel (they are kings because they do have the Holy Ghost), are sure to be snared. They will not be able to discern Christ, and, brethren, have they not consistently failed to discern Christ? The carnal church cannot see Christ in us. They think we are into heresy. Amen?

 

Glory to God. Any questions on this teaching? Praise God. Any questions on anything else?

 

COMMENT: I wonder why you called the Lord Jesus Christ the Lake of Fire? I would like an explanation.

 

PASTOR VITALE: The Lake of Fire is Christ. Christ is the fire of God within us. A lake, by definition, is a piece of land with water in the midst of it. Therefore, a lake of fire would be land with fire in the midst of it. Christ is the fire in the midst of our soul. He is coming together with our fallen heart.

 

COMMENT: What about brimstone and sulfur?

 

PASTOR VITALE: Brimstone and sulfur? We did a study on that. If you look it up in the Greek, you will find out that one of those words, I do not remember which one, is the purifying element. For centuries it has been a purifying element, it is known to purify. I do not want to say the wrong thing, it is just known as a purifying element. The fire would be Christ. One of them is the Christ and the other is the Spirit of the Father, if I am not mistaken.

 

COMMENT: My question has to do with the Lake of Fire. I had been thinking that it is those who are not Christians who are going to be thrown into the Lake of Fire, and that it is non-Christians that God is bringing adverse conditions to. If Christ in us is the Lake of Fire, then does the person who is not a Christian have Christ in them?

 

PASTOR VITALE: If the person is not a Christian, he does not have Christ in him. The casting into the Lake of Fire is another way of saying the crucifixion of Christ or the joining together.... That which is being cast into the Lake of Fire is our carnal mind, it is the purification of our carnal mind. Did I understand your question correctly?

 

COMMENT: In Revelation 20, talking about the dead, and judgment, and the book of life, who is it all referring to? What happens to those who are not even Christians?

 

PASTOR VITALE: Revelation 20:12, is that where you are? "And I saw the dead....", the whole human race is dead, "....small and great", those who were important and those who were not important by man's standard. I saw all of humanity, all of humanity is dead, I saw them "....stand before God and the books were opened".

 

We mentioned earlier that our soul is the book. A book is something that has writing on it and writing is engraving. The whole Living Soul stood before Christ. If you have Christ being formed in you, this is happening to you, in that your carnal mind is standing before Christ to be judged. If you do not have Christ formed in you, you will be standing before the firstfruits company when they are in full stature.

 

Let me just take it word by word. "And the books were opened", that means that, that which was in the hearts of men was revealed. Man is hidden. It is just our human condition not to show our emotions, brethren. If you go into a room and somebody does something socially unacceptable, you look away, do you not? We hide our feelings.

 

If somebody offends you, if you do not have a boldness in Christ that I have been talking about through this whole message, if it is not Christ in you, you will probably just walk away. You probably would not even tell them that they offended you. If it was a store keeper that offended you, you would just not go back there again. I do not know if that is so in Nigeria. Is that true in Nigeria?

 

A lot of people are like that. People do not show their feelings. We have been raised since we were small children that this is the socially acceptable thing to do. If you are mad at somebody, you hold down your temper, you go away, but in this last day when Christ appears, every sin of man will be exposed!

 

I could tell you what these sins are, because they are sins that are common to all men; pride, envy, hatred, disputations, fornication, adultery, both in the carnal level and in the spiritual level. They will no longer be held secret. When God sends a Son of God to you with the gift of discernment, you can lie to yourself, and you can lie to the Son of God, but your sin will be exposed.

 

I declare unto you, if you are in a condition where you cannot see your own sin and God sends a Son of God to you, for you to stumble over, what God will do.... Let me explain this to you, if it is time for your soul to be judged, He will send a Son of God to you in such a circumstance that the sin which is in your heart, which God is trying to expose will manifest.

 

You will manifest this ungodly behavior (does everybody know what I mean?) and then the Son of God will not respond like a natural man. The Son of God, depending on their degree of maturity and depending on how God ministers to them, might confront you right on the spot, not with condemnation but with kindness, saying, "Sister, this is ungodly," or they might go home and pray about it.

 

They might have to pray about it for several months until God makes it real to you. I could tell you (anyone, I am not pointing at you), for the next hundred years, that I see envy in your heart. Until you believe that you have envy in your heart, it does you no good, because you justify yourself.

 

You say, "No, I do not have envy in my heart, you are jealous of me". How can this judgment benefit you? Therefore, the Father must back up the Son of God, especially those of us who are not in full stature (when you are not in full stature you are a member of the two witness company).

 

If you are not in full stature, and this person that you said, "I see envy in you," then says, "No, you are jealous", what do you? Do you spend the rest of the day saying, "Jealousy...." "Envy...." You cannot go back and forth like that, so the Father must back up the Son of God by revealing the envy in the heart of that person.

 

He must bring a trial into their life that will result in a revelation that this sin is truly in their heart and give them an opportunity to repent. This is what the judgment is, and it will happen to all men.

 

If you are a person in whom Christ is not being formed, and a Son of God is sent to you and you engage in this process, it will reveal whether or not Christ is present in you. I know I did not make that clear, let me just give it to you in another way.

 

Let me take a different tract here, "And the books were opened, and another book was opened, which is the book of life, and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books according to their works." What this means is, when your soul is exposed, when the sin is exposed in you, at the same time, it is revealed whether or not the book of life is in you.

 

The whole world is going to be judged. If you have the book of life as well as the book of the dead, you.... I am having trouble doing this, just give me a second. Help me, Father.

 

The judgment of God is not a lightning bolt from heaven, it is not instantaneous death. It is a judgment as to whether or not you will enter into eternal life. If it is the time for the unsaved to be judged, they will come into an encounter with a Son of God, and the encounter is designed to determine whether or not Christ is in that person. When it is proven that the book of life is not in this person, when the sin....

 

Let me back up. I am sorry I am being so confusing. When the sin is exposed, if the person also has Christ, they have the ability to repent and to have that sin rooted out and replaced with the corresponding righteousness of Christ. If they do not have Christ, and their sin is exposed, they will have an option of crying out to God to have mercy on them and give them Christ, or live out the rest of their life and pass on, the way of all flesh.

 

It is not so much that God is casting them into hell forever. It is that if they cannot repent and cry out to God, they will not enter into the kingdom. They will live out the rest of their life as a natural man, as they would have done if they never came.... if they did not live in the hour of the White Throne Judgment.

 

COMMENT: So there is a physical death at some point, at the end they will die? What happens to them when they die?

 

PASTOR VITALE: Yes there will be a physical death then. What happens to them when they die? Their body decomposes, we know that when we bury a body in the ground it deteriorates, right? Their soul also deteriorates because the soul that sins must die, that is a judgment from God. The soul that sins dies, and I believe that what happens to it is that it goes back to that original lump of clay.

 

Remember, God is the potter who is forming individual vessels. He made one Living Soul. He mixed the dust with the Spirit of God, and He made a big lump of spiritual clay. He pulled a piece of that clay off (of course, you know I am exaggerating), and He formed you and He formed me. Let us not use ourselves. He formed a couple of other people and it came time for them in this natural lifetime to die.

 

God looked at their soul and He saw there was sin in it and He said, "Alright, die, and I will not raise you from the dead because there is sin in your soul." When this physical body dies, God makes a judgment as to whether or not He will raise us from the dead. For every human being that dies and is not raised from the dead, that means that God has pronounced a judgment that, that person was not a righteous man.

 

Jesus Christ of Nazareth was the only one whom the Father raised from the dead because the Lord looked at his soul and said, "This is a righteous man." We said their body deteriorates, their soul dissolves and goes back into the original lump.

 

The Scripture says that the potter will mar the vessel, and remove it. Are you familiar with that Scripture? Their soul goes back into the lump of clay to be remolded. What does that mean? Somebody will have a baby somewhere. Can you hear this?

 

The spirit goes back to the Father, because the spirit is that part of us which comes from God. The spirit is that part of us which is eternal, it is either dead or alive, but it always has an existence. This spirit goes back to the Father until that day that the Father is raising the whole spirit from the dead.

 

Let me tell you this, when the Spirit of God is in a man, his name is Christ. We established that when that mind of Christ died, His name changed, and now His name is human spirit. It is just like you have your garri. When it is raw, it is called garri, and then when it is cooked, it is called eba. When Christ is alive His name is Christ, when He died his name changed to the human spirit.

 

The spirit of the man that has been broken down, and dismantled because of the presence of sin, goes back to the corporate human spirit until that day that the Father will raise the whole human spirit, the multi-membered human spirit of all humanity from the dead.

 

This is typified by Ezekiel, where the Lord says to him, "See those dead bones, Ezekiel, can they live again?" Each human being has one of the bones. That skeleton is the skeleton of Christ that died and each of us has one of His bones buried in us. Do you understand?

 

COMMENT: I still want you to clarify something. The Scripture I would like to refer to says that, "And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the Lake of Fire". You were saying that the carnal mind is being cast into the Lake of Fire, and is being purified. I do not know if the carnal mind is going to be purified, because I think, from what you are saying, there is no place for the carnal mind. It is put under subjection, it is destroyed. Could you please talk about that and clarify.

 

PASTOR VITALE: The carnal mind is being dismantled. Let me remind you that the carnal mind is the product of a union, of a penetrating union between the spirit of Satan and the human spirit of man. In our world, when a man and a woman have a child, the man and the woman are physically separate and the child is separate, but in spiritual matters when the male and female have a union and produce a child, all three cleave together and they are one entity.

 

The carnal mind has three parts to it; the spirit of Satan, the human spirit of a man, and the carnal mind which is the personality that you see appearing. All that is being dismantled. The carnal mind will dissolve and break down into Satan and the human spirit, which is Eve. Eve now has a new husband, she is marrying Christ. She is marrying the Christ that is in her, and Satan is being castrated. He can no longer impregnate God's wife again. He was a bull, he is becoming an ox. There was a role for him in the kingdom and that role has to do with giving physical form to the creation.

 

As far as the casting into the Lake of Fire is concerned, it is not so much a purification of the carnal mind. Did I say purification of the carnal mind, did I say that? If I said purification, sometimes I say a wrong word, You are right, that is not an accurate word.

 

It is not a purification of the carnal mind (that would really be Satan and the devil, because now the carnal mind is broken down). Eve is marrying Christ, so that leaves us with Satan who is appearing on two levels; in the unconscious mind he is Satan and in the conscious mind he is called the devil, I guess that is the carnal mind.

 

I see the Lake of Fire as, not so much a purification, but as a controlling influence, a controlling influence. I believe that the casting of the devil into the Lake of Fire, will break him down. That contact with the fire will break him down, and that is what Peter is talking about when he says that the elements will melt. The devil, which is the carnal mind, is cast into the Lake of Fire which breaks him down, and separates Satan from Eve.

 

Eve goes to join with Christ, and Satan comes into this position of servitude to mankind. When we did those Scriptures about the vision of the new creation man in Ezekiel Chapter 1, when when we looked them all up in the Hebrew, we found a very exciting Scripture which said that the fire which is Christ will burn in the midst of a man.

 

Remember, spiritual things are not from high to low, they are from your center outward. Can you follow me? They are from your innermost part outward, so the Spirit of God will be at your innermost part, and it will be burning in your spirit, purifying it. It will be an eternal fire. Do you know that in the tabernacle there was a continual burnt offering? It would burn forever, purifying your spirit, and it will burn as far out as you can get away from God.

 

Sometimes we call it outer darkness, you can call it hell. It will burn all the way out and it will be a preserving, not purifying, a preserving factor to those parts of our being which need to be under authority, which is our soul and our body. It will be a preserving factor, not a purifying factor. In other words, Satan will still exist but he will now be contained and not only powerless but beneficial to the creation. Did I answer your question? Okay.

 

COMMENT: You said the inkhorn writer in Ezekiel is us and that we are going to mark the people in judgment. I want you to throw some light on that because I thought that the inkhorn writer is Christ giving us the word, because Ezekiel said he went forth marking those who were crying for the iniquity of the land.

 

PASTOR VITALE: The inkhorn writer is Christ, but when we are in full stature, we shall be Christ. He is appearing on two levels. The inkhorn writer in the man who is not yet in full stature is Christ in you engraving the image of the Father on your heart. Then when you stand up in full stature, you are going forth as Christ, to men who are not in full stature.

 

You and Christ are one, and you will be Kingsley the Christ. Praise God. That is not blasphemy. When his mind is Christ, he will be Kingsley the Christ. If he is not in full stature, to say that he is God, is blasphemy, but when his mind becomes Christ and he is without sin, he will be Kingsley the Christ. Amen.

 

COMMENT: The question I want to ask is related to symbols, because you talked about symbols and interpretations. When you go to the Book of Revelation, you have lots of symbols there. In the book of Daniel, you have a lot of them there. Various Bible scholars have tried to relate things like the beast, the ten horns, and Babylon to people and events occurring in nations at specific times. They have tried to determine what time the manifestation of the sons of God would be, by the coming of the nations. However, from all you have said, it appears these things prophesied concerning the last days have to do with the work of God in man individually, that is, judgment of our carnal mind. If it is so, how do we reconcile what people have said about horns and nations and beasts.

 

PASTOR VITALE: All of this teaching you refer to about the beast and the ten horns, is man's revelation of this book. It is the revelation of the carnal mind of man. I have to be honest with you, I cannot find any of this teaching in there with the ten horns and the ten toes.

 

When I first started bringing forth this doctrine, a lot of people objected to it because I go into the original language and choose another legitimate translation of a particular word. At least, I have a legitimate basis for my translations, but I do not see how they can get what they come up with.

 

The translation that I give you is a legitimate translation of the Hebrew word. These men have gone into the Scriptures and they just pull this stuff out of the air. I do not know where they have gotten it from. I tell you in all honesty, my understanding of it is that, their carnal mind has read a spiritual book and made up a story.

 

Wait a minute, God just corrected me. There is more to it than that. We know that there is a prophecy that comes from the spirit of man. There is a prophecy that comes out of the spirit of man; the is an ability to prophesy that comes out of the spirit of man.

 

We have someone called Nostradamus. Did you ever hear of Nostradamus? I have not read his prophecies but I am told that some of them get pretty demonic, yet he prophesied events that did occur hundreds or thousands of years later (I do not know when he lived. When did he live? In the 1500s?)

 

These events came to pass. He prophesied some events correctly. He also prophesied, I am told, the end of the world, that it is ending in fire. I declare unto you that man can prophesy out of his carnal mind but no carnal mind knows the secrets of God, because the secrets of God are locked in Christ.

 

Just like you go to a fortune teller, just like you go to a witch, a card reader, a palm reader (in New York we even have an egg reader, she scrambles eggs and she looks in it and she reads your fortune by looking at the eggs), people that prophesy out of their carnal minds do have an ability to prophesy events which will truly come to pass in your life, but they cannot prophesy and neither do they understand or comprehend in any way, the provision of God for humanity.

 

That is how we get a King James translation that is so full of death and destruction, because the very well meaning scholarly translators that translated this book, translated this book as a human skill, and they could not see the spiritual purposes of Christ in it.

 

The translation came out of the mind of man, which only sees the destruction in it. You may recall that I said earlier that almost every Hebrew word has both negative and positive meanings. They have totally contradictory meanings, one meaning to be applied to the carnal mind and the other meaning to be applied to Christ.

 

Maybe the mind of man has an ability to prophesy something that will be a true event, but that is not coming out of the mind of God, and is not a part of the purposes of God. That is why we see some of these prophesies coming to pass. We see a common market trying to whip together. It has not gotten together yet, it keeps falling apart, maybe it will get together, maybe it would not, I do not know.

 

I declare unto you today that such prophecies are not of the purposes of God. They may be true, but they are not of the purposes of God. Anything that they prophesy that comes to pass, for instance, God forbid, a nuclear attack or a war, is not of the purposes of God. They are now saying there is going to be an attack on the United States from the Middle East and from Russia! I do not even want to listen to it anymore.

 

Even if it comes to pass, if it turns out that it was a true prophecy, it is not the judgment of God. Let me tell you this. A lot of people, especially in the United States, a lot of us, not all of us, but a lot of us have a pretty good life in the United States, and when I was studying for the ministry, there were a lot of questions about this tribulation.

 

As I studied history, I realized that people throughout history have been in tribulation. The people in the concentration camps in Hitler's Germany were in tribulation. There is always some nation that has a nation next door who has been persecuting them. We see it going on in Yugoslavia, and now they are saying that there is ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia. There are always people being persecuted, there are people being tortured all through South America, and Central America.

 

What is this tribulation? It is happening now. Men have been crucified, men have been burnt at the stake for the name of Christ. What about the Spanish Inquisition and all the Bible believers that were tortured because they would not give up the Bible? What is this tribulation that Jesus said, "You have never seen anything like it before, and you will never see anything like again"?

 

The carnal mind of man says, "It is going to be worse than anything you ever saw. It is going to be worse than Hitler, and the Spanish Inquisition and the Yugoslavian ethnic cleansing. It is going to be worse than anything you ever saw".

 

I want to give you another thought. Jesus did not say that. He said that you have never seen anything like it before. I want to suggest to you that it is a different kind of tribulation. It is not a tribulation of man torturing man, but it is a tribulation of God condemning the carnal minds of men.

 

My whole point is that even if these things come to pass, if the common market comes to pass, if a dictator stands up in the Middle East, if everything they prophesy comes to pass, it is a natural event. If a dictator persecutes humanity, if famine falls on all of humanity, this is not of God. I have to change that, I am getting a little tired. It is not God's end time judgment.

 

There are two judgments in the earth. There is the reaping and the sowing judgment which is mediated by Satan, and this is unto destruction. When this kind of judgment comes upon you, it is unto destruction, which is what the carnal church is preaching, the destruction of this world, the destruction of nations.

 

However, the judgment which is of Christ is not unto destruction, it is unto life, it is unto resurrection. Even if what they are preaching comes to pass, it is not the judgment that Jesus spoke about, because the judgment that Jesus spoke about will raise us from the dead. Did I make that clear?

 

What I am trying to say is that the end-time prophecy that is being taught is the prophecy of the heart of man, which may be true, but it is witchcraft. Let me qualify this, I do not know who is getting this tape.

 

Any prophecy that comes forth from the heart of man, is witchcraft. However, I do believe that there is a category of believers in whom Christ is not being formed and this prophecy of the mind of man is all that they have, and under certain circumstances, God does bless them despite this carnal end-time message that they bring forth. Do you know what I am saying? You do not know what I am saying.

 

They are doing the best that they can for God. (How do I say this Lord?) What I am trying to say to you is that I am trying not to sound condemning towards this carnal church, that believe that they are serving God, as to put them in the category of witchcraft. Do you understand what I am trying to say?

 

They are really doing the best they can. I personally believe God never called them into these studies, but what makes me hesitate is that I have met men of God who preach this carnal end-time message, and I see God in their life in power. That is what I am trying to tell you. (I have got it.)

 

I have met carnal Christians that preach this carnal message and yet when I look at their life, I see the power of God in their life. At the very least, what we can say is that God is winking at it in some cases. It looks to me like these people are doing the best they can.

 

They are not perfect, they are serving God to the best of their ability and somehow they got involved in this. Obviously God has permitted it, so I do not want it to sound like I am condemning these people. God loves them too and He is working with them also.

 

COMMENT: From what you are saying, could it be that even when we see these things happening physically, we should look inwards and focus on what God is doing in us rather than focus outwards, externally, on the signs of the times? Are you saying that the focus should be on the work God is doing in our individual lives, judging our sins, His personal dealings with us?

 

PASTOR VITALE: Yes. My attitude in this whole situation, brethren, is there is nothing that we can do should an anti-Christ rise up in the Middle East. What are we going to do about it? If I am in America and I hear a bomb is coming from the Middle East, what am I supposed to do about this? When you concentrate on these things, it tends towards fear, because you perceive it as powerlessness, unless you believe in the rapture. I do not believe in the rapture.

 

What am I supposed to do, sit there and quake in my seat? Am I supposed to sit at home and worry about this? I do not even particularly want to think about it, because all of my concentration is directed inward towards confessing the sin that God reveals in my soul and using the Christ that God has given me to wound my carnal mind, hoping that in that moment that the door opens, that I will be one who will pass through.

 

Here I have some control, there is something that I could do. What good is it doing me to count the toes on the statue, I mean it is ridiculous. That is how I feel about it. It is ridiculous, it is a waste of time and energy, and it is a focusing on external things when the move of the spirit is internal and eternal.

 

COMMENT: From what you are saying, there is no time set apart that we would all have to enter a great tribulation and go through it, like it is said, maybe a period of seven years. Could you go further to say something on the millennium. We, prior to your teaching, have the view that there is a set date when the Sons of God shall reign with Christ for a thousand years (Revelation Chapter 20, Verse 6). What do you have to say about this, as it is related to time?

 

PASTOR VITALE: I would like to suggest to you that "millennium" is a word that does not appear in the Scripture anymore than the word "rapture" appears in the Scripture. We did some studies on Bible numerology, and found out what the "thousand years" means. I am of the opinion there is no millennium. Let me find that Scripture.

 

Here it is, Revelation Chapter 20, Verse 4, "And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them...." remember the throne, Christ's throne, is your carnal mind. This phrase that says "And I saw thrones and they sat upon them...." means full stature. Christ is fully sitting upon the carnal mind of these men. The throne of God is the carnal man. He will sit upon us. "Christ will tread Satan underfoot," is another witness.

 

"And I saw thrones and they sat upon them...." who? The human beings who had, by the power of Christ put their carnal mind under them "....and judgment was given unto them...." That is the judgment of the people outside of them. They are qualified to judge the rest of the Church and the rest of humanity because they have attained unto righteousness, and their judgment will be in righteousness, unto the ultimate resurrection of the entire creation.

 

When I say "entire creation", I am not talking about every single individual that has ever lived, because individuals are temporary formations which can be likened to the leaves on a tree. Not every human being that appears will necessarily be made permanent. Only that last crop of leaves in which Christ stands up in full stature, will be made permanent.

 

"And I saw thrones...." I saw carnal minds, "and they sat upon them...." I saw the men who sat on them because they had transferred into Christ. They were no longer carnal, they were now Christ and they were sitting on their carnal minds.

 

"And judgment was given unto them...." over the nations, "and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus Christ, and for the word of God". I saw the souls that no longer had the carnal mind as its head, for the carnal mind had been cut off so that Jesus Christ could be glorified by sitting on those carnal minds.

 

They were beheaded for "the witness of Jesus," the witness of Jesus is Christ in you, the hope of glory, "and for the word of God...." "....the witness of Jesus and for the word of God...." I did do this word by word, but I do not recall. It is probably speaking about Christ and the Spirit of Christ within him, "....and which had not worshiped the beast...." those believers who had refused to worship the beast of their carnal mind, because they stood for righteousness.

 

What is the worship of the beast? It is submission to the beast. No matter what was in it for you, you did righteousness, you obeyed Christ and you laid down your carnal life so that God could be glorified in you, believing that he would meet your every need. That is what these people are. We are talking about the firstfruits company,

 

"And which had not worshiped the beast, neither his image...." that is the personality, I am not sure, I get them backwards, but the beast is the carnal mind and his image must be the spirit. Remember, the carnal mind is in the soul, and this image must be referring to the nature of Satan in the spirit.

 

"Neither had received his mark upon their foreheads...." that is, his thinking, "or in their hands...." that is, their behavior, "and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years". A couple of years before we ever did this Scripture, God had revealed to us in Bible numerology, that, that number "one thousand" was referring to the resurrection of the human spirit, the resurrection of the human spirit.

 

Therefore, I believe that should be translated, "and they lived and reigned with Christ in a condition of full stature," that is what it means. However, I did find in the Scripture something that indicated it would take approximately fifteen hundred years for this glory to be imparted to the balance of humanity, but I cannot find it now.

 

I know I have it on a tape somewhere, but I never wrote it down, so I cannot remember which Scripture I got it from. I remember the teaching, but I just cannot remember my Scriptural reference for it. However, this particular phrase does not refer to a millennium.

 

COMMENT: I know there is a problem in trying to understand the seasons for judgment. Some people have the understanding that everything is as it has always been, and there is no difference between what is happening now or what is about to happen, as against what has been happening for thousands of years. Is there a season for any particular thing?

 

PASTOR VITALE: Yes, I believe there is a season. Jesus clearly said there is a season, and I believe that the signs that Jesus sited will be occurring both in the physical heavens and in our spiritual heavens. I think that the condition of the world today definitely does indicate, for carnal people, that we have entered into the season, but for spiritual people, the sign can be seen in the hearts of God's people.

 

There is an overall season, and I think we are about to enter into it because of the things that I see coming to pass, not only the natural disasters but I see what is happening in God's church. He said that there would be earthquakes, and God has revealed to me that an earthquake typifies a piercing through from one realm to another, and do we not see Christ invading this world system? He is invading the hearts of His people.

 

He is starting to appear in His people. His message of how to enter into full stature is coming forth. This is the earthquakes that we see. I mentioned yesterday that wherever Christ goes with this kind of an anointing, there are explosions, there are disruptions, and there are controversies, because wherever Christ comes in contact with the carnal minds of men, there is war.

 

It may or may not come as a confrontation and a verbal expression in the physical, but that warfare is going on in the spirit. Christ is waging an intense warfare against the carnal minds of the elders of his church in this hour.

 

I see the signs happening, I see Christ appearing in God's people, I see the beginnings of it. I see it happening. I would not tell you that we have entered into the season, I do not know. I believe that we may, at the very least, be right at the door. I do not see how it could be much longer.

 

Let us say it takes another ten years. I hope it does not take that long for the firstfruits, but even if it does, what is ten years? I am hoping it would not be that long, but you never know. I see things speeding up, but you know God has all the time in the world, but I believe we are either in the season or at the very exterior of it.

 

I see Christ coming forth, I see the judgment happening, I see a remnant of God's people willing to submit to this correction. I see it happening before my eyes. I see help available to people that God sends to me, for problems that there was no answer for in the carnal church, that deliverance did not help, that healing did not help. I see them being helped.

 

I see Christ being formed. I see righteousness coming forth. It is happening in just small groups of people, not in the Church at large, but I see it starting. I know that something has happened in me. I know that Christ is coming forth in me and I know that He is increasing. I know what He has done in me in these last five years.

 

This doctrine is amazing me. Sometimes I do not even know where it comes from. It just pours out of me. This is of Christ, this can only be of Christ. This is not coming from the immature Church. This can only come from a Christ that is being formed in me.

 

I am seeing the signs. If you can perceive this, if you can say amen to the fact that you can perceive the Spirit of God in me, and that these words of God could not come forth from the carnal mind of men, if you really believe this, then you are seeing the signs.

 

I am here announcing to you the tribulation, I am saying it is coming upon you. I am not just teaching about this, God has sent me to tell you. If it has not started, get ready, and when it comes, know it is of Him. He sent a prophet to you, so that when it happens you should know that He sent it. He wants the glory. Did I answer your question? It is now, it is now. Hallelujah.

 

COMMENT: I just thank the Lord for the word of the Lord that has been coming forth. Although I have not really been present at the meetings over the weeks, I can feel the impact of the Spirit of the Lord, and His dealings. I know that He is really treading on us and really breaking us in a way that we can be able to understand his words. I want to say that the experiences, and even the things that you shared today are tremendous. When I look at it, I know that God is giving us an in-depth understanding. There is something that struck me whilst you were talking, and that is that the kind of warfare for every battle that the Lord is going to bring upon us is going to be different. Like it is in the Old Testament and all through the Scriptures, there are no two battles that were faced, using the same method. God used different methods in bringing forth his victory over every circumstances that He allowed Israel to pass through. I believe that, now that he has made us to see the things that He is doing by His Spirit through you, the Lord is opening us up to the challenges that are ahead of us. We are looking up to Him as someone who is coming like a wind. We do not really know how He is going to do it but we know that there is going to be a turning over. There is going to be a bringing forth of His life such that it would be so real. The instruments He would use, are not going to be instruments we have known before. They are going to be instruments and tactics and various kinds of strategies as He gave to Israel. Each time He comes, it is different, yet the principle is always the same. He comes so straight, and the victory is so perfect. If you see the victory, you know it is the Lord that has brought it. I just want to testify to the Lord's dealings over this week and thank you for His great Spirit that has come through the ministry of your words. I know it is Christ. I know that it is bringing forth a new thing. I know that there might be one or two restraints here and there, but the Lord will help us. There are so many things that cannot be articulated in human language, it will take the Spirit of the Lord to actually open up. When you talked about the image of Christ.... I was studying all through yesterday and this issue of the image kept coming up. I was just running all through the Scriptures, checking out the image, and I was saying, "God, this image runs right from the Book of Genesis down to the Book of Revelation." This is the image that at the end of the day, the Bible says there is a life given to it. I was a little bit confused, and then you just started touching on all of these matters! There is really so much that God has to help us with in this fellowship. There is really so much that we need to open ourselves unto, and it is like one's whole being is quaking to realize the benefits of Christ within the shortest time. Concerning the timing, it has been witnessed in my own spirit that the timing is actually the Lord's business. The timing is really in His hands, although by the level of the anointing and maturity of Christ in you, you know that it is soon. I believe there is an individual working in which God comes in His own personal timing to bring about certain things. The timing you are talking about is the collective timing, the timing that has to do with the body, as it were. I believe that this issue is actually in the hands of the Lord. Nobody can actually say, until the revelation is so clear. Then it would be as manifest as in the book of Zechariah, where it says, "one cell ministered one to another" and they knew that there was something that was actually going on, and it could not be told outside, because it was something that was peculiar to the people who received it and they knew it was of the Lord. Praise the Lord.

 

COMMENT: I want you to throw more light on this issue of resurrection. There has been a teaching which says there will be the firstfruits, then maybe a second class, a third class and so on.

 

PASTOR VITALE: There is no second and third class fruit in God's kingdom. This is a carnal teaching. There is a firstfruits company which is not a first quality company. It is not that the first company is first grade, and every grade thereafter is less, like if you press nut oil, the first grade is the finest, and we go down the line.

 

What God is doing is He is resurrecting this whole creation from the dead. We are a mighty soul, billions of people across the world, and God is a God of order, so He has a plan as to how he is going to raise us all from the dead.

 

That plan says that the resurrection will be accomplished in companies, a group at a time, each man in his own order, not necessarily the first better than the last. On the contrary, the Scripture says he who is last shall be first, and he who is first shall be last. At the end, we shall all be one in Christ. The whole creation is being swallowed up into Christ.

 

I have heard that teaching. It is just the carnal mind of man, the pride of man, trying to make oneself important at the sacrifice of the other person. Do not take it too seriously.

 

COMMENT: A Scripture that emphasizes that, or makes us think like that, is in Revelation, Chapter 20, Verse 6. It says, "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection; on such the second death hath no power."

 

PASTOR VITALE: The first resurrection refers to the first stage of the resurrection. We will be raised from the dead in three stages. It does not mean that there will be several groups of people raised from the dead. That phrase, "the first resurrection" means that each individual will be raised from the dead in three stages.

 

Let me just get the exact Scripture here. Revelation Chapter 20, Verse 5, "But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished, this is the first resurrection." The first stage of the resurrection is the resurrection of your spirit. We are the dead, every human being is dead. We are spirit, soul, and body. God is first raising our spirit from the dead, and the rest of the dead is our soul and our body.

 

"The rest of the dead" is not all the other people that are not in the firstfruits company. It is our soul and our body. Our soul and our body "....did not live again until the thousand years were finished, this is the first resurrection." I did do this study, I just do not remember what "were finished" means. Maybe God will give it to me, but I do have it on a tape, just give me a second.

 

"But the soul and the body did not live again...." that is referring to glorification, your body is not going to be raised from the dead until glorification. Do you understand what I am saying? Jesus was glorified when the man, Jesus the Christ, died on the cross. His Father raised him from the dead and He was glorified, His human body became spirit.

 

This Scripture is talking about the glorification of our body. The first stage of the resurrection is that your spirit will be raised from the dead, but you are still going to be in the same body, but the rest of the dead, your soul and your body would not live again. You are not going to be glorified, they are not going to be converted into spirit, "until the thousand years were finished."

 

I cannot remember what that means, maybe I will listen to the tape when I go home. Off the top of my head at this point, I would say that it means that your soul and your body is not going to be raised up until your spirit is completely raised from the dead, because this resurrection of your spirit....

 

Everybody is manifesting, I rebuke this manifestation. Let her hear the answer. Help her to hear the answer, Lord.

 

What this Scripture is saying is that this is the first resurrection, the resurrection of your spirit, this is the first resurrection. Your soul and your body would not be glorified, they would not be raised from the dead until your spirit is raised from the dead.

 

Until your human spirit is completely raised from the dead, do not expect your soul and your body to be raised from the dead. That word "finished" can be translate "completed." Until your spirit is completely resurrected from the dead, your soul and your body will not be raised from the dead. Can you hear that? I know there has been a lot of confusion here, but did you hear what I said? Did you understand it?

 

COMMENT: .... A set of people being given the human spirit as their reward, whilst some will be in the carnal nature. Some will be like angelic beings whilst some will be like humans, would be given the human spirit.

 

PASTOR VITALE: They probably base that on the Scripture that says there will be woodcutters and water bearers. This is all the carnal mind of man which wants to exalt itself. This is all the carnal teachings of men, but let me say this to you, resurrection is a process.

 

There will be a time when there will exist on the earth, men in full stature. There will also be men in the condition that we are in now, with Christ being formed in them. There will be men who have the Holy Spirit but not Christ. It will go right down the line, but they are not going to stay that way. At the end of all things, every human being will either have lived out their natural life and gone the way of all flesh, or will have arrived in full stature. At the end of all things, every human being remaining on this earth will have been absorbed into God, and we will all be one with God.

 

Prophecy

 

Yea, saith the Lord, I have called thee by my name, saith God, and I have imparted my very life unto thee and thou shalt see my glory upon me, saith the Lord, and I shall do mighty signs and wonders. Yea, I shall roll back the red sea for thee, saith God, and thou shalt march through on dry land and enter into kingdom of my dear son. For I have loved you even before the foundation of the earth, and I shall do mighty signs and wonders in your heavens and in your earth, saith God. Trust in me and fear no other god, and I shall do these things.

 

The Lord is telling me to pray for that woman that I told you about who opposed me in the ministry in which I trained. I do not know whether she needs help or He wants to set an example unto you.

 

Prayer

 

I truly bless her, Lord, and I pray for your mercy in her life, and I pray that she inherits all the promises, Father, for you have said that this carnality is childishness, O God. I forgive her, Father, and if any area I have not completely forgiven her, I pray that you give me that ability. I bless her Lord, and I declare unto the heavenlies that this transgression does not cut her off from the kingdom, but that you bring her to repentance and to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and that you permit her entrance with all of your children into all of the glory of God. Let your perfect will be done in her life Father. I pray that this day you deliver her out of the bondage that she abides in and that you show her the mercy of your life in the name of Jesus, amen.

 

02/21/03rs

03/21/05mml-final edit