Just in case it's not clear enough here's another sketch of the uncanny correspondences between Isaiah 9:10 and 9/11/01

I've outlined the "harbingers" of Jonathan Cahn's study here already, but maybe it could use some more spelling out. I'm not comfortable with his system or the focus on "harbingers" really, just not the way my mind works I guess, so if I spell it out I come at it differently, less systematically perhaps.

So here's the story: This rabbi/preacher Jonathan Cahn discovered that there is a verse in the book of Isaiah in the Bible that relates to what happened on 9/11, to the attitude people had about the attack, but it not only corresponds to 9/11 in that general way, but specific things mentioned in that verse became literal realities on 9/11 as well. These are literal physical harbingers and it is truly uncannily amazing that there should be such a literal correspondence between an ancient Bible verse (732 BC) and a modern event. God certainly speaks to us today through his scripture but this is the only instance I'm aware of in which the actual facts of the scripture have been manifested literally and physically in the present.

Here's the verse and this time I'm going to include the context which shows the consequences God says will follow:

Isaiah 9:10 The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are cut down, but we will change [them into] cedars.

Isaiah 9:11-14 Therefore the LORD shall set up the adversaries of Rezin against him, and join his enemies together; The Syrians before, and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand [is] stretched out still. For the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them, neither do they seek the LORD of hosts. Therefore the LORD will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day.

So the first correspondence is that the people of Israel had the same attitude when they were attacked by the nation of Assyria, as America had when attacked by terrorists. They do not attribute the attack to God, do not see it as His judgment, and instead of seeing that they need to repent and turn back to Him they defiantly vow to rebuild bigger and better than before.

As a consequence of that attitude, right after that God says they will be attacked again. And as a matter of historical fact, Israel, the northern kingdom, was completely wiped out in another attack by Assyria some ten years later. The ten tribes completely disappeared, absorbed into the surrounding nations, and their former kingdom became known as Samaria. This was God's judgment against them for all their disobedience of his commandments, particularly for following foreign gods and for sacrificing their children to those gods.

Afterward, Samaria kept a distorted semblance of the Law given by Moses but as Jesus said of them when He spoke to the Samaritan woman He met at the well:

John 4:22 Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews.

Judah, the southern kingdom made up of the two remaining tribes, was also warned of judgment to come, and also did come under judgment but later on, through attacks by the Babylonians. In 586 BC they went into captivity in Babylon for seventy years.

Judah's judgment came later because they had fewer sins, more obedient kings, and God had also promised that He was going to bring the Messiah Savior from them so He wouldn't completely destroy them, and it was from the tribe of Judah that Jesus was born 700 years after the events of Isaiah 9:10.

When the nation of Israel was originally formed under Moses after the Exodus from Egypt (around 1500 BC), God had given them commandments that they'd all agreed to obey and he'd also told them what would happen if they didn't obey. He promised protection and prosperity if they obeyed, but attacks by enemies, economic disaster and so on if they didn't obey. All this is spelled out in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy written by Moses, and to show this I'm going to copy out the first 25 verses of the 68 verses of Deuteronomy 28 at the bottom of this post.*

The attitude of the Israelites in Isaiah 9:10 is clearly the same attitude America had after 9/11, which anyone ought to be able to remember. Hardly anybody thought of it as God's judgment and the few who did were criticized. I immediately knew it was God's judgment and I don't know why so many other Christians didn't. They kept saying God wouldn't do that sort of thing, but the Bible ought to make it clear that nothing happens without Him. Also, it was clearly only a warning. 9/11 was bad but it could have been a lot worse, which means God isn't yet judging us as harshly as He could and He's giving us time to recognize Him and change things. It was a warning, but it's been over ten years and there's no sign of repentance from any quarter that I'm aware of, we've already had economic disasters and there's still more to come.

Even without all the uncanny harbingers the attitude expressed by Israel in Isaiah 9:10 is the same as America's after 9/11, but the uncanny harbingers did happen and what might have been merely an instructive example from scripture has become an official statement of America's defiance of God. Tom Daschle who was Senate Majority leader at the time actually QUOTED Isaiah 9:10 on the Senate floor the day after 9/11, thinking it was just a nice promise to rebuild that would make everybody feel better, not realizing it's a harbinger of judgment that states the defiance of America against God just as it stated the defiance of Israel against God. Better not quote the Bible at all than quote a passage like that.

Then three years later at a prayer breakfast also on 9/11 John Edwards quoted the same verse with the same misunderstanding of it.

In case anybody thinks they didn't misunderstand it, you can go read the commentaries at Blue Letter Bible on that verse, which all make it very clear that this is a statement of defiance against God. Both Edwards and Daschle did completely misunderstand it, and by pronouncing it in a public official way they committed America to defiance of God rather than to the repentance that verse ought to call for. Former American leaders knew better. Lincoln knew better for instance. But in our time only a very few -- who were vilified for it -- were calling it judgment and calling for repentance, everybody else was crying, "God bless America" as if God COULD bless this miserably apostate nation.

Those who don't believe in God might still think what's the big deal, but that's only possible if they aren't really thinking about it. Why did Dasche and Edwards quote that specific verse from the Bible that's ABOUT defying God and misunderstand it so completely? They could have quoted lots of verses from the Bible that really are comforting but they chose that one.

But that's just the beginning of the harbingers. Israel said they'd rebuild with hewn stone to replace their fallen bricks, refusing to recognize that it was God who had knocked down the bricks of their buildings. We brought in a huge stone weighing tons that was cut out of the New York mountains, a "hewn stone" to be the cornerstone of the proposed Freedom Tower to replace the WTC. It was just a gesture. The building wouldn't be built out of hewn stone but that hewn stone became a symbol for the rebuilding, and it's uncanny that they did it that way since that's what Isaiah 9:10 says Israel planned to do. The governor of New York made a speech over it too, also promising to rebuild what had been knocked down.

A symbolic hewn cornerstone of the defiant vow to rebuild isn't uncanny enough? Well, even more uncanny is that a sycamore tree was destroyed on 9/11, by a piece of the falling tower. It lay uprooted in the graveyard beside a little church at the corner of Ground Zero. Another symbol. The sycamores had been cut down by the Assyrian attack on Israel so a sycamore was also cut down on 9/11. It's not the same tree that's found in the Middle East but it WAS named after that tree.

And people made a big deal out of that fallen sycamore too. It appears that the church itself might have been destroyed but the sycamore protected it. They put its roots on display and a sculptor was commissioned to make a replica of those roots in bronze to commemorate the tree. That replica now stands next to the main church of which that small chapel is a part. There it stands, not recognized as the sign of judgment to come against America that it is.

AND, just as the Israelites said they’d replace their fallen sycamores, which the Assyrian army had cut down during the attack, with cedars, our fallen sycamore was also replaced by the same kind of tree, a conifer of the same family as the cedar. It was installed where the sycamore had stood, and officially named the Tree of Hope, although, again, it so clearly reflects the verse in Isaiah which is about defying God that it should really be called the Tree of Doom.

Can it be denied that all this is an uncanny playing out of the specifics of Isaiah 9:10? Every detail of it actually manifested on 9/11, the defiant attitude made official in quotes by American leaders, the fallen bricks replaced by a symbolic quarried stone, the fallen sycamore replaced by a conifer.

THEN, just to make sure that this is all God’s judgment on the nation of America, it turns out that the chapel where the sycamore had stood and where the conifer now stands was where the first government of America under George Washington met to pray for the new nation. The capital of America at that time was not Washington D.C. but New York City. Washington had just been sworn into office a few blocks away and he and his whole government walked to the chapel to spend two hours praying for the nation, essentially consecrating the nation into God's hands.

The uprooted sycamore now stands for God’s judgment that the nation has come to an end unless we turn back to Him.

Also, Ground Zero is property that was owned by that church. The attack on the WTC was therefore an attack on the original ground where America was originally consecrated to God, another sign that God is withdrawing His protection from the nation that was prayed for by Washington and his government.

Another uncanny bit of fact is that the church has a Wall Street address. The bronze sycamore root stands right next to it. It is known as Trinity Wall Street Church. God’s judgment on the American economy has already begun with stock market crashes.

And there's more: The New York Stock Exchange which is only a block from the church was originally formed from an agreement known as the Buttonwood Agreement because it was signed by the members under a buttonwood tree that grew on Wall Street. Buttonwood is another name for sycamore. (Wikipedia verifies all this). The uprooted sycamore specifically points to judgment against the American economy which is already well underway.

Cahn goes into all of this in his talk and in more detail in his book. I don't see how anyone could recognize all this and deny that there is a God who did it all, a God who is talking to America through all these events and through these amazingly manifested symbols that echo His word to ancient Israel when they too had gone astray and come under judgment.

So there's my sketch of Cahn's revelation of the "Harbingers." He actually goes into more in the book, involving the timing of our economic collapse in terms of other parts of the Law of Moses, so if this isn't already uncanniness overload I recommend reading about that too.

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*And here's part of Deuteronomy 28 about God's promises to Israel if they obeyed and warnings of what would come if they didn't:

Deu 28:1 And it shall come to pass, if thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe [and] to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth: [Surely we can say that God did bless America in this way in the 20th century]. And all these blessings shall come on thee, and overtake thee, if thou shalt hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God. Blessed [shalt] thou [be] in the city, and blessed [shalt] thou [be] in the field. Blessed [shall be] the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy ground, and the fruit of thy cattle, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Blessed [shall be] thy basket and thy store. Blessed [shalt] thou [be] when thou comest in, and blessed [shalt] thou [be] when thou goest out.

Deu 28:7 The LORD shall cause thine enemies that rise up against thee to be smitten before thy face: they shall come out against thee one way, and flee before thee seven ways. The LORD shall command the blessing upon thee in thy storehouses, and in all that thou settest thine hand unto; and he shall bless thee in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. The LORD shall establish thee an holy people unto himself, as he hath sworn unto thee, if thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in his ways. And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the LORD; and they shall be afraid of thee. And the LORD shall make thee plenteous in goods, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy ground, in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers to give thee. The LORD shall open unto thee his good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in his season, and to bless all the work of thine hand: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath; if that thou hearken unto the commandments of the LORD thy God, which I command thee this day, to observe and to do [them]:

Deu 28:14 And thou shalt not go aside from any of the words which I command thee this day, [to] the right hand, or [to] the left, to go after other gods to serve them. Deu 28:15 But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee: Cursed [shalt] thou [be] in the city, and cursed [shalt] thou [be] in the field. Cursed [shall be] thy basket and thy store. Cursed [shall be] the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep. Cursed [shalt] thou [be] when thou comest in, and cursed [shalt] thou [be] when thou goest out.

Deu 28:20 The LORD shall send upon thee cursing, vexation, and rebuke, in all that thou settest thine hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed, and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings, whereby thou hast forsaken me. Deu 28:21 The LORD shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it. Deu 28:22 The LORD shall smite thee with a consumption, and with a fever, and with an inflammation, and with an extreme burning, and with the sword, and with blasting, and with mildew; and they shall pursue thee until thou perish. Deu 28:23 And thy heaven that [is] over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee [shall be] iron.

Deu 28:24 The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed. Deu 28:25 The LORD shall cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies: thou shalt go out one way against them, and flee seven ways before them: and shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth.

The IRREFUTABLE revelations of "Harbinger" have to overcome some obstacles to get the hearing it deserves

First, these harbingers ARE irrefutable.

There really is an uncannily precise correspondence between the words of Isaiah 9:10 and the events in America of September 11th, 2001 --and afterward. Just as a matter of fact, the verse obviously applies to 9/11 even without the uncanny correspondences, but they seal the deal in a way that ought to convince the most adamantly skeptical.

The bricks are fallen down, but we will build with hewn stones: the sycomores are cut down, but we will change [them into] cedars

Isaiah 9:10 really is about the defiance of a nation against God's judgment and the next verse is about the inevitable continuing judgment that will follow. All the commentaries on this passage give this understanding of it.

American leaders really did quote Isaiah 9:10 after 9/11, mistaking it for an encouraging word of promise that the nation would rebuild, rather than the act of defiance against God it is. The verse refers to fallen bricks or buildings and the cutting down of sycamore trees as God's act of judgment against the idolatrous nation, really his warning of judgment as it was light compared to what could have been, just as 9/11 was light compared to what could have been. Instead of repenting the nation of Israel simply vowed to rebuild and replant bigger and better. And so did America.

After 9/11 some reporters described fallen bricks in the devastation, but the simple fact of fallen buildings is enough to tie the event to the Isaiah passage. A stone was quarried from the New York mountains to be the cornerstone of the projected "Freedom Tower" which was to replace the WTC, and ceremonially installed with words of defiance echoing the attitude of Isaiah 9:10. That's the hewn stone that Isaiah 9:10 pictures as the act of defiance.

There was also a western version of the sycamore tree that was uprooted by a falling piece of one of the towers. The sycamore became an icon in people's minds. Its roots were put on display to commemorate 9/11 and later a bronze replica of those roots was installed beside the church to which the sycamore had belonged. You can find pictures of this on the internet. The address where it is located also happens to be Wall Street.

The fallen sycamore really was replaced by a conifer of the same family as the cedar, and that tree also became an icon, dubbed the Tree of Hope.

This is all highly ironic since the Isaiah passage these things are so closely following without anyone's intention is all about defiance of God and the determination to do things our own way. This was the predominant sentiment about 9/11 by everybody involved, and is to this day. Anybody hear any calls to repentance for the sins that brought about God's warning judgment? The very few who even called it God's judgment were vilified.

The harbingers don't stop there. It turns out that the sycamore tree was planted in the churchyard of the very chapel where George Washington and his first governing body prayed after his inauguration as our first President. The capital city of the nation at that time was New York City, not Washington D.C.

Oh and there's more than that too, involving Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange, also involving the very property of the World Trade Center. Go listen to Jonathan Cahn's talk I've posted two or three times in recent posts below, or get Jonathan Cahn's book "Harbinger." He fictionalized the story of how the correspondence with Isaiah 9:10 was discovered, using fictional characters, alas, but all the true facts are there.

I do have to report that I finally read Cahn's book, took me a while to get to it but I read it over the weekend and finished it this morning. I can't say I'm happy that he chose to put it in fictional form, and I can only hope that it won't be a problem for many figuring out what parts are fiction and what parts reality, but overall for me it didn't detract from the message itself so I've finally accepted his decision to do it that way. At least it gave him the opportunity to present the material in a measured way so that we have time to digest each part before being hit with the next. There are a LOT of parts to this revelation, each as uncanny as the previous, and anything that makes it easier to assimilate has to be welcomed. As characters in the book say: "The point is to get the message out to as many people as possible (p. 248)." If the fiction mode accomplishes that I have to be all for it.

Later: It occurred to me that maybe this could be considered a literary form for the orderly presentation of a complex subject rather than a novel. A teaching device. Seems to me something like this has been done in history, though I have to admit I don't know where or by whom or what it would be called.

In the book he gets to the subject of the church's responsibility, and here's what he says about what believers need to repent of:

From their apathy, from their complacency ... their compromises with darkness ... their omissions ... their serving of other gods ... their sins committed in secret ...their withholding of life ... and their failure to fulfill their call (p. 224).

The job of unpacking that statement would bring out every category of sin we need to face.

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I'm certainly no supporter of the charismatic movement, or of televangelists either, so it does put me in an uncomfortable position to be so strongly convinced of Jonathan Cahn's revelation of the meaning of 9/11 as God's judgment on America, because those are the contexts in which his message is being promoted, while the rest of the churches apparently either don't know about him, or, perhaps, reject what he has to say. I really don't know how he is being received outside those contexts, though, it could be simply that they aren't hearing his message at all. I just know that my own attempts to get his message out to others have mostly been met with silence.

I didn't even know that Jim Bakker was on television again, or that he had a second wife, that's how out of touch with the world of televangelism I've been. But his program aired a series of interviews with Jonathan Cahn just last month, and Bakker says he was one of the few who recognized early on that 9/11 was God's judgment on America and took a lot of criticism for it.

The interviews are rather choppy, frequently interrupted, and at times repetitive but pretty much all the material does get covered by the end, and it's more up-to-date than the Messianic conference speech I keep linking. The Biblical connections concerning judgment on the economy are staggeringly uncanny, but much too detailed for an economically-challenged person like me to keep track of. You just have to hear it for yourself.

Here are the Bakker interviews, again with the warning that they may be frustrating to watch: Part #1 Part #2 Part #3 Part #4 Part #5 Part #6

Getting the message out to as many as possible is Bakker's desire and that makes me very happy as it's my own desire too. I've been experiencing much resistance but he's gained a large audience for it, praise the Lord. There do seem to be obstacles to getting it out in general, though, which is to be expected about such a message. At first I thought this message is so just plain IRREFUTABLE it should spread like wildfire through the churches and we'll all be humbled and turn from our wicked ways, a great revival will engulf the nation and America will be saved. Turns out that as usual that's ridiculously optimistic and in reality we have a spiritual battle on our hands if we want God's kingdom to advance in this world. Rabbi Cahn describes various ways he's been in spiritual battle over this in these interviews.

This message needs to break down all the walls and get to EVERYBODY.

Revival Hope

Again I'm hoping maybe it really isn't too late to save America, to have revival that resuscitates an entire nation and pulls it back from the brink of death.

Here's where Leonard Ravenhill would have us start:

...[I]f I could, I would like to call together thousands of preachers in different countries of the world to spend a week in prayer for renewal. I would like to see them given instruction in prayer; not seminars on prayer, mind you, but exhortation to pray. We would spend the whole week praying, with periodic breaks. I believe this could be a detergent in the life of the Church. It would be a cleansing process. We could go back to our churches and perhaps stave off judgment, and God would usher in the revival that must* come. [p. 95, America Is Too Young To Die. Christian Life Books paperback]

This ought to be a prayer in itself, but I've found that I can't pray that big. I can barely pray for thousands of preachers in America myself, let alone the whole world. Which I guess means I don't have the faith for a movement that large. But wouldn't it be great if thousands of us all over the nation prayed for this to happen?

It seems right that it should start with the preachers, the pastors of churches, and the elders and deacons. That's where the revival in the Hebrides under Duncan Campbell started, with the church leaders saddened by the falling away of the young people in the community and desiring to revive them, so getting together two or three nights a week to pray, while a couple of the elder women in the congregation prayed together at home at the same time.

We need a HUGE revival in America, a nation-wide revival, and of course a world-wide revival would be even better, but Ravenhill's book is about America under God's judgment and what it would take to save the nation, and the theme of my recent posts has been the same. America is going to go under completely if the churches don't rise to the occasion and pray out their hearts for revival. The same is true of all the nations of Europe and all I can do is hope the fire would spread there too.

And please, not the kind of revival they had in Brownsville with people passing out and jerking and flailing around as if that's the whole point of revival while the word of God hardly got heard, but a revival that majors in conviction of sin and repentance first of all, at all levels of the Church from the pastors on down. That's where REAL revival always starts and that's what the nation needs, after all, if judgment is to be averted.

There always seems to be less preaching during revivals from what I've read, God Himself doing the major work of it, but there must be some preaching of the truth if there isn't going to be a flood of false doctrine taking over. People can get saved but have some very strange ideas about Christian theology and someone has to teach them.

The very best book I've found on revival is Brian H. Edwards' Revival!

[Back later to say more about this book]

How do you tell a true revival from a counterfeit?

Reading in Leonard Ravenhill this evening, a book he wrote in 1979, America Is Too Young To Die, his usual powerful exhortations to a failing church, exhortations to repentance, to holiness, to prayer, to revival. It's rich with quotations I'd like to copy out and hope I will soon. It's so sad that it's been over thirty years and America still hasn't seen revival considering that Leonard Ravenhill prayed for years for revival and preached and wrote exhortations that moved many.

But some would disagree that we've had no revivals since then. In the back of the book there are ads for other books put out by the same publishing company, all revival-oriented, some of them about genuine revivals I'm aware of that go back a hundred years or more, but some on highly questionable revivals. There is a series of books, for instance, about the "Azusa Street Revival" of 1904 which I came to believe years ago was a false revival, but now I'm going to have to repeat my research on it to convince myself again, because I find it so hard to reconcile an ad for that event with the solid Biblical position of Ravenhill -- can't the publishers tell the difference?

There's also an ad for a book on the supposed "Brownsville Revival" of the 90s in Pensacola, Florida, which I've also been convinced was counterfeit. Again I'm going to have to do more research, but I did start by finding some video of that "revival" on You Tube and it's really quite fascinating. It's the first time I've actually seen some of the phenomena I'd only read and heard about otherwise, people falling down, jumping up and down "in the spirit" and having the "jerks" and generally acting "drunk in the spirit."

Well, to be accurate, I'd seen something like it in charismatic contexts, people falling down when the leader -- usually a visiting "evangelist" -- touched them and prayed over them, but I was never convinced that was for real. None of it appeared to be involuntary -- though some of it may have been, I don't know, there was no way to tell.

I also saw some people fall down under helpless laughter at a charismatic retreat, but not the whole group, just a few. The "Laughing Revival" in Toronto was going strong during that period and it was clear the people in the group where I was were really having some kind of laughing fit they couldn't stop. I've experienced out-of-control laughter that takes your breath away and makes your sides hurt and that's what this looked like, but it went on an entire night in one case at least and maybe more and it was all attributed to the Holy Spirit.

Brownsville wasn't into laughter, but it certainly was into passing out, jerking and flailing and the like. And now I know it is very very real, whatever it is. You can see it particularly in a four-part You Tube video, the first part of which I've embedded below -- you click on a message at the end of each which will take you to the next part -- where one of the leaders/pastors is interviewing various people about their experiences in the "revival." Most of them experienced these phenomena even in the process of being interviewed -- watch the young black man as he is waiting for his turn in the second part -- and the interviewer himself almost succumbed a few times later on, his head jerking uncontrollably at times, almost completely falling down at least once. The phenomenon seems to start with small jerks of the upper body and may or may not progress to full body flailing movements and/or falling down, though some just seem to get weak in the knees and fall down without any of the other manifestations.

It appeared some were making a mighty effort to control the effects. Whatever these things are they are clearly real in the sense that the people are not intentionally doing them but it's all just happening to them. I think this is completely obvious on the film.

They call it "the power of the Spirit" and refer it all to God and Jesus. But is that what it really is?

It seems that all they talk about is the physical manifestations themselves. This is what interests them, what they come for, what suffices for "revival." They "give the glory to God" but IS God the author of all this? They seem drunk, and they love being drunk, it's obviously a lot of fun. The crowd applauds when someone falls down or shows other evidence of being "under the power" and they laugh and jump up and down in the normal voluntary emotional way to see that clearly INvoluntary stuff going on. It all reminds me of the giggles people get on various illegal drugs recognizing that everybody else is also high. Very much like that. Drunk. Stoned.

What IS this phenomenon?

The interviewees say God "really did a work" in them or something along those lines, when they were out cold on the floor, or God "healed me" and so on. But the actual content of the experience is oddly vague and scrambled or not voiced at all while the jerking and falling and whatever the feeling is that goes along with those manifestations are celebrated as what it is really about. "Give me more," more more more, says the first woman. More WHAT? Apparently just whatever the feeling is that makes her stagger and eventually fall down and not wake up until 3:30 in the morning.

Is God REALLY the author of these things? Is God glorified in such phenomena?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogSrTm598XE&feature=related

Since the people in the Brownsville "revival" clearly believe it is the work of the Holy Spirit and give thanks to God, talk about cleaning up their lives and plead the blood of Christ and the like, I don't want to come to any premature conclusions on the basis of some negative impressions but want to study it more. The test is always the fruit, as the Lord says, so what has been the fruit of Brownsville? True revivals change the surrounding community in some way and the participants in the revival go on to do meaningful Christian work. Has that been happening?

There have been many credible witnesses of former revivals that were undoubtedly true revivals who reported that such phenomena also occurred to some participants --sometimes understood in earlier times to evidence a bad conscience under conviction of sin, or a weak constitution -- but in those cases the manifestations were not made the center of the revival as they obviously were in Brownsville. So there is room, it seems, to recognize that such things may happen to some people in a true revival, but when they dominate and become the focus as if they are the whole point of the revival itself they've got to be considered at least a distraction from God's true work. I'm not completely happy with this way of sorting it out but it would be risky to assume more than this.

At the very least I have to say that this is not the revival I'm praying for, and I specifically pray that such phenomena not be welcomed and applauded if God sends us revival, though I'm not going to say it shouldn't be expected or tolerated. If the focus isn't clearly on conviction and repentance from sin and changed lives it's just too vague WHAT it's about.

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Later, I'm convinced this all does come from God now, my impression after watching the video a number of times, but I'm also puzzled at the different kinds of revivals that apparently all come from God. [June 13 2012: I don't remember what made me think this was of God back then, probably nothing more than believing one or two of the participants. But as I review it now I have to go with all the misgivings I had at the time as well. This can't be from God.] Just what's on these videos makes it appear that repentance from sin was NOT part of this revival. There's more of a spirit of accusation from the pastor's wife, for instance, a complaint she had against the church, a statement about being "hurt," no sense of her own being at fault, so rather than being forgiven by God she thinks in terms of being "healed" by God, or released from a "curse" she's been under, or from a kind of imprisonment. The young black man said something about having done some bad things but he also denied that he was a bad guy and there was no spirit of repentance in him either.

This kind of thing is what I've witnessed in charismatic contexts myself -- much emphasis on healing and release, no sense of repentance. (I do have to note that the Wikipedia article on the Brownsville revival says that preaching on sin and experiences of conviction and repentance definitely WERE part of this revival, though that wasn't evident on the video above.)

But it's the great revivals in which God breaks people under conviction of sin and self-accusation that I've only read about that seem to carry God's power out to the community and affect the participants for the rest of their lives. This is the sort of revival I hope would come to America. The revival in Saskatchewan in the 70s started with repentance among the church members and I think their pastor Bill McLeod ought to be a model for all pastors today because he spent hours praying for his church every day until the revival came. This charismatic kind of thing in Florida just seems weak by comparison. The TONE of it bothers me, the giddiness or giggliness. What WAS the fruit of Brownsville?

What do the churches need to repent of?

Thinking about how Christians need to fast and pray and repent for the sake of America I was trying to determine what the main sins of the churches are -- where we should start. There are plenty of problems with America at large of course, but how much of it should be laid at the door of the churches? In a sense all of them, I believe, simply because a strong Bible-based and Spirit-led church utterly dependent on God would have prevented them from happening. I'm assuming the failure started with the church back somewhere but I don't know how to locate that point. The Deism of our Founders perhaps? The Higher Criticism that infected so many in the middle of the 19th century? Well, the churches that succumbed to that are now utterly apostate, denying the full inspiration and authority of the Bible, allowing women pastors, treating homosexuality as a normal expression rather than a sin, even having homosexual pastors. And that's just the start of it. Whole church denominations are given over to some false doctrine or another and if this isn't the Great Apostasy predicted in scripture it's hard to imagine what that would look like. There is also an amazing trend of supposedly Protestant churches treating Romanism as a true church.

But I'd like to think more about the specific sins of the churches that are still good churches, that still adhere to Biblical inerrancy for instance, that teach the true gospel of salvation by faith alone through grace alone.

Even in those churches you may hear teaching that is very soft on divorce and remarriage for instance. Studies have determined that Christians are divorced in the same proportions as the rest of the society, even possibly greater proportions. We hear these statistics and they make us sad but does anybody stop to think that this has to be because the churches themselves aren't upholding Biblical teaching on divorce and remarriage? I've thought this for some time but hardly ever hear this preached against. I found one good discussion of the problem BY A ROMAN CATHOLIC (can't find the link right now, hope I can track it down). I had to agree with him. Too bad. The Catholics do get some things right biblically which is a terrible indictment of the Protestant and nonCatholic churches.

I know of churches that are more or less Bible believing and true to the gospel that nevertheless have divorced/remarried pastors and elders and deacons, which seems to me to be clearly in violation of scripture, specifically Jesus' own teaching on the subject. Seems to me if God should bless such a church with revival He'd have to begin by convicting them of this violation and the only way it could be properly dealt with would be pretty inconvenient to put it mildly. The Israelites who had married foreign women in the time of Ezra, and even had children by them, were put through the wrenching experience of separating from them because their marriages were a violation of God's word in that case too. Sometimes repentance and restitution are messy.

But if churches want to be in God's favor, if we want revival, something like this is going to have to happen. I'm going to have to find that link and get into the specifics of this, but it does seem to me that if Christians would simply pray and honestly seek God's will instead of "leaning to our own understanding" it would be revealed to them directly, they would be personally convicted of sin in these matters and wouldn't need to hear a lot of sermons on it. Of course if they've been hearing permissive sermons that support them in their sin then they are trained in resisting the Holy Spirit for starters, and may not even listen to a contrary view of the scripture anyway.

Another issue that continues to strike me as a violation in the churches is the abandonment of the requirement for women to cover our heads in the assembly. My study of this completely convinced me that the vast majority of the churches are in violation of scripture on this point, and this is also a matter that I think an honest and protracted seeking of God's will would resolve. Not to cover our heads is to violate God's creation ordinance of man as the image of God and woman as the glory of man. In the churches this means that the glory of man is allowed to compete with the glory of Christ. This is one practice that ought to be simple and straightforward that has been made unnecessarily complicated because people just don't want to have to do this.

It ought to be clear enough from the fact that on the basis of the same scripture that calls for a woman to cover her head in church a man is required to uncover his, and we enforce that part of the directive while ignoring the other. It's not about women having long hair either because there was never a time when women did NOT wear their hair long until very recently, so Paul would have had no reason to exhort them to wear it long.

Those two issues, divorce/remarriage and the head covering, are where it seems to me the churches need to start the process of repentance.

(Not that I think it's going to happen, of course, I'm afraid I'm pretty sure that America is going to be destroyed by God's judgments because the churches will not rally to our calling, but nevertheless I hold out a small hope that I'm wrong.)

A couple of end times messages

Most recent radio talk by Brannon Howse of Worldview Weekend. This is part 2 of some revelations about Newt Gingrich's far-from-conservative politics, and he goes on to talk about how all the current crop of unacceptable Republican candidates are part of God's judgment on the nation.

Most recent email from Jan Markell of Understanding the Times: A pastor's analysis of the deterioration of Christian culture as seen in comparing the recent Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster with the Titanic disaster. The Titanic sank in an era of Christian culture that taught even unbelievers to put the weak before the strong. But on the Costa Concordia we have behavior that even barbarians would have been ashamed of -- "every man for himself" with big strong men shoving aside women and children to save themselves.

"Survival of the fittest" in action. The Man of Indomitable Will, the Antichrist, who disdains all weakness, doth slouch to Bethlehem to be born very very soon.

Just sitting here waiting for God to wipe America off the map

Now I'm disappointed with Jonathan Cahn. On the one hand he presented his prophetic vision as simple fact, as in that speech at a Messianic Jewish conference that I keep posting here, but on the other hand the book he wrote about it is written as a novel. I haven't seen it yet but that's what people say about it. I expected it to provide more detail about the facts he had discovered and maybe it does, but a novel I do not need and treating this kind of information as fiction is a horrendous offense! It turns out that Cahn himself indulges in the hype tone I mention in the previous post though I'd been saying it wasn't his doing.

And yet I still have to regard the mere facts of the matter he presents as just as uncanny and meaningful as I first found them to be. Ground Zero really is where George Washington's inauguration was consecrated by prayer by the first members of the US Government. Whether America is to be regarded as consecrated to God in the sense ancient Israel was is questionable, but Cahn's point that some form of consecration took place seems undeniable, and MUST explain why God treats us the same as He did Israel, which is clearly what is happening with the Isaiah 9:10 connections. Cahn mentions both the plaque at Jamestown and the dedication of Washington's presidency at Ground Zero as two instances in which the nation was consecrated to God. It's hard to dismiss this as a meaningless coincidence.

Isaiah 9:10 certainly does refer to the felling of sycamore trees as God's judgment on Israel, and to the planting of cedar trees or conifers as Israel's defiance of God in response. How can we possibly overlook the uncanny symbolism of a single sycamore tree in the churchyard of that same historic church being destroyed by part of a falling WTC tower and replaced by -- a conifer? And there's also the replacement of the fallen bricks with the hewn stone echoing Isaiah 9:10 as well. That too is uncanny. In doing these things America has certainly had the same attitude as ancient Israel as recorded in Isaiah 9:10 -- we'll redo and rebuild what God destroyed, and we'll do it bigger and better and stronger. The sycamore itself is now memorialized in a bronze replica of its roots, which I find spooky in the extreme, like celebrating death, in this case the death of America, what else? Unwittingly of course. And it's right beside that historic church in which our first government was consecrated.

But most uncanny of all is the attitude of American leaders who exactly echoed the spirit of the leaders of ancient Israel in their denial that this was God's judgment and their refusal to repent but instead to rebuild in their own strength what God had destroyed. There is no way to deny that parallel, there's no way to deny that this follows the same lines as Isaiah 9:10. Of course it wasn't a President who quoted Isaiah 9:10, it was merely the Majority Leader of the Senate, Tom Daschle at the time, but that IS a leader of the nation and it has to mean something. The fact that John Edwards quoted the same verse a few years later in a prayer breakfast on the anniversary of 9/11 isn't quite so telling, because he wasn't in a high position of leadership, but it certainly does at least reflect the attitude of defiance America as a whole was taking at the time, strangely unaware of its actual meaning, thinking to be speaking words of comfort about 9/11 instead. And he made that speech at a typical government prayer breakfast, an official appealing to God for the nation. Again, all this was unwitting, they all think they are comforting the nation with promises to rebuild.

But here is how that passage continues:

11 Therefore the LORD shall set up the adversaries of Rezin against him, and join his enemies together; 12 The Syrians before, and the Philistines behind; and they shall devour Israel with open mouth. For all this his anger is not turned away, but his hand [is] stretched out still. Isa 9:13 For the people turneth not unto him that smiteth them, neither do they seek the LORD of hosts. 14 Therefore the LORD will cut off from Israel head and tail, branch and rush, in one day.

Sure sounds to me like God is promising more judgment to come BECAUSE Israel didn't repent but vowed to plant better trees and build better buildings.

Some of us didn't need all these signs and symbols to know that 9/11 was God's judgment on America, or warning judgment. All you need to know is how God dealt with nations in the OT and specifically how He dealt with Israel. He TOLD them -- Deuteronomy 28 for instance -- how he would deal with them if they obeyed and if they disobeyed. Disobedience calls for the triumph of enemies and the destruction of the economy for instance -- surely this is a principle that applies to all nations, not just God's own people, although in lesser degree simply because "to whom much is given much is required." Those principles are all we should need to know to understand 9/11 as God's judgment -- a warning judgement of more to come, I should say, simply because it was such a limited event compared to what it could have been. A warning judgment to wake us up and lead us to repentance. But Americans refused to see that in it, and the biggest shame of all is that the pastors of churches all over the land refused to see it that way. Thousands of churches could have been fasting and praying for repentance in earnest except for that.

So a few years later along comes Jonathan Cahn who discovers these uncanny correspondences between a little-known verse in the Old Testament and the events and attitudes in America surrounding 9/11. This has to be God's mercy, giving us some indisputable signs to prove that He's bringing judgment against America even in the teeth of the nation's determined denial and defiance. NOW, I think to myself, how can anyone avoid the fact that America is under God's judgment? This revelation, I think to myself, ought to speed through the churches and send us all to our knees. But no, it hardly gets off the ground.

And now it turns out to be presented in some questionable forms with a questionable tone itself, and we still have no problem avoiding the truth of the situation. How much this hype has to do with our avoiding it I don't know, I just know the whole thing is incredibly sad, we are under God's judgment and we have plenty of reason to know we are under God's judgment and we are doing nothing about it.

I wish I hadn't ordered the book because I can't afford much these days and I don't need a novel. I'd like to have all the material he offers in support of this prophetic vision but the money is too much for me. And now I'm really angry that he has been treating this material this way, hyping it up as a novel, using all the spooky hokey hypy words that should not be used in reference to Biblical revelation.

Even with all that, as I said, I still believe this message is authentic at its core. The parallels with Isaiah 9:10 can't be denied. This is a strange case of amazing TRUTH being manhandled by the techniques that belong to lies. I don't know how to put all this together.

I've been disappointed in Christians' response to this. And I still am, but this problem with how the main protagonist has been treating the material does give some excuse to the churches for ignoring it. SOME excuse, though, that's all. I still think the facts themselves ought to have overridden such a reaction to the hype, if that is part of the reason it's been ignored.

So here we are, looking at a major warning of God's judgment in the events of 9/11, given to us in unmistakable signs, being ignored by God's people instead of taken to heart as it should be, as we are the only hope for the nation to escape future escalation of God's judgment, which is inevitable if we do nothing, and we ARE doing nothing. Going-on-eleven years after the event we are doing nothing despite this revelation that ought to have set a fire under us long ago.

Our state of paralysis is itself a form of judgment.

Will the next hit, whatever it is, wake us up? Probably not. We've had a few hits since 9/11 in fact, not just the Wall Street hits but some pretty heavy weather hits across the nation as well. That's certainly what Katrina was. Anybody moved to repentance? Naa, just the usual complaints against anyone who suggests it was God's judgment.