THE LAST JUBILEE is a detailed prophetic analysis of forthcoming
spiritual current events. It draws extensively from the Biblical Scriptures,
Isaac Newton’s exegesis of Daniel and a Dead Sea Scroll fragment called “The
Last Jubilee”.

CONTEXT:

     The world aches with Messianic expectation; El Nino (“the Little Boy”,
originally a reference to the Christ Child) and his spoiled sister La Nina
rage in a tantrum of bazaar global weather. Financial chaos in Asia, Russia,
South America, China grows like cancer. The highly hyped YK2 terminal
malaise clutches the bowels of our economy. Trusted men and institutions
shatter with corruption: there is madness in the land, manic greed, rabid
lust, rumors of cataclysmic betrayal. Recently the United States suffers a
virtual coup d’etat, abandoning the rule of law to the “media”, to the lust
and whims of a cabal of misanthropic globalists who concentrate untold power
into unknown hands. This year in May when Israel’s ancient   “West Bank”
lands of Judaea and Samaria are amputated by the Palestinian State, Israel
must fight or die. Monstrous weaponry slithers into place; the Moslem dogs
of war slaver and pace. Moral anarchy, extreme beyond measure, shreds the
ground rules. The still, small voice in every heart moans “for looking after
those things which are coming on the earth”.

CONCEPT:

     As the State of Israel, according to Leviticus 25, finishes its natural
year of “Jubilee” which ends March18, 1999, God intends to fulfill the
spiritual Last and ultimate Jubilee, the full manifestation, reclamation and
restoration of His Kingdom on the earth. From the midst of “millennial
madness”, religious deception and delusion,  His Family, “all Israel”, a
remnant company of Christian and Jews will return at last to the full
possession of their kingdom inheritance. The Last Jubilee is coincident with
and causative of the incipient Great Tribulation.

CONTENTS:

 1.  Time cycles, Hosea’s Prophecy and History p.4
 2.  “The Last Jubilee” Scroll from Qumran  p.12
 3.  The Great Tribulation               p.20
      a.  The Melchisedec Priesthood   p.28
      b.  Israel on the Plains of Moab   p.41
 4.  The Agency of Christ    P.51
 

If you find this paper useful, copy as written and pass it on. Extra copies
available for $5.00.
(C) copyright 1999 Thomas E. Wilson, Jr.

The Last Jubilee, 1.

     Do Christians dare to hope? Twice recently widespread hope for a
popular view of Christ’s immediate return crashed and burned. In 1988, based
on Israel’s 40th birthday and her 40 year Old Testament sojourn, some were
so sure God would move, would bring the Church or Israel or both into some
manifestation of the “Promised land”; what we got was the Intifada. Then in
1993, based on the “chronological dimensions” of the Tabernacle, or the Oslo
Accords, or seven years left to Jesus’ 2000th birthday, or the Toronto
“revival”, or some other such wishful creativity, hopes were raised and
dashed again. Now when The Hope is mentioned, the reaction is, “What are
you, a Millerite?”, and the subject is changed. The Millerites were a New
England sect which sold their worldly goods and awaited Christ’s return to
the hilltops in 1840. They were a little early. Since then, most Christians
simply don’t relate to the return of Christ, and the rest of men are so
steeped in materialism that to them the Bible is just ethnic history and
mythic metaphor. Theologically, today’s field is held by either the
skeptical liberalism of a myriad  moribund denominations , or
“Post-Millennialism” (e.g., Catholicism, a dominion theology which supposes
to possess in fullness God’s promised kingdom, despite the obvious carnage
of unbridled personal and collective self-righteousness), or the ragged
tatters of fundamentalism, ripped by a scornful world, muttering about a
“rapture” which never comes. Meanwhile, volcanic wickedness devours our hope
and innocence. Thank God there is a great gulf fixed between the Kingdom of
God and the so-called “kingdom” of the Church.

     But when Christ came as a baby, the “El Nino” of long ago, He was
expected by more than just His close family; people were looking for the
Advent, the Promise of Israel, the Desire of nations, for the Messiah the
Prince, and those who were rightly anticipating were rewarded. Anna, Simeon,
the Magi, the Essenes, the shepherds, the strange common folk who read and
knew the prophecies, were looking for and therefore saw His coming. Where
were they looking? While the Magi searched the stars, the other faithful
searched the prophetic Word. They found the coming of Christ in Old
Testament Sabbatical Law and in Daniel:

9:24: “Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city,
to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make
reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and
to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.

9:25: “Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the
commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince
shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be
built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

9:26: “And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not
for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the
city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto
the end of the war desolations are determined.

9:27: “And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the
The Last Jubilee,   2.

 midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and oblation to cease, and
for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until
the consummation, and that determined shall be poured out upon the
 desolate.”

      We know their “Messianic expectation” was valid because it worked:
their expectancy was rewarded: they were there at the right time and place
to welcome their Messiah, the very God Most High. But what was the proper
interpretation? Modern expositors add together the “seven weeks” and the
“sixty and two weeks” for a total of 69 weeks or 483 years. Then they search
for some historical 483 year interval between one of several ancient
“commandments” and one of several events in Christ’s life. The confusion is
compounded by uncertainty over the date of Christ’s birth and dates of
ministry; nothing really matches without bending history or scripture a
little too far, and the sceptics smile some more.

     Isaac Newton, in Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel etc, 1733
(reprinted by Art Robinson in 1991), analyzed the “seven weeks” and the
“sixty and two weeks” of Daniel 9:25 as two separate intervals between two
different “comings” of the Messiah: two different “commandments going forth”
and two entirely separate Divine visitations: a  first and a second coming
of Christ. According to Newton, there were, in fact, 62 weeks, or 434 years,
from the completion of the wall in Jerusalem (after the return from Babylon)
to the birth of Jesus. The “7 weeks”, or 49 years, was to precede the second
visitation of Jesus at the end of the age. Maybe Newton was a
“pre-millennialist”. From Observations, pp. 133-134:

“As the seventy and sixty two weeks were Jewish weeks, ending with
sabbatical
years; so the seven weeks are the compass of a Jubilee, and begin and end
with action proper for a Jubilee, and of the highest nature for which a
Jubilee can be kept: and since the commandment to return to rebuild
Jerusalem, precedes Messiah the Prince 49 years, it may perhaps come forth
not from the Jews themselves, but from some other kingdom friendly to them,
and precede their return from captivity, and give occasion to it.”

     That is a pretty interesting quote from a man who wrote over a million
words of Biblical commentary and who had, shall we say, impeccable
intellectual credentials. If both Magi and common folk knew from the
Scriptures of Christ’s first coming, might not we today, faced with looming
titanic and inexorable chaos, find a similar hope and reward from a fresh
searching of God’s word? Unlike Newton, we are aided by the retrospection of
recent modern events which are a clear fulfillment of Old and New Testament
prophecy.

     Newton recognized that Daniel was describing, in his “seven weeks”,  a
period of 49 years and recognized this period as the “compass of a jubilee”.
God set forth the Law of Jubilee in Leviticus 25:

(2-3)...“When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land
keep a Sabbath unto the Lord. Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six
years thou
The Last Jubilee,   3.

shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the
seventh year shall be a Sabbath of rest unto the land, a Sabbath for the
Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field nor prune thy vineyard....(8-9) Thou
shalt number seven Sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and
the space of seven Sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine
years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the
tenth day of the seventh month, in the day of atonement shall ye make the
trumpet sound throughout all your land. (10) And ye shall hallow the
fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the
inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return
every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his
family.”

     It is not a  mere random happenstance that the present State of Israel
“came into the land” as a body politic in May 1948 and is now celebrating,
some 50 years later, a sort of carnal, truncated “jubilee”, a “hallowed
 year” (Nisan 1, 1998  to Nisan 1, 1999) of improbable peace amidst the
threat of a doomed “peace” process. History is not random; if God rules in
the affairs of men we are going to see His signature. Given the “event” of
the State of Israel 50 years ago’ we ought to search history and the
Scriptures in detail for other testimony which may corroborate Newton’s
interpretation of Daniel 9:25. If he is correct, and the “seven weeks” from
the “commandment to restore...unto Messiah the Prince” refers to the second
visitation of Christ, we may be in the midst of far more than we expected.

     The “commandment to restore” went forth by the vote of the United
Nations on November 29, 1947. Israel “came into the land” as a secular body
politic on May 14, 1948 when the British Mandate expired. The last time
secular Israel was constituted a body politic was just prior to its
obliteration by the Romans in 70 AD. During the period of the Second Temple,
while a “Sabbath for the land” (when crops went unharvested the seventh
year) was sometimes practiced, as it was in the time of Christ, the law of
Jubilee was not commonly practiced; obviously during their dispersion, after
the Second Temple was destroyed, Israel was not “in the land” for the Law of
Jubilee to be practiced. But in 1948, in fulfillment of prophecy (Jeremiah
30-32 etc.), Israel once again as a secular body politic “came into the
 land” which the Lord had given them. Following Leviticus: counting 49 years
from the “zero point” of their modern coming “into the land” to the next Day
of Atonement brings us to the autumn of 1997, the first legitimate point at
which, after almost 2000 years, a bonafide Year of Jubilee could properly be
announced, a Jubilee which God could legally fulfill in the material, carnal
realm.

     Presently, modern Israel “hallows”, as the Jubilee “fiftieth year”, the
“sacred” year that will pass from Nisan 1 (Exodus 12:2), 1998 to Nisan 1,
1999. But the Levitical Law dictates an agricultural Sabbath, and therefore
an “agricultural” or “civil” year that runs from Tishri to Tishri, six
months out of phase with the sacred year. Counting 49 years from the zero
point of May 1948 would bring us to the start of the 49th agricultural year
at Tishri 1, 1997, the start of what would be an agricultural Sabbath year
(if such was practiced), and the point of proper “proclamation” of the Year
of Jubilee. But we are told to “hallow the fiftieth (not the 49th ) year”;
therefore, while secular Israel may affix the Jubilee Year to the sacred
calender, God may
The Last Jubilee,   4.

very well affix it to the agricultural or civil calender, from Tishri 1998
to Tishri 1999. Therefore, we will examine a year of Jubilee which would
have started in spring 1998 (sacred calender) and could possibly extend to
autumn 1999 (civil or agricultural calender). This is an 18 month Jubilee
“window”.

     If this present Jubilee year, possibly from spring 1998 to fall 1999,
leads to the ultimate “hallowed” year, the carnal events of the Jewish
national celebration in Israel will be blindly eclipsed by events of the
Spirit. Returning to the possession of a heavenly Jerusalem, means an advent
of Messiah’s manifested heavenly Kingdom, events of magnitude beyond
imagination. If this portends, we are about to collide with Messiah the
Prince in ways for which the Church, Israel and the world are wholly
unprepared. Whether Christ intends to “rend the heavens and come down”
(Isaiah 64:1) or quietly anoint a few disciples in some backwater, whatever
He does, will quickly catch up our mundane vanities with inexpressible Glory
and Trauma. While great Tribulation gathers on the earth, Newton saw these
events as a “jubilee” at the end of time. Is there support for this? Yes,
emphatically, in the scriptures of the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls. We
will see that Newton, Daniel, the Essenes who wrote the Scrolls, and
immediate events in modern Israel all move in cadence: an orchestrated,
lockstep march toward Tribulation, Armageddon, and the Last Jubilee. Not
later. Not next year. Now.

                1.  Time Cycles: 6000 and 2000 years, Hosea 5:14 - 6:3 and
some History

      God has a schedule. Men miss His schedule by looking at the trains
instead of the timetable. God’s schedule is built upon the “sabbatical
 cycle”, that after six days (or years) of work, God decrees the seventh day
(or year) to be a Sabbath, a day of rest. This is the basis for the law of
Jubilee in Leviticus 25; the Jubilee is a Sabbath of Sabbaths, “seven times
seven years”, an “exponential” Sabbath: rest times rest equals restoration.

     The doctrine of the sabbatical cycle grows from and stands upon the
fact of God’s creation week in Genesis 2:2: “And on the seventh day God
ended His work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all
his work which he made”. Because God worked for six days and rested on the
seventh, man shall work for six days (or years) and rest on the seventh. God
extends the sabbatical cycle structure beyond “week” and “year” out to
“millennia” (2 Peter 3:8): “but, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing,
that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as
one day”. The early church (Peter, John, Barnabas, Justin Martyr 100-165
AD., Lactantius 325 AD.) and early Jewish Talmudists (Tanna debe Ellyyahu,
Rabbi Katina in Gemara,) clearly held this doctrine: that human history,
i.e. God’s work upon man, would span 6000 years, and that the 7th millennium
would be a Sabbath of rest. Barnabas, Paul’s missionary companion, says
(Epistle of Barnabas 13:4-5):

“In six thousand years, the Lord God will bring all things to an end. For
with him, one day is a thousand years; as himself testifieth, saying, Behold
this day shall be as a thousand years [Psalm 90:4]. Therefore, children, in
six days, that is, in six thousand years, shall all things be accomplished.”
The Last Jubilee,   5.

Although they are out of fashion now*, there have been several chronologists
of the Bible who did outstanding work: the Irish Bishop James Ussher, the
Russian emigre Ivan Panin, to name two of the best. From an exacting
treatment of the scriptural genealogies, Ussher determined creation “week”
to have occurred in 4004 BC., and Panin independently confirmed Ussher by
the use of Scriptural numerics at 4003 BC.  Obviously devout believers
searching for the Messiah when Christ was born realized that Malachi’s
prophecy (4:1-2),

“For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud,
yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh
shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them
neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of
righteousness arise with healing in his wings’,

was a  reference to the 4th Day of Creation (Genesis 1:16-19) when God
created the solar sun. The Messiah, the “Sun of Righteousness”, they
reasoned, would “arise” (be born) during the 4th 1000 years of God’s
creative work on history. Coming to the end of that 4th 1000 year “day”,
Messiah would have to be born. And so He was. If we follow the successful
reasoning of the ancient faithful, and realizing that there is no year
 “zero”, 6000 years from 4003 BC. brings us roughly to autumn 1997, the date
of announcement of the present Jubilee. Upon the achieving of this season,
or year, or time frame, coincident with the announcement of Israel’s Year of
Jubilee, God’s work upon man could presumably be complete, and some company
of saints, presumably the ones we see in Revelation 7 and 14, could, in the
midst of impending tribulation, pass into the Millennial Kingdom, the full
possession of their inheritance: God’s manifest presence. How accurate was
Panin? Long before the age of computers, his date for the birth of Christ,
3999 years from Creation, falls upon the last year of the “4th Creation day”
(Genesis 1:16-19) when the sun (of righteousness- Malachi 4:2) was created.
It also falls within the year of the September 11, 3 BC. birth date (the
Feast of Trumpets that year) which harmonizes Scripture (Revelation 12:1**)
with verifiable astronomical history (E. L. Martin, The Star That Astonished
the World; A.S. K., Portland OR; 1996).  That this 6000 year cycle ends at
the point of announcement of the Jubilee is prodigiously significant. In
this 12 or 18 month time frame, we could rightly anticipate the advent of
God’s millennial Sabbath.
 

*It should be noted that, despite the evolutionist  paradigm , nowhere on
earth does human history extend back beyond 6000 years. The testimony of man
’s history, natural history and natural law all clearly support the recent
creation ex nihilo described in Genesis. While the humanist “scientific”
collective may ridicule Biblical authority, their willful ignorance, blind
arrogance, and adjustable intellectual integrity reduces their evolutionist
“expert” opinion to drivel.

** “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a women clothed with the
sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve
 stars.” Precisely on the Feast of Trumpets (the traditional birth and
coronation date of Kings) in 3 BC., the sun was precisely “mid-bodied” and
the moon exactly “beneath the feet” of the constellation Virgo.

The Last Jubilee,   6.

      Are we setting dates? No. We are examining seasons. While we are
forbidden to know the day or the hour (Matthew 24:42, 25:13), we are
enjoined to search the season (2 Peter 5:12, 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6). Seasons
of prophetic significance are periods or time frames during which God
intends to act. Certainly this year of Jubilee, from spring 1998 to autumn
1999 is one such profoundly significant “window of opportunity” or “signal”
of impending significant spiritual events, and has thus far introduced
portents of considerable magnitude. Over the course of this year, Israel has
become politicized, paralyzed, demoralized, polarized, and about to be
dismembered: “the Syrians before, the Philistines behind”. In the context of
that quote from Isaiah 9:12, Messiah the Prince was prophesied to be born.
In the course of this year, America, once the political and moral hope of
mankind, has become mesmerized, etherized with Clinton’s lies, corrupt
beyond measure, drunk with the blood of the innocents. Our economy is like a
damaged breeder reactor fueled with runaway greed, heating up with broken
controls: Y2K, or our panic toward it, or the government’s panic to control
our panic, insures pandemonium. Never in history has the dominant global
regime become so destabilized so rapidly, and this secular Jubilee year isn’
t over yet.

        In Genesis, the sun was created on the 4th day of Creation week;
therefore the Sun of Righteousness, Jesus (Who shall arise upon us, Malachi
4:2, Isaiah 60:2) was born within the 4th day (the 4th 1000 years after
Adam), on the Feast of Trumpets, 11 September, 3 BC. (Revelation 12:1,5).
2000 solar years (i.e., 2 “days”) from 11 September, 3 BC., brings us, by
the Judean method of birth reckoning, to September 1997 or, by common
reckoning to September 1998, to this year of Jubilee and the end of the 6th
day. Christ’s birthday was right on schedule.

       The “2 day/2000 year” theme has strong Scriptural support, in both
prophecy and metaphor. Just as Tanna debe Ellyyahu in the Talmud identified
the last 2000 years (the “Church Age”) as the “Messianic Era”, so is there
tremendous metaphorical emphasis throughout both the Old and New Testaments
(Genesis 41:1, Exodus 19:10-11, Joshua 3:4, Esther 1:3, 5:1, Luke 13:32,
John 2:1, 4:40, 11:6)  that the last “two days” or 2000 years is a specified
interval of time until a promised event of consummation, deliverance,
anointing and resurrection. As well as metaphor, there is solid prophetic
support; Hosea 5:15-6:3:

“I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and
seek my face: in their affliction, they will seek me early. Come, let us
return unto the Lord: for he hath torn and He will heal us; He hath smitten
and He will bind us
up. After two days will He revive us: in the third day He will raise us up,
and we shall live in His sight. Then shall we know, if we follow on to know
the Lord: His going forth is prepared as the morning; and He shall come unto
us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.”

As in Daniel 9:25, both comings of Christ are here described, and the latter
one first. In Palestinian agriculture, there were early rains in the autumn
for germination of the crops, then the long dormancy of winter, and the
latter rains in spring to bring the crops to harvest. The Lord Jesus came as
early rain to plant and start the Church and then departed. There has been a
long winter of the Church age, our 40 years (40 Jubilee periods) in the
desert. Now He plans to come
The Last Jubilee,   7.

again, as the latter rain to revive us with His presence for the harvest.
When? “After two days will he revive us”, after 2000 years.

     Hosea’s prophecy describes a tribulation (“in their affliction”) which
would later force those who had rejected Him to seek Him “early”, i.e.,
“immediately upon the affliction”. This would happen “after two days”, or
2000 years from either His going forth (His birth) or His returning to His
place (His departure). While post-millennial Christians and some historians
ascribe this “affliction”/Tribulation to the Roman War, 66-70 AD., Hosea is
obviously referring to the “Great Tribulation” (Revelation 7:14, Jeremiah
30:7, Daniel 12:2) and assigning it (“after two days”), as do pre-millennial
Christians, to the time of the end. Note that most Jews, after the Roman
War, did not “seek the face” of Christ. Those few who did, found Him. The
majority began the long march of the Diaspora when their nation was
obliterated. They have yet to “acknowledge their offence and seek my face”,
nor has their recent incorporation as a secular body politic dressed or
healed their spiritual wounds. The “affliction” Hosea describes is yet to
come, and may well began this spring when the “Philistines behind” (with
Hillary’s blessing) seize Judaea and Samaria from the heart of Israel. The
phrase “he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight” is an obvious
reference to the Resurrection, and no matter how much the post-millennial
camp wants to place the book of Revelation and its “Great Tribulation” in
the past, fulfilled by the Roman War, Hosea connects it with the
Resurrection and places both after the 2 day/2000 year interval of the
Messianic Era.

      The 6000 and 2000 solar year cycles are in perfect step and point
precisely to this year of Israel’s jubilee. That is not a mere coincidence.
The more closely we examine Hosea’s prophecy, the more evidence we get, and
the more our focus narrows to the Jewish year beginning Nisan 1 (March 28),
1998. While the Jubilee year began then, the Lord tends, in our experience,
to be “the Lord of the last minute”; scripturally (1 Peter 1:5), He is
“ready to be revealed in the last (Greek: “eschatos”: the “remotest
extremity” of) time”. Vis-a-vis the Lord’s vengeance, Jeremiah 51:46* seems
to imply the delay of a year between the announcement and fulfilment of
destruction. The Lord will probably wait to the end of this Jubilee year to
effect His decisive work.  Moreover, the Jubilee year now in progress is a
celebration in the mere carnal or “natural” dimension, and the Jubilee for
which we yearn is the restoration, the full possession of our inheritance in
the “spiritual” as well as in the natural dimension. 1 Corinthians 15:46
states in axiom: “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that
which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual”. Often the
 “natural” event announces or heralds the “spiritual” event. When this
“natural” Jubilee year ends at Nisan 1, 1999 (“sacred” year or at Tishri 1,
1999, “civil” year), then most probably will the “spiritual” Last Jubilee
follow quickly; the Lord intends to “finish the work, and cut it short in
righteousness: because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth”
(Romans 9:28).
 
 

*51:46: “And lest your heart faint, and ye fear for the rumor that shall be
heard in the land; a rumor  shall both come one year, and after that in
another year shall come a rumor, and violence in the land, ruler against
ruler.”

The Last Jubilee,   8.
 

      Prophecies in Isaiah (9:6-7, 66:7-8) and Revelation 12 certainly
target the Birth of Christ as a key prophetic event, an appropriate point
from which to count the “two days” of Hosea 6:2, and 2000 solar years from
the birth of Christ brings us to this year, Israel’s Year of “natural”
Jubilee. But Hosea’s prophecy describes both the birth and departure of
Christ. We know His birthday plus 2000 years brings us to today; what about
the departure? Indeed, when examine or figure His “departure”, His ascension
from Olivet (Acts 1:9), a wonderful synchronicity occurs.

     There is ample evidence from secular and Biblical sources that prior to
the 8th Century BC. the solar year consisted of 360 rather than the present
365.2414 days. The best documentation for this is Immanuel Velikovsky’s
exhaustively researched Worlds in Collision (Dell, New York; 1967, pp.
333-361), suppressed, forgotten, but as yet never discredited.. Rarely has
the world seen the intellectual horsepower of a Velikovsky. He quotes and
cites sources from ancient Hebrew, Mayan, Peruvian, Indian, Persian,
Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Roman, and Chinese literature. His proofs
are incontrovertible. Among modern Bible expositors, this 360 day, 12 month
year is called a “prophetic” year, and a series of prophetic years is called
“non-determined” time.

     Scripture shows  that the ancient Israelites used a 30-day month and a
12 month year; unlike the modern Rabbinical calender, nowhere is there
mention of months shorter than 30 days or years longer than twelve months. A
360 day year is suggested by the account of the Genesis Flood: 150 days
passed between the 17th day of the 2nd month and the 17th day of the 7th
month (7:11, 24; 8:4), i.e., 30 days per month and therefore 360 days per
year. Does God still count by the older, “prophetic” year?  In both Daniel
and Revelation, when prophesying the duration of the Great Tribulation, God
describes the same 3½  year period as “time, times and half a time”, “forty
and two months”, “a thousand, two hundred and threescore (1260) days”. The
only way this “works” is that God intends a 12 month, 360 day “prophetic”
year to be somehow operable
at the time of the end. If God counts that way at the end, might He not also
count “prophetically” when dealing with longer prophetic cycles?

       From the midst of His Church, the Lord ascended from Olivet
approximately forty days after His Resurrection or ten days before
Pentecost, in May, 30 AD. While controversy surrounds the date of the year
of Crucifixion/Resurrection/Ascension, we choose 30 AD. for several reasons.
If Jesus was born on the Feast of Trumpets (Sept 11, 3 BC.), which tradition
would suggest (the World, Noah, Jacob and Abraham were born at Trumpets and
it was coronation day for kings, 1 Kings 1:34,2 Kings 9:13,11:11) and which
Scripture (Revelation 12:1) and historical Astronomy seem to indicate, such
a birth date allows Christ to “begin to be 30", (Luke 3:23: He was 29 years
old when He began His 30th year) and start His ministry, therefore, during
the sabbatical year 27-28 AD., during which year He could most appropriately
and properly proclaim the “acceptable (dektos) year of the Lord”, the
incipient Jubilee of Life in the Spirit. While the Jews of the 1st Century
Palestine did not practice the ordinances of the Jubilee, they did observe a
Sabbath for the land every seven years, a year in which the agricultural
land was fallowed for a year and crops unharvested. We see this “Sabbath of
the Land” (and therefore the 27-28 AD.
The Last Jubilee,   9.

time frame) in the scriptures at John 4:35*-38 and Luke 6:1. If Jesus
proclaimed the Jubilee at Nazareth, at Pentecost, on a sabbatical year
(Pentecost, 28 AD.), the utterly appropriate place and time for Him to do
so, and if His ministry was confined to the span of the three Passovers
which are specifically mentioned in scripture, His crucifixion would have
been Passover, 30 AD., leaving the appropriate 40 year interval to the
destruction of the Temple on Ab 9, 70 AD. In 30 AD. (as in 33 AD.), the
crucifixion would properly have occurred on a Friday. The evidence for a 30
AD. Crucifixion and Ascension is pretty strong.

       2000 prophetic years from a May, 30 AD. Ascension (2000 Prophetic X
360/365.2414 equals 1971.2989 solar years), brings us to September, 2001 the
Feast of Trumpets, traditionally the Feast of Resurrection; “in the third
day he will raise us up”, describes the Resurrection of the dead  (1
Thessalonians 4:13-17, Revelation 11:11, 15). This is the ultimate in
Jubilee, the revival of God’s family and the restoration of our heavenly
possession. In Revelation 11 is described the ministry, death and
resurrection of God’s Two Witnesses. Their ministry, that of Christ’s
Melchisedec Priesthood, in the presence of God’s restored Shekinah Glory,
decrees and directs the Great Tribulation (11:6). They are anointed to
minister, a first fruits (Revelation 14:1-5) of the Jubilee, 1260 days
before the Resurrection. 2000 prophetic years, less 1260 days (3 ½ years)
seems to point, then, to the spring of 1998, the beginning of Israel’s
present Jubilee year. Am I saying the Resurrection will occur in the autumn
of 2001? It may, or it may occur within the year following that date as the
obscure scripture quoted earlier from Jeremiah would seem to suggest. What I
am saying that here there are two different means of reckoning time, 2000
solar years and 2000 prophetic years, from two different events in the life
of Christ mentioned in Hosea, His birth and ascension, each pointing
directly at this year of Jubilee. The two witnesses of solar and prophetic
time call for our attention. History is a script that flows from God’s pen.

      The “Shekinah Glory” was the visible manifestation of God in the Old
Testament. Moses saw it as the “burning bush” in the backside of Midian
(Exodus 3:2); for the nation in the Sinai
wilderness (Exodus 13:21), “the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of
a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire”. As
Shekinah Glory, God dwelt in the Holy of Holies of the Wilderness Tabernacle
(25:22), “there I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from
above the mercy seat”. Later, upon completion of the First Temple at
Jerusalem when Solomon had finished his prayer of dedication (2 Chronicles
7:1-2),

“the fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the
sacrifices, and the Glory of the Lord filled the house. And the priests
could not enter into the house of the Lord because the Glory of the Lord had
filled the Lord’s house.”
 

*4:35: “Say not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest?
Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they
are white (fully ripe) already to harvest”. If the crops were unharvested in
the spring, and could not be legally harvested for another four months,
Jesus was most probably making this observation in the sabbatical year,
27-28 AD.

The Last Jubilee,   10

Thereafter He dwelt above the Mercy Seat in the Holy of Holies of the First
Temple. But there was more. The Shekinah Glory was also manifested as
“cloven tongues of fire” (Acts 2:3) above the heads of those who had
received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, 30 AD. In all His Old Testament
manifestations, the Shekinah Glory was the identifiable “type”, the
pre-figure (1 Corinthians 10:1-4), the fore-shadow of Christ in His heavenly
kingdom. Proof of this comes from the episode of the Transfiguration where,
“after six days” (Matthew 17:1-4), i.e., after 6000 years, we see Jesus
clothed with the Shekinah Glory (Luke 9:29-32), preparing for the Feast of
Tabernacles which we later see Him conducting in the Book of Revelation.
While some claim that the Shekinah Glory was absent from His usual place in
the Holy of Holies of the Second Temple, there is evidence* that in the
forty year period after the ascension of Christ, the Shekinah Glory
continued a desperate witness to the nation of Israel; at the end, He
departed Herod’s Temple (per Josephus) and abode (per Eusebius) 3 ½ years on
the Mount of Olives, a stark and visible witness of God’s impending
judgement (Ezekiel 11:23).  Then He ascended to heaven (per Jonathan), as
had Jesus almost forty years earlier.

       Some history needs review, history which will soon impact our world.
The forty year period from Christ’s crucifixion in 30 AD. to the Temple’s
destruction in 70 AD. was a period of fierce and poignant trial for both
Jews and Christians in Jerusalem. Jesus had prophesied (Matthew 23:38-24:2)
the total destruction, within forty years, of the Second Temple, a word
that hung for that forty years (24:34) poised like a Damoclean sword: “Your
house is left unto you desolate”. Everyone knew and waited. Like the twelve
spies under Moses, who had penetrated Canaan to spy out the Land of Promise
for forty days, the Apostles, similar representatives of the twelve tribes,
had entered the true Promised Land of God’s kingdom, the Holy Spirit bearing
witness to the Jewish nation for forty years of the miraculous fruit of that
kingdom. Not only did the explosive birth of the Church, as recorded in
Acts, testify, by manifest signs and wonders that Jesus was indeed Christ,
but the Shekinah Glory in the Temple bore, in effect, the same witness: the
Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds both record* that in each of the forty
years between Christ’s’ resurrection and the Temple’s destruction, many
supernatural events within the Temple testified to God’s pointed disapproval
of the old Levitical order. Both the Holy Spirit, which anointed the
“spiritual” Temple of the Church, and the Shekinah Glory, which anointed the
doomed “physical” Temple of the carnal nation, together prodded Israel
toward Jesus, but, like
the nation under Moses in Exodus, when brought to the very border of the
promised land of Canaan, Israel refused to trust the report of the two
faithful witnesses (here Spirit and Glory, then
Caleb and Joshua) and would not enter the true Promise of God’s kingdom in
Christ. Under Moses, God sentenced Israel to a forty year trial in the
wilderness, one year for each day the
twelve had spied out the land; under Christ, God sentenced Israel
“exponentially”: to forty jubilees in the wilderness, a jubilee period (49
years) for each of the forty years (30-70 AD.) that God’s true Kingdom of
the Spirit had been spied out by the twelve Apostles.

     In the Roman Tribulation of 66-70 AD., the Shekinah Glory set forth a
testimony, now almost forgotten, which needs reexamination. According to
Josephus (Works of Flavius Josephus, Baker Books; Grand Rapids, 1984, Vol 1,
pp. 453-454), at Passover 66 AD.:
 

* E. L. Martin, Secrets of Golgotha: A. S. K., Portland OR, 1996; pp.
361-370.
The Last Jubilee,   11.

“...at the ninth hour of the night, so great a light shown round the alter
and the holy house, that it appeared to be bright day time; which lasted for
half an hour...At the same festival also (Passover 66AD.), a heifer, as she
was led by the high priest to be sacrificed, brought forth a lamb in the
midst of the temple. Moreover, the eastern gate (the gate of the Prince,
Ezekiel 44:1-3) of the inner [court of the ] temple, which was of brass and
vastly heavy,...was seen to be opened of its own accord about the sixth hour
of the night....The men of learning understood it, that the security of
their holy house was dissolved of its own accord, and that the gate was
opened for the advantage of their enemies....Moreover, at that feast which
we call Pentecost , as the priests were going by night into the [inner court
of the] temple, as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations,
they said that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great
noise, and after that they heard a sound of a great multitude, saying, ‘Let
us remove hence’.”

For prophetic purposes, the beginning of the Roman Tribulation can best be
dated, not from Roman military maneuvers, but from the movements of the
Shekinah Glory. At Passover 66, God dramatically abandoned the defense of
the gate of the Temple to its enemies.  Passover 66 was His decisive start
to the Roman Tribulation. The Glory ascended or departed from Israel in two
stages: first He departed from the Temple at Pentecost 66. Early Christians
and a Jewish eyewitness *relate how the Glory then ascended to the Mount of
Olives, the site of the symbolic “gate” of the True Temple, through which
Jesus had “ascended” to the True Holy of Holies in the heavenlies  (Hebrews
9:24). There on Olivet the Glory remained for the 3½  years of the Roman
Tribulation. Then the Shekinah Glory departed from the Nation in November
69AD.  and returned to heaven. The Old Testament Levitical order was
“Ichabod, saying the Glory is departed from Israel” (1 Samuel 4:21). In
fulfillment of Christ’s prophecy delivered on the Mount of Olives in 30 AD.
(Matthew 24:2, 34), the carnal Temple was demolished by the Romans the next
year (on Ab 9, 70 AD., precisely a “generation” from Christ’s prophecy and
on the very anniversary date of the destruction of Solomon’s Temple), and
earthly Jerusalem became “Sodom and Egypt” (Revelation 11:8) which it
remains to this day.

      For God, as Shekinah Glory, to remove from the Temple and the Nation,
to go so dramatically, by way of Olivet, the way that Christ had gone, a way
of grace and the cross which they would not follow, to close the door to a
“national” salvation so deliberately, and with such decisive prodigies, was
a sentence to the wilderness indeed. We can date the “Great Dispora” from
the two stage “departure” of God’s Shekinah Glory. The “wilderness” for the
Temple and its priestly order began at Pentecost 66; the “wilderness” for
the unbelieving Nation began in November 69 AD. The “two stage” historical
withdrawal of God’s Glory has profound implications for us (Revelation
describes a two-stage return), which we will consider. But within a year of
that event, on the very anniversary of the ruin of Solomon’s  First  Temple,
Herod’s
 

*Eusebius, 264-340 AD., Proof of the Gospel, Book VI, Chap 18 (288); Jerome,
340-420 AD., Letter CVIII.12); Rabbi Jonathan, Midrash, Rabbah Lamentations
2:11; as cited in Secrets of Golgotha, pp. 186-190.
The Last Jubilee,   12.

 Second Temple was demolished, Jerusalem razed, the Nation shattered,
dispersed to wander the great and howling spiritual wilderness, not for
forty years, but for forty jubilees.

      How well does the pattern of “forty jubilees in the wilderness”
harmonize with the other cycles we have examined? First we saw that the
Levitical Law, 49 years after modern, secular Israel “came into the land”,
decreed a Year of Jubilee 1998-1999. The 6 day/6000 year Creation week cycle
ending God’s “work” and the 2 day/2000 solar year cycle (2000 years from the
birth of Christ) also brought us precisely to this jubilee year, 1998-1999.
When we examined the departure of Christ (His Ascension) in the light of
Hosea’s prophecy, 2000 prophetic years (2 “days”) brought us to the Feast of
Trumpets, 2001, 3½ years (the duration of the Great Tribulation) forward
from Passover, 1998. In examining the departure of the Shekinah Glory, forty
jubilee periods, 40x49, is 1960 years. 1960 prophetic years (x360/365.2414)
is 1931.873 solar years. Counting 1931.873 solar years from the departure at
Pentecost 66 AD of the Shekinah Glory from the physical Temple also brings
us precisely to this year of Jubilee. This is another very strong second
witness, not only that this year is the “set time” (Psalm 102:13) for the
ultimate Jubilee, but that our scenario of “forty jubilees in the
 wilderness” is correct. The wilderness sojourn for the true Temple, and its
Melchisedec Priesthood, may be about to end at the end of this year of
“natural” Jubilee. The two Melchisedec Witnesses of Revelation 11, the Moses
and Elijah ministries we saw prefigured at the Mount of Transfiguration,
would than receive the Jubilee anointing and return to their  ultimate
possession: the full manifestation of Christ’s Kingdom. In 3 ½ years, at the
Feast of Trumpets (the Feast of the Resurrection), 2002, the wilderness
sojourn for the Nation, for all Israel, the full family of God, would end,
and we can return to our full heavenly possession: Eden restored on planet
earth. Is this hopeful thinking? Yes, unreservedly. Forget YK2. Get ready
for the Last Jubilee.

2. The last Jubilee Scroll From Qumran

      The first of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the most fabulous archeological
treasure of all time, came into the hands of  E. L. Sukenik, the Professor
of Archeology at Hebrew University the precise day the U.N. voted to
partition Palestine and permit the Jewish State: November 29, 1949. And what
a birthday gift they were. Sukenik’s acquisition of the Scrolls, as told by
his diary (Yigael Yadin’s The Message of the Scrolls, 1957), puts an
espionage thriller to shame. In the midst of Israeli rejoicing over the U.N.
vote, Sukenik’s son, Yadin, chief of the Haganah, the underground Israeli
defense force, grimly prepares a desperately unprepared nation for impending
war. His father tenuously acquires the Scrolls, secreting them upon his
person as he passes through hostile Arab Bethlehem and Jerusalem, knowing
that he carries the most astounding archeological find: the very history,
the birthright of his newborn State.

     So much has been written about the Dead Sea Scrolls, we lose sight of
both forest and trees. Deliberate political deception and religious fraud
have obscured the simplicity of most profound message. The Dead Sea Scrolls
are the surviving writings, some whole scrolls, but mostly fragments, on
parchment and metal, of the “wilderness” community at Qumran of the Jewish
sect known as Essenes. This community, along with the rest of Israel, was
utterly obliterated by the Roman Tribulation of 66-70 AD., but, before their
destruction, the Essenes managed to hide
The Last Jubilee,   13.

their writings, their sacred prophecies, commentaries, community ordinances,
Temple treasure maps, in wilderness caves along the western shore of the
Dead Sea where they lay undiscovered and utterly unimagined until 1947.
After passing through Bedouin and Syrian, even American hands, the Scrolls
and fragments now reside in a nuclear bomb-proof museum in Jerusalem.

      At the very inception of its modern national life, the Jewish state
has been forcibly reminded of the moment when its past national life was so
brutally terminated. While modern Rabbinical Judaism spans the same
spectrum, as does every other religion, from orthodox to liberal, the devout
practitioner seems more devoted to the Talmud than the Torah, following the
line of the “oral Tradition” which Jesus so scathingly excoriated in the
Pharisees. Pharisaism flourishes almost as well in modern Judaism as it does
in the Church, elevating self, the Israeli State, and the wider chauvinistic
Jewish identity to a convenient, but myopically diminished, godhead. When
examining the Qumran community, the modern Jew sees a sect of Judaism which
has rejected his pharisaic roots. Of the Jewish denominational pantheon at
the time of Christ, the Pharisees stood on the top of the heap. But banished
or self-exiled to the Judean Wilderness, the Essenes rejected the authority
at Jerusalem, kept their own counsel, calender, feasts, communal rituals,
and messianic expectations, in which they were fervent. Both Pliny and
Josephus describe the monasticism of the Essenes: although female remains
have been exhumed  at Qumran, the population was maintained through the
influx of penitents and conversion. The asceticism and virtue of the Essenes
was widely known; it is thought that John the Baptist was an Essene. Their
communities were self-contained and self-sufficient, a quiet backwater of
fervent disciples, devout, simple, dedicated to maintaining a pure testimony
and to preparing the way of the Lord in the wilderness while they awaited
Messiah and His coming victory. Contrast the opulence and carnality of
Jerusalem and Herod’s Temple: the splendor and deceit of tradition, the
political intrigue, the compromise, the self-justifying religious posturing.
One doesn’t have to read the New Testament; Josephus paints a grim portrait
of the quality of spiritual life in Jerusalem at the end (what an
instructive contrast for today’s Laodicean Christian: ascetic Essenes versus
worldly Pharisees). Not only do the Scrolls show today’s secular Israeli a
profoundly devout past, but even the Hasidic Talmudist sees a rejection of
his modern religion by the Essenes at Qumran. But more than that: despite
all the concealment and deceit on the part of the religious authorities,
Jewish, Moslem and Christian, there is seeping quietly into the print of
obscure but reliable periodicals the evidence of Christianity at Qumran. Not
only do recently published fragments reveal strong textual compatibilities
with the New Testament (e.g., Scroll 4Q246 with Luke 1:32-35), but some
reveal belief, on the part of at least some Essenes, in the substitutionary
execution,  possibly crucifixion, of their Messianic leader, heretofore
thought by Jews to be only an aberrant Christian belief. Then, starting in
the late 1970's rumors began filtering through the secrecy of Scroll
scholarship of the discoveries of Father Jose O’Callaghan; begun in 1971 and
finally published in the December 1995 Bible Review, his work reveals the
New Testament identity of nine scroll fragments from Cave Seven at Qumran,
portions of Mark, Acts, Romans, 1 Timothy and James.

     The implications are enormous. To what extent the Qumran community, in
the 40 or so years between His resurrection and their destruction, accepted
Jesus as their Messiah remains to be discovered, but the closely sequestered
worlds of liberal Christian scholarship and Talmudic or
The Last Jubilee,   14.

Rabbinical Judaism both ought to have been kicked, shall we say, right in
their liturgical dirges. Warning: the smarmy complacency of the critics of
New Testament authority is no longer secure. Christ was there, in scriptural
Word as well as testimony, and no amount of myth-making by theological
spin-meisters, sceptics, or anti-Christian clerics will obscure that fact.
The gift to the modern Jewish State, i.e., the testimony of Christ at
Qumran, as revealed in Scroll fragments, was synchronized perfectly with the
gift of the modern Jewish State, given by
U.N. decree (the second “going forth of the commandment” of Daniel’s
prophecy). While the U.N.’s commandment brought forth a secular body
politic, the State of Israel, the word “Israel” means “God will rule” or God
ruling as the “Prince of God”. Both Daniel 9:25 and the Scrolls, given the
very same day, speak “unto Messiah the Prince” or “God ruling in power”, an
anointing coming for the Jewish people and Israel out of past history as
well as future prophecy. November 29,1947 was no random event. In ignorance
the U.N. was prophesying, and the Scrolls ( a “voice”crying from the Judean
Wilderness) bore witness: “Behold Israel, the Lamb, the Prince of God!” God’
s ultimate purpose, as always, is the revelation of Christ, the Prince of
God, the Messiah the Prince, the Person of Israel, who would come by Divine
Authority to fulfill in power (in His heavenly Body politic): the U.N.
decree, the hope of the ancient Essenes, and the promise of His Word in the
period of a Jubilee.

       The literature of the Qumran Essenes contains much eschatological or
“end-time” commentary. Best known is the Scroll of “The War of the Sons of
Light and the Sons of Darkness”, or the “War Scroll”, a kind of
“proto-Apocalypse” describing the Essene war strategy for “the last days”.
While lacking Divine Authority, the War Scroll is nevertheless prescient and
powerful: it seethes with the fervent apocalyptic expectations of God’s
Faithful; their “Armageddon” was the Roman war, and the doomsday
obliteration of Essene Israel was so complete it lasted to the very day
proclaiming Israel’s rebirth. Such a divine “coincidence” should focus our
attention to the application of Essene “doctrine” toward Israel’s current
“geopolitical” situation. One can dismiss the War Scroll as tainted with a
kind of temporality: after all, the Essene order of battle and tactical
trappings reflect the tactics and trappings of the Roman Legions. But other
portions of the apocalyptic Qumran literature, scrolls and fragments
published after 1964, are more compelling in their immediate relevance. They
give us a doctrinal “window” on foundational eschatology that has been
closed for nineteen centuries. One such fragment is a small treatise called
The Last Jubilee.

       The Last Jubilee is a fragment evidently compiled by one of the
“official expositors” mentioned in other Essene sources. Preserved as a
single copy, it takes the form of “sermon notes”, doctrinal commentary on
eschatological events, the interpretation of Essene scholars of matters
pertaining to the end: the ultimate victory of God and His people and the
final judgment of God’s enemies. These ultimate events, like the events
described in the Book of Revelation, however much they may have received an
initial fulfillment in the pre-figure and fore-shadow of the early church
and the Roman Tribulation, have obviously not yet transpired; the text
describes the empowerment of a corporate or plural “Melchisedec Priesthood”,
showing far more penetration into Christian doctrine than much of  the
Church has achieved, and harmonizes with the Books of Daniel, Hebrews and
Revelation. The events described are set in the context of a “last Jubilee”
at the end of the age, a time at which, if we hear the speech of current
events,
The Last Jubilee,   15.
 

we have hauntingly arrived. It is vital to understand that this “last
Jubilee” prophetic scenario was very probably doctrine of crucial importance
to the Essenes: they saw impeding  “Armageddon” in the coming Roman
Tribulation, and they and their nation had run out of time. As doctrine, The
Last Jubilee fragment expressed their interpretation of earlier prophecies
from, among others, Daniel. Newton’s interpretation of Daniel 9:25 meshes
precisely with this Essene fragment.

     T. H. Gaster was in his time the foremost Hebraist in the world.
Omitting most of his editorial comments, I quote from The Dead Sea
Scriptures, 3rd ed.: Anchor Books; 1976, pp. 435-436; letters and words in
[brackets] are fragmentary, in (parentheses) are Gaster’s comments, in bold
or underlined are my emphasis.
 

 “The Last Jubilee: a Sermon (‘Melchizedek Texts’)

“(2-3) This is of a piece with (the commandment concerning the period of
remission). What is meant by the Period of Remission, says the scripture, is
that anyone who has made a loan to his neighbor is then not to exact payment
of it from that neighbor or kinsman, seeing that a Period of Remission has
been declared by God . (4-5) As applied to the last days, this refers to the
(liberation of those) in captivity, consonant with the words of Isaiah:
(“The Lord has sent me to proclaim liberation to captives”, 61:1). This
signifies that they will become one with the sons of heaven. [They will
partake of the inherit]ance of [Melchiz]edek.

“(6-7) God will in fact be restoring them (every one, to his Patrimony). As
for the allusion (in the law of the Jubilee, Leviticus 25:10, to proclaiming
liberation to them,) this is to be understood also in the sense that he will
then remit [the full term of] the punishment for their misdeeds. All this
will happen in the final week of a series of years involving nine preceding
Jubilees. When, therefore the scripture speaks of a Day of Atonement, what
is meant is that (this final Jubilee will be marked) by a day on which (8-9)
all the children of light and all who have cast their lot with righteousness
will achieve forgiveness of their sins, [whereas the wicked will reap their
deserts and be brought to an e]nd. This is the era
(which Isaiah terms the year of favor, 61:2, designed for) Melchizedec (to
come into his dominion.) [He will take the lead among] God’s saints in
executing (10-11) the various sentences of judgement, even as it is said in
the songs of David, (quotes 82:1, 7:8-9.) There is a further reference to
this final judgment in the continuation of the verse from the Psalter.

“(12-14) The allusion is to Belial and the spirits of his ilk- that is to
(elders who) defy God’s statutes in order to per[vert justice]. Melchizedec
will execute [upon them] God’s avenging judgements and deliver [the just]
from the hands of Belial

The Last Jubilee,   16.

and all spirits of his ilk. With all the angels [of righteousness] at his
aid, he will [bla]st [the counsel of] Belial [to destruction]. (But the
faithful, as the psalmist says, will return to (their) eminence,) the
eminence in question being the [destination] of all who are indeed children
of God. (15-16) The visi[tation] of which I have been speaking is the same
as the Day of [retribution] of which the prophet [Isa]iah speaks in the
words (Isaiah 52:7): How fair upon the mountains are the feet of the herald
who proclaims ‘Shalom!’, the herald of good tidings who proclaims
‘Salvation!’ who says to Zion, ‘Your God has now claimed
 His kingdom!’ (17-18) The mountains stand for the prophets, [and the feet
for their words whereby] they br[ing their message] to all [who are willing
to listen]; while the Herald is as the one anointed with the spirit- the
same whom Dan[iel] calls the [anointed leader who will make his appearance
at the end of seven weeks (of years)- this is , at the final Jubilee]....”

      Here in the Essene Fragment, where “the anointed leader will appear at
the end of the seven weeks, at the final jubilee”, is the succinct
exposition of Daniel 9:25 which Newton made independently 1700 or so years
later, and which harmonizes so well with other scripture, prophetic cycles,
and modern history. The weakest link in Gaster’s thesis is the fragment
“Dan-“ in vv 17-18. While this two letter fragmented word does not
overwhelmingly demand the specific interpretation that Gaster and Milik give
it, which would entirely support Newton’s thesis, neither does he stretch
for it. Gaster was, after all, the foremost Hebrew scholar of his
generation, whose exegesis of this fragment bears respect. It is not a great
leap of faith to assume, as do Newton and Gaster, that Daniel 9:25 is
describing a Jubilee period and that Daniel is being referenced in the
Essene fragment. Let’s look at the translation of verse 7 of the fragment,
first the translation by G. Vermes,  The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 2nd
ed.; Penguin Books, Middlesex, England; 1975, pp. 266-267, and then the
translation by Gaster cited above.

Vermes: “And this thing will [occur] in the first week of the Jubilee that
follows the nine jubilees”.

            Gaster: “All this will happen in the final week of a series of
years involving nine                     preceding jubilees”.

     Notice that where Gaster describes the elusive 10th Jubilee period with
a phrase “a series of years involving”, Vermes names that series of years as
the tenth “Jubilee that follows the nine jubilees”. Clearly we are
inspecting a set of ten jubilee periods (10 x 49), the 490 years or 70
“weeks” of Daniel 9:24:

“Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to
finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make
reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and
to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy”.

     In both translations the tenth or last jubilee period is presented as
distinctive from the previous nine,  asserting the possibility that it
follows them separated by an interval of  “non-
The Last Jubilee,   17.

determined”time. The key issue is whether this jubilee of Daniel, in effect
the tenth jubilee after the nine preceding, comes at the end of time, as
prelude to and intimate with Christ’s second coming, or, as most modern
interpreters believe, is to be lumped with the other 62 weeks in the
prophecy of His first coming. The overwhelming thematic content of the
fragment clearly speaks of the second coming, and not the first. The “first
and final” week pertains to the Last Jubilee, but not the way many modern
interpreters believe.

      The fact that Vermes says “first” where Gaster says “final” is gently
ironic but not terribly important. Both “first” and “final” can mean
“ultimate” or “paramount”, and this “week”, final or first, is pretty
clearly, we shall see, a reference to Daniel 9:27:

“And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst
of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and oblation to cease.”

Daniel doesn’t specify when that “confirming” week occurs. Now in spite of
the fact that no one anywhere in Scripture renders the counting of time in
this rather awkward fashion (7 plus 62 years),  because the “seven weeks”
and “sixty-two weeks” of Daniel 9:25 add up to 69 weeks, and because modern
interpreters just assumed that the 69 weeks led to the first coming of
Christ (never mind the bad historical fit), we all just assumed that this
week of the confirmed covenant, the “70th”, was the last in sequence. Many
modern interpreters look at Daniel’s “70th” week, the
assumed “final” seven years, and try to jam it somehow into the 3½ year
period of the Great Tribulation described in Daniel and Revelation. We know
that the Great Tribulation at the time of the end lasts for 3½ years: all
references to its duration (Daniel 7:25, 12:7, Revelation 11:2-3,
12:6,12:14,13:5) describe a period of 3½ years exclusively; nowhere is
“seven” years mentioned as the length of the Great Tribulation. But careless
expositors wishfully fabricate two 3½ year periods at the end, the real
“Great Tribulation” plus an extended 3½  year “Wrath of God” to manufacture
a seven year total. This fabrication of a “3½ year" wrath of God is,
however,  entirely unsupported by Scripture.

      Daniel says that God is going to do something “in the midst”, possibly
the precise middle, of this 70th week (He will “cause the sacrifice and
oblation to cease”), something that possibly divides this week into two
separate, distinct, possibly equal, parts. One thing that most profoundly,
emphatically and decisively caused the sacrifice and oblation to cease was
the destruction of the physical Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. To properly
assign the seven years to historical or prophetic events, we must find two
3½ year events, one on either side of the destruction of the Temple. One
such event is obviously the future 3½ year Great Tribulation   prophesied in
the Book of Revelation. The other 3½ year event must have occurred before 70
AD.

      Daniel 9:27 says that God will “confirm the covenant with many for one
week”. “Confirming the covenant” is obviously what Jesus accomplished with
His death (Hebrews 9:15-18) and resurrection, so some want to assign the
missing 3½ years as the duration of His ministry from His  anointing  to His
crucifixion or ascension.  But there are two problems with this. First, to
The Last Jubilee,   18.

minister 3½ years Jesus would have had to attend four Passovers in
Jerusalem, at the last of which He was offered as the Passover Lamb. But
only three Passover feasts are specifically mentioned in the Gospels, and
His movements are followed closely and specified clearly enough that the
implication is pretty strong that His ministry lasted less than three years
. Second, during the 3½ years for which we are searching, the covenant would
be confirmed “with many”. During the course of Christ’s ministry, however,
the covenant was confirmed only “with one”, i.e., with Jesus: the Holy
Spirit pointedly “remained with” or “upon” Jesus alone (John 1:33 ); Jesus
was to be the sole baptizer of the Spirit (Matthew 3:11, Mark 1:8 , Luke
3:16-17 ), and the Spirit would not be given to the Church, to the “many”
(and could not, therefore, “confirm the covenant with many ), until and
after Pentecost of Acts 2: after Christ’s earthly ministry was finished. The
earthly ministry of Jesus could not be the missing 3½ years since during
that time the covenant could not yet be confirmed “with many”. The obvious,
but long overlooked, 3 ½ year event is the Roman Tribulation.

      In the Roman Tribulation, which started at Passover in 66 AD., we know
that God”s Shekinah Glory left the Jewish Temple and visibly rested on
Olivet for 3½ years; we have the corroborative testimony of Eusebius,
Jerome, Rabbi Jonathan* and Josephus. What other event could possibly
“confirm the covenant with many” more dramatically? And what a perfect
symmetry: two 3½ year Tribulations for the secular Jewish State, first by
the Romans and finally by the end time beast: seven years of tribulation,
exactly divided into equal parts by the destruction of the Second Temple.

          In the Essene fragment The Last Jubilee, (7) “the final (or first)
week of a Jubilee that follows the nine Jubilees” is described as (9) “the
era which Isaiah terms the year of favor, 61:2". Gaster’s inference here is
that the Essenes equated the Last Jubilee, the “year of favor” (which the
KJV translates as “the acceptable year of the Lord”, and which Jesus
proclaimed at
Nazareth on Pentecost , 28 AD.) with the “final week” of Daniel. The
“acceptable Year of the Lord” was the final week. The last year of Jeremiah’
s prophecy (25:11-12, 29:10, foretelling Israel’s restoration and Babylon’s
destruction) and the “seventieth year” of Zechariah (1:12, LXX) translates
(by Gabriel’s instruction to Daniel in 9:2,22,24,27) to the seven years, the
week of “confirmed covenant”. We will examine this idea further, but we
establish it here: the 70th year translates to a week, to seven years of
Spiritual Jubilee, to the week of the confirmed covenant.

     We know that Jesus affixed His ministry, the ultimate fulfillment of
the Last Jubilee, to the sabbatical cycle. When Jesus read Isaiah 61:1-2a at
Nazareth at Pentecost, 28 AD.,

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to
preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken
 
 

*as cited in Ernest Martin’s Secrets of Golgotha, A. S. K.; Portland Or,
1996, pp. 186-190.

The Last Jubilee,   19.

hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison
to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord” ( The
Last Jubilee Scroll: “the year of favor”).

 He proclaimed not only the ultimate release, deliverance and restoration of
the Last Jubilee (the only year acceptable to God, in which He favors us by
His Jubilee week of confirmed covenant), He also proclaimed it at Pentecost
(the Feast for the harvest (John 4:35) of freed souls) during the sabbatical
year of release, 27-28 AD. To underscore his relationship, He then said,
“This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21). By
proclaiming the Last Jubilee where and when He did, Jesus placed the Last
Jubilee precisely on the ancient sabbatical cycle. We know that Genesis, the
Levitical (25) law, and the New Testament (Hebrews 4:9) mandate a spiritual
Sabbath and the sabbatical cycle, and we can precisely locate this cycle in
history. The sequence of sabbatical years (Tishri to Tishri) at the time of
Christ was: 27-28, 34-35,...55-56, 62-63, 69-70 AD. etc. Continuing this
sequence into modern times: 1945-46, 1952-53, ...1987-88, 1994-95, 2001-2.
This is the historically established, ancient sabbatical cycle. But notice
something: Israel, as a body politic, came into the land in May 1948,
totally out of step with the ancient cycle. A modern sabbatical cycle (i.e.,
1997-98), however out of sync it might be with the ancient established
cycle, would have just as much secular validity: both share the same strong
authority: the historicity of a national Israel. If Sabbatical Law and
secular “national” Israel are both prophetic constructs, this disharmony
must be resolved.

      The “modern” and “ancient” sabbatical cycles are exactly harmonized by
the 3½ years of the Great Tribulation. If the Roman Tribulation ran from
Passover*, 66 AD. (per Josephus) 3½ years to the Day of Atonement, 69 AD.,
it ran up to but deliberately excluded the sabbatical year 69-70 AD. The
resumption of the week of confirmed covenant would imply a Sabbath at the
start of the Great Tribulation, which is indeed experienced by the Two
Witnesses of Revelation 7 and 11. But the 3½ year Great Tribulation is the
last half of Daniels’s final week and must therefore end with a sabbatical
year. If the Great Tribulation begins at Nisan 1, 1999, restarting the
 “Year” of spiritual Jubilee at the end of secular Israel’s natural Jubilee
year, the 3½ year sabbatical ministry of God’s Two Witnesses (they will have
entered into Rest) would bring us to the Feast of Trumpets (Tabernacles) in
the autumn of 2002. Thus the last year of the Great Tribulation, the seventh
year of the week of “confirmed covenant” (3½ year Roman and 3½ year Great
Tribulations) would be the year 2001-2002, a sabbatical year on the ancient
established cycle. At that point, modern and ancient history are back in
step, the symmetry with Scripture has been maintained, and secular and
spiritual Israel (Jews and Christians) have been reconciled in their
Messiah. It takes a 3½ year (not a 7 year) Great Tribulation, and a
spiritual as well as natural
Jubilee, to do the job, and we are provoked with urgency: if the Lord
intends to finish His week on the established, current sabbatical cycle, He
must resume it now.
 
 

*God seems to intervene for the deliverance of His people at Passover:
Exodus from Egypt, crossing the Jordan, smiting the Assyrians, the
Resurrection of Christ.

The Last Jubilee, 20.

     During both the Roman and the Great Tribulations, God did and will
manifest His Glory in an obvious, visible, most decisive way, “confirming
His covenant with (the) many” members of His body, the Church. If this
“first” or “final” week mentioned in the Essene fragment is in fact the 70th
week of Daniel, there is nothing that precludes our dividing it into halves:
the two 3½ year tribulations. We take no presumptuous liberties here; Daniel
is the one who so divides it, saying that while God intends to confirm His
covenant during the whole of these seven years, He also intends, “in the
midst of the week”, i.e., after 3½ years, to do something that would “cause
the sacrifice and oblation to cease”. The destruction of the Temple in 70 AD
is obviously that event. Here is the gentle irony: the two translators cited
above describe the week as the “first” and “final”, a seeming contradiction.
In reality, divided into its two 3½ year parts, it is both first and final:
under the manifested Shekinah Glory of the Messianic kingdom (the
manifestation of which confirmed and will confirm the covenant), the Roman
was the “first” and the Great will be the “final” Tribulation of Israel.
First and final. Together, Gaster and Vermes get it right: a total of seven
years, but two Tribulations. Jeremiah 16:18: “And first I will recompense
their iniquity and their sin double”; Isaiah 40:2: “for she hath received of
the Lord”s hand (i.e., at the hand of Jesus, Whose resurrection hath made
Him Lord and Whose Glory will be twice manifested) double for all her sins.”
Note that the two periods of “confirmed covenant”, i.e. the two
tribulations, are firmly rooted in New Testament time: the covenant has been
“confirmed” at the “Lord’s hand” by the blood of Christ. This excludes the
Babylonian Tribulation and confines our consideration of the “double” to the
Roman and the Great Tribulations under the dominion of the resurrected and
ascended Lord Jesus Christ. Two Tribulations, totaling seven years, but
separated by a specific prophetic period of “non-determined” time, 1960
prophetic years, 40 prophetic Jubilee periods: the Roman Tribulation began
and the Great Tribulation will end forty jubilees in the wilderness for the
Temple of God.

3. The Great Tribulation

      The Great Tribulation (Revelation 7:14) is about to break forth upon
the earth. Why? What is the causa fiendi, its “cause of becoming”? There is
a pattern in the Scriptures of Exodus, Jeremiah, the New Testament and in
The Last Jubilee Scroll, which circumscribes the tribulations inflicted upon
Israel by the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, and the end time
“Beast”: they are all the historical consequence of God’s declaring a
Jubilee. The tribulation “pattern” is this: 1. Evil prospers and becomes
intolerable; 2. God reacts, “Let my people go (Jubilee)”; 3. satan’s
response is “no”; 4. God’s Word is manifested: His Glory brings Tribulation;
5. Tribulation enforces deliverance and destruction at the same time,
concurrently (Daniel 12:1, Jeremiah 30:7): this “dual” effect
(deliverance/destruction, liberation/ judgement) is the work of God’s Spirit
poured out upon all flesh (Joel 2:28), upon the righteous and upon the
wicked: Glory for the righteous, for those people who seek to attribute
Glory to God, becomes darkness and delusion for the wicked, for those people
who seek to attribute God’s glory to themselves (Exodus10:22-23, 14:20,
Isaiah 60:1-2, John 3:19-21, 2 Thessalonians 2:11-
12). God’s Glory (the revelation of God’s manifest presence), by how men
react to it, proves their hearts, bringing forth deliverance or destruction,
liberty or judgement. It’s that simple, and it all starts with a Jubilee.
The Last Jubilee,   21.

       The Egyptian Tribulation sets the type; the Great Tribulation
fulfills it (therefore we see the Mosaic “plagues” from Exodus reiterated in
the book of Revelation). At a set time, after manifesting His Shekinah Glory
to Moses in the burning bush, God declared a “Jubilee” to restore His
family, that they might return to the possession of their inheritance: His
“kingdom” presence, the Shekinah Glory. He declared to Pharaoh: “let my
people go, that they may hold a feast unto me in the wilderness” (Exodus
5:1). Pharaoh refused. By the agency of His two witnesses, Moses and Aaron,
God’s Word was manifested: its fulfillment in the various plagues brought
tribulation. Israel was liberated; Egypt was destroyed. This precise pattern
is repeated, and the type is fulfilled (Revelation 11), in the Great
Tribulation.

      The Babylonian Tribulation follows the same pattern, but it’s a little
harder to see. In the midst of the siege of Jerusalem, Jeremiah had
prophesied (30-31) a great Restoration for a future time (30:24). While a
“return to the land” was promised (30:3, 31:17), it is the “real estate” of
the Spirit (31:31-34, Hebrews 8), the New Covenant of the Spirit of Life in
Christ Jesus (Romans 8:2), which now at the end will transcend the dirt of
Palestine. After a return to the physical land of Israel, God will bring
forth the Person (31:22) of Israel, the “Prince of God”, the Melchisedec
Branch (33:15, Zechariah 3:8, 6:12-13) Who will effect deliverance. Jeremiah
was obviously prophesying the Last Jubilee, but King Zedekiah, desiring God’
s favor against the Babylonian armies, declared this “release” right then
and there (Jeremiah 34:8) in his own day. God would have granted them favor
(34:15), had they kept the Jubilee, had they “let His people go” (34:9), and
the righteous who did obey were, in a sense, “delivered” (34:5). But most,
like Pharaoh, changed their minds (34:11), and refused to release those in
bondage. God then brought upon them the Tribulation of judgment and
destruction through the agency of His prophet Jeremiah (34:17):

“Therefore thus saith the Lord; Ye have not hearkened unto me, in
proclaiming liberty every one to his brother, and every man to his neighbor:
behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the
pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be removed into all
the kingdoms of the earth”.

Refusal to permit the Jubilee triggered the fulfillment of judgment and
destruction, same as with Pharaoh.

      The same pattern holds for the Roman Tribulation. Jesus proclaimed the
Last Jubilee at Pentecost, 28AD. Just as the Law (Exodus 19) and later the
Spirit (Acts 2) were offered to the nation at the feast of Pentecost, so was
the Glory of God, Who is the agent of the Jubilee which Jesus was
proclaiming. But the offer was refused, at Nazareth, at Golgotha, and ever
since, by both secular nation and carnal “church”. Both the Holy Spirit and
the Shekinah Glory manifested, established and promoted the Kingdom of God
“in the wilderness”, i.e., outside the rejected religious institution and
established order (Hebrews 13:10-13, 2 Timothy 2:20-21, Revelation 3:20).
The Jews did everything they could to prevent the “exodus” to Christ (1
Thessalonians 2:14-16),  to keep the  nation  under the “schoolmaster” of
the Law,  under the
The Last Jubilee,   22.

authority of an “Ichabod” clergy, under tyranny of “salvation by works”
(“bricks without straw”-no endurance). For forty years the Jubilee was
offered to Israel.  Those few (Isaiah 53:1) early witnesses, like Stephen
(Acts 7:56), Paul (2 Corinthians 12:2), the Apostles, the other Christian
martyrs (Greek: martus, “witness”) who sold all to obtain the priceless
Pearl, the gate of Heaven (Matthew 13:46, Revelation 21:21), were delivered
directly to the presence, if not possession, of God’s kingdom. A few more,
like Joshua and Caleb in the Old Testament, spied out the Promise, seized it
earnestly, and kept the “good report” of God’s testimony locked in their
hearts, sealed by the first fruits of the Spirit, as they embarked on the
spiritual nation’s forty jubilee wilderness pilgrimage. It is important to
realize that while Jesus secured for us the promise of our inheritance at
His resurrection, the family of God, the holy nation, has never yet
possessed the promised inheritance in “fullness”, just the “earnest” or
“first fruit” of it, a down payment, a dim view through the veil, savory
odors of the Feast. The wilderness “manna”, our daily bread from Christ,
while it keeps us nourished, also keeps us hungry, unsatisfied, wanting
more. Daniel prophesied (9:24) that the full possession of our jubilee
inheritance as a nation would have to wait until the 70 weeks were finished.
It is a great error and deception to mistake the “Promise of full
 possession” for the “full Possession of the promise”. We have the Promise;
we get the Possession after the Promise has done its full work (2 Peter 1:4,
Colossians 1:23, Hebrews 3:6,14).

       The rest of the nation, rejecting Christ, rejected the Jubilee.
Hardening themselves against the two divine witnesses of Spirit and Glory,
Who testified for forty years of the heavenly commonwealth and the true
Temple (Hebrews 12:22-25, Revelation 21:22), secular Israel deliberately
chose to be “Egypt” (Revelation 11:8), choosing the old and perishing
“shadow” temple and Testament (Hebrews 8:2, 9:11,24) over the True. They
chose the old “form” of works over the new “substance” of Faith (Hebrews
11:1), and for this deliberate rebellious choice, God blew them away. They
received “the wrath of God to the uttermost”, the Roman Tribulation. But God
is merciful; if they refused to enter under Moses and refused to enter under
Christ, He would give a third chance to their offspring, to those who were
left when the rebellious generation had died in the desert. Now the
wilderness for the Temple is almost over; Round Two of the “double”
recompense is about to begin, and the choice remains to be offered again.
Which will we choose: form (2 Timothy 3:5) or Substance, ritual “works” or
spontaneous Grace, mixture or Purity, religion or Christ?

       What nobody expected (not the Essenes, not the “Jerusalem” Jews, not
even the Christians, Acts 1:6) was the interval of the “Church age”, the
forty jubilees (40x49=1960 prophetic years) in the wilderness, which
separated the two Tribulations, the two halves of God’s manifested Glory and
“confirmed covenant”.  When Jesus proclaimed Himself as the Last Jubilee at
Pentecost, He read from Isaiah 61:1-2a and stopped in the middle of the
verse: He read, “The Lord...hath sent me...to proclaim the acceptable year
of the Lord...”, and then He sat down. He
left the rest of the verse, Isaiah 61:2b, the proclamation of the “day of
vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 63:4), to a double future fulfillment:
initially (in the near future) by the Roman Tribulation and ultimately (in
the far future) by the Great Tribulation on the other side of 40 wilderness
jubilees. The pattern of an early initial and subsequent later ultimate
fulfillment of
The Last Jubilee,   23.

prophecy ought to be well known: the six days of Creation week and the 6000
years of redemption; the “former rain moderately” and then the “former and
latter rain” together (Joel 2:23); the two triumphs over evil at either end
of the millennial reign (Revelation 19:20, 20:10); indeed, several
scriptures* seem to lay out the concept of a double prophetic fulfillment,
initial/ultimate, almost as a pattern. God’s purpose in deferring the
ultimate is always to extend the impact of the Gospel, to universalize what
was initially only a localized application, and to save those born in the
interim.

 Where Christ’s first ministry was initial and local, it has now been
extended to an ultimate and universal application. The Last Jubilee and the
Great Tribulation will apply God’s Glory to all flesh (Joel 2:28), to every
soul that ever lived; He would bring deliverance to His family, and
destruction to His enemies, yes, but now the application has been justly and
legally multiplied far beyond the Jewish Nation or religion. God has
expanded the Last Jubilee to apply exponentially: what was local is now
universal. What had been confined initially to the Jews and the locality of
Palestine could now be extended, thanks to the preaching of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ, ultimately to every spirit and soul and the whole material and
heavenly creation. The Last Jubilee would dictate the Great Tribulation
which would apply deliverance/destruction, Redemption/judgement
macrocosmically, to all humanity, even the dead (Daniel 12:2). God would
deliver and restore the whole house of Israel (Ezekiel 37:11), Christians
and Jews (Revelation 7), living and dead (1 Thessalonians 4:22, Ezekiel
37:12, 13), and redeem the entire physical (Romans 8:19-22) and spiritual
(Revelation 12:10) cosmos back to Edenic innocence (Isaiah 51:3). If He
intends that exquisite detail of redemption, He intends the same exquisite
detail of judgment against the self-satisfied complacency and carnality of
the Laodicean Church. What a wake-up call that is going to be.

       It is instructive, when examining the Great Tribulation, to recognize
that it is a continuation of the Roman Tribulation, now universalized in
application. In its Scriptural as well as historical context, it is the last
half of the “seven years” of the “confirmed covenant”. The first half of
that “week” was so long ago, and our “wilderness” memory is so dim, that no
one now recognizes its importance, but we can learn some things from the
Roman Tribulation. Just as the King-Priest Melchisedec (Genesis 14:18) was
the foreshadow, the pre-figure of Christ in His “Kingdom ministry” (Psalm
110, Hebrews 7), so was the Shekinah Glory, during Roman Tribulation, the
foreshadow, the pre-figure, of Christ in His “kingdom manifestation”. The
movements of the Shekinah Glory defined the event: leaving first from the
temple at Passover-Pentecost 66 AD., and second from the nation, 3½ years
later, when He ascended from Olivet. Two separate departures from two
different entities: although He treated the Temple and the Nation in
identical fashion, His departures were deliberately sequential. At the
Ascension of Jesus, the angels told the disciples (Acts 1:11) that Jesus
“shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven”. As with
Jesus, so, then, with His pre-figure: the Glory “shall so come in like
manner as ye have seen Him go”. He left first from the Temple and second, 3½
years later,
 

*Isaiah 43:9, Jeremiah 51:46, and especially Ecclesiastes 3:15: “That which
hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God
requireth that which is past.”
The Last Jubilee,   24.

from the Nation. So shall He return: first to the Temple, as Shekinah Glory
(Malachi 3:1: the “messenger of the covenant” is the Shekinah Glory), the
type or pre-figure of Christ the King, and second, 3½ years later, to the
Nation, as Christ the King the fulfilled antitype. This is very important.
It explains why the Two Temple Witnesses of Revelation 11 enter the
Possession of their inheritance, the manifest Glory of Christ (the kingdom
anointing, Revelation 11:3, 12:10), 3½ years before the Nation, the Body
Politic (Revelation 11:15) of “All Israel” (Romans 11:25), the whole,
united, Spiritual Commonwealth.

         However much the Essenes at Qumran may have been afflicted by
religious xenophobia or the chauvinistic myopia of the Pharisees, The Last
Jubilee Scroll describes the ultimate Jubilee Restoration and coincident
Judgement: they viewed it as the End game. We will come to realize in the
near future that they were right; the Roman War was the End game, at least
the start or the first half of it. The Essenes analyzed Daniel 9:24 (“70
weeks are determined upon thy people”) as ten jubilee periods, the last of
which, the “seven weeks” of Daniel 9:25 (not 62 or 69 weeks), would count
the time down to the Last Jubilee. This also, with obvious independence, was
Newton’s exegesis. The 49 year countdown would lead, not to the birth of the
Christ Child, or to Christ’s initial earthly ministry, nor would it lead
merely to a “natural*” Jubilee celebration by the secular Nation. It would
lead, in fact, to the Last, the ultimate Jubilee: the “birth” of the
“Man-child” (Revelation 12:5), the “full grown” ultimate ministry of Messiah
the Prince, and the ultimate return, after the 3½ year Great Tribulation and
the Resurrection
(Revelation 11:3,11), of the incorruptible Holy Nation to its full
“spiritual*”inheritance, the manifested Kingdom of God.

       The Church has spent so much time at a perpetual Christmas time with
“sweet baby Jesus” that most of us have no concept of Who He now is. He is
not now the mere Son of man, itinerant preacher and humble sacrificial Lamb
Whom we saw in the Gospels; that was His initial coming and His initial
earthly ministry. Now He has been glorified; “His countenance (is) as the
sun shineth in His strength” (Revelation 1:16), i.e., blinding. Don’t try
looking at the sun unless you want to become permanently blind to the world.
The true prophets who saw Christ all but died in His presence (Isaiah 6:5,
Daniel 10:17, Revelation 1:17), which  ought to tell us something about
today’s “casual” prophets who are so quick to claim “personal” and
incarnate visitations by Jesus: they forget He is “dwelling in the light
which no man can approach unto; Whom no man hath seen, nor can see” (1
Timothy 6:16). Paul enjoins us that “though we have known Christ after the
flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more” (2 Corinthians 5:16). To know
Christ, then, “after the spirit” is to know Him “glorified”, which means we
must be in His Glory with Him (Romans 8:30), an experience heretofore
uncommon to Christians, but not for long.
 
 

*1 Corinthians 15:44-46 states a prophetic principle: “(There) is sown a
natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and
there is a spiritual body....Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual,
but which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual”. A “natural”
Jubilee (a jubilee for a natural body politic) would precede a “spiritual”
Jubilee (a jubilee for the spiritual Body politic).

The Last Jubilee,   25.

 Not only is Christ “glorified”, but He is also “us-corporate”: our souls
are the “cells” of His Body. If we have been heretofore a largely comatose,
disjointed, spastic and uncoordinated Body, again, not for long (Ezekiel
37:1-10).

      Christ is about to “come again”, but not as Sweet Baby Jesus, and not
in His initial singularity of ministry. Now He comes as Messiah the Prince,
the corporate Prince of God, the plural ministry of Melchisedec. If we
recognize that the object of Christ’s initial ministry has been
“universalized” to extend to the entire cosmos, cannot we recognize that the
agency of that ministry would extend to His plural corporate Body (John
14:12) as glorified, plural Priest and King? Does it diminish Jesus that He
would finish the work which He started, that He would bring other sons of
God to His stature (Ephesians 4:13), that He would be the “firstborn among
many brethren (Romans 8:29)? Or is it OK only as long as no one “claims*”
it, as long as we
 place it far in the future, “not in our lifetimes”? Look at some of the
“birth” scriptures in the “tribulation” prophecies: they describe the birth
of a full grown, plural, corporate, and ruling Melchisedec ministry:

Jeremiah 31:22: “the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, a woman
shall compass a man”;

Isaiah 66:7-8: “before her pain came, she was delivered of a man child...for
as soon as Zion travailed, she brought forth her children”;

Revelation 12:5, 13, 17: “and she brought forth a man child, who was to rule
all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up to God and to
His throne...and the dragon persecuted
 the woman which brought forth the man...and the dragon was wroth with the
woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed”;
 

*Here is a disclaimer at the outset of our discussion of the Melchisedec
Priesthood. There are always religious dolts who try to play God, who try to
“do the works” of God, who try to “make Prophecy happen”, the basic “name it
and claim it” crew. It is tragic that the government of Israel has to deal
with “christian” morons who think they can precipitate the Great Tribulation
by blowing up the Dome of the Rock or some other such idiocy. Real
Christians have placed their own, subjective Cross (Matthew 10:38-39,
16:24-25, Luke 9:23-24, 14:27, 1 Corinthians 1:17-18, Philippians 3:10,
Galatians 6:14), the abandonment of self agency, between themselves and the
world, and “make no provision for the flesh” (Romans 13:14), for their own
self directed volition and agency. We will discuss this further in detail in
part 4, “The Agency of Christ”. But deceived apostate “christians” (2
Thessalonians 2:3-4), the lukewarm, rebellious Babylonian “church” will,
however, try to initiate a carnal, counterfeit Melchisedec “kingdom
 ministry” (Revelation 13) under their own (and satan’s) direction and
volition (Matthew 24:5, 24, Revelation 12, 13). If the deception is so
subtle that “if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect”
(Matthew 24:24 ), if “satan himself is transformed into an angel of
light...and his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of
righteousness” (2 Corinthians 11:14-15), then ultimately the sole
distinguishing factor between the rule of true and false Christianity may
well be the Cross we all seem so unwilling to pick up.
The Last Jubilee,   26

Micah 5:3: “Therefore will he give them up until the time that she which
travaileth hath brought forth: then the remnant of His brethren shall return
to the children of Israel”;

Zechariah 3:8: “Hear now, O Joshua the high Priest, thou, and thy fellows
that sit before thee, for they are men wondered at (of prophetic anointing):
for behold, I will bring forth my servant the Branch”;

Zechariah 6:11-14 (KJV): “Then take silver and gold and make crowns and set
(them) upon the head of Joshua (Jesus)...the high priest....Behold the man
whose name is the Branch...He shall build the temple of the Lord...He shall
bear the Glory, and shall sit and rule upon His throne; and he shall be a
priest upon his throne...And the crowns shall be to (LXX:) them that wait
patiently, and to the useful men of the captivity, and to them that have
known it....(KJV:) And they that are far off shall come and build in the
Temple of the Lord”;

Revelation 5:10: “Thou hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and we
shall reign on the earth”;

Romans 8:19: “For the earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the
manifestation of the sons of God”;

The Last Jubilee Scroll (not “inspired” scripture) 5: “they will partake of
the inheritance of Melchisedec”.

        If Christ is “plural”, as well as “singular”, and Paul enjoins us to
regard Him that way, if the “Branch”, “Man child” and “Melchisedec”
ministries of the end time Messiah the Prince are corporate, plural
ministries, as the scriptures above seem to indicate they are, and as the
“Bride” of Christ and the “Great Whore” are corporate, plural personages,
can we not also regard other prophetic personalities as plural and corporate
beings? The Two Witnesses of Revelation 11, the “Man of sin, the Son of
perdition”, the “Anti-Christ”: cannot they also be plural, companies of
people? There is plenty of scriptural support (1 Corinthians 15:22, 1 John
2:18, Matthew 24:24) for their “plural” identities too.

        Who are the Two Witnesses of Revelation? The easy answer is “Moses
and Elijah” because we see the Mosaic plagues of Egypt and the fire and
drought of Elijah reiterated at their hand. In Matthew 17:1-3 we read,

“And after six days Jesus...bringeth them up into a high mountain apart, and
was transfigured before them: and His face did shine as the sun, and His
raiment was white as the light. And...there appeared unto them Moses and
Elias talking with Him”.
 
 

The Last Jubilee,   27.

Here Jesus stepped forward in time into Glory, into the finished work of the
millennial Kingdom of rest that would reign after God’s six days or 6000
years of work upon man. Seeing the Glory, the disciples instantly recognized
this as ultimate ministry, the fulfillment of the Feast of Tabernacles, and
they desired to build the “tabernacles” associated with that Feast. We see
Jesus fulfilling this Feast in the Book of Revelation, but now Jesus meets
with Moses and Elijah to discuss His “exodus” from Jerusalem (Luke 9:31).
Obviously Moses and Elijah figure in the Great Tribulation; they are both
mentioned in Malachi 4, another Great Tribulation prophecy, and we see their
Old Testament ministries operating at the hands of the Two Witnesses
(Revelation 11:6). If the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 are two singular
people, Moses and Elijah are their “ministerial” identities.

         But Revelation 11:4 tells us that these Two Witnesses “are the two
olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth”.
This is an obvious quote from Zechariah: the “two olive branches...the two
anointed ones (the sons of fresh oil) that stand by the Lord of the whole
earth” (Zechariah 4:12,14). In Romans 11:24-26, Paul describes the  the Jews
and the Gentile Christians as the branches of this olive tree:

“For if thou (the gentile believer) wert cut out of the olive tree which is
wild by nature, and wert grafted contrary to nature into a good olive tree:
how much more shall these (the elect Jewish remnant), which be the natural
branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? ...Blindness in part is
happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles be come in. And so
all Israel (the two olive branches, the full commonwealth of elect Jews and
Gentiles, Ephesians 2:11-15) shall be saved”.

Paul describes the two olive branches (the Two Witnesses) as a company of
remnant gentile Christians and a company of remnant elect Jews. We see these
two companies standing before the Throne of the God of the whole earth;
Revelation 7 clearly identifies them: the Jews are the “144,000 of all the
tribes of the children of Israel”, and each tribe is specified (4-8); the
gentile Christians are “a great multitude which no man could number, of all
nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (9). These “companies” are
unified, plural corporate beings whose business is to “witness”, to “testify
to” and thus to “actively participate in” the business of God’s manifested
Throne, which is precisely what we see them doing in Revelation 7 and 14.
That “business”, during the Great Tribulation, is deliverance and judgment,
and so we see the Two Witnesses, or a portion of them, not only being
delivered, healed and set free (7), but also a portion of them engaged in
the deliverance ministries of Moses and Elijah (11). There is no doubt that
the company of Jews is Christian (14:4), and that both companies (Witnesses)
are conducting God’s “earthly” business in the “earthly” manifested presence
of God’s heavenly Throne and Temple. That is what tribulates the world.

 The “Man child” (Revelation 12:5, Jeremiah 31:22, Isaiah 66:7-8),
 the “Branch” (Zechariah 3:8, 6:11-14, Isaiah 4:2, 11:1, Jeremiah 33:15) and
 the “Messiah the Prince” (Daniel 9:25) are the same entity and the same
event: the plural, The Last Jubilee,  28.

corporate, Melchisedec ministry of the two Temple Witnesses in the Great
Tribulation, and the “birth” of the Man child is the birth, the inception,
the empowerment anointing of their ministry. The “woman” of Revelation 12,
who gives birth to the “Man child” is the spiritual Nation of Israel, the
“virgin who conceives”, the “Jerusalem which is above...which is the mother
of us all” (Galatians 4:26). The Shekinah Glory, the advance “kingdom”
manifestation of Christ the King, returns first to the Temple (Malachi
3:1-3) 3½ years before Christ returns to the Nation (Matthew 24:29-31). The
True Temple of heavenly Zion is then aflame with the Glory of God (Isaiah
59:20-60:20), that no man, no flesh , no self, can “stand” in God’s presence
(2 Chronicles 5:14, Isaiah 33;10,14-15); the Shekinah Glory tribulates and
“purifies” the priesthood (Malachi 3:1-3) to “activate” and “vitalize” their
ministry (Revelation 12:10), to “birth” the Man child, the ministry of the
Two Witnesses (11:3). The Witnesses, the two companies of Christians and
Jews, minister to God in the midst of the Glory in His Temple; but they are
standing right here on corrupt old mother earth, in the wreckage of carnal
“christian” and “jewish” religion, the doomed old order, while they
minister. The Melchisedec ministry, a “kingdom” of Priests and a
 “priesthood” of Kings (Revelation 5:10), will “rule in the midst of thine
enemies” (Psalm 110:2-5): their prophesy for 1260 days directs the Great
Tribulation. As the Body of Christ is also the True Temple of God (1
Corinthians 6:19, 2 Corinthians 6:16, 1 Peter 2:5), so will the Glory of God
be manifested upon the person of those believers; in them has been fulfilled
the spiritual Last Jubilee: they have passed into the possession of the
Promise, the Restoration, in the carnal, material realm, of God’s manifested
Kingdom, the actual possession of their heavenly inheritance. They are
“first fruits unto God and to the Lamb” (Revelation 14:4). Meanwhile the
Nation, the “woman” who brought forth the “Man child”, is maintained 3 ½
years in the wilderness (Revelation 12:6, 14), finishing the 40 jubilee
wilderness sojourn for the Nation. Like the nation under Moses she is not
denied the ministry of God’s Glory (Zechariah 2:4-5, Isaiah 4:4-5), and can
enter the Jubilee as she repents of her “religion” (Ezekiel 20:41,
Revelation 7:14), but the complete Nation does not enter fully until the
final redemptive work of the Promise has been completed in the wilderness:
the last enemy to be overcome is death (Isaiah 25:6-8), and the Resurrection
of the righteous dead (1 Thessalonians 4:14-17, Revelation 11:7,11,15,
Ezekiel 37:12-14), occurs after the Great Tribulation (Matthew 24:29-31).

3a.  The Melchisedec Priesthood

        When will the “Man child”, the plural Melchisedec ministry, be born?
Christ was likely born on the Feast of Trumpets, Rosh Hashanah, 3 BC. We
believe this because modern computers allow the examination of past
astronomical ephemera, and alignments of the sun, moon and stars for that
date match Revelation 12:1-5. Jewish tradition holds that Noah, Abraham and
Jacob (who became “Israel”) were born, and Isaac, Joseph and Samuel
conceived, on this feast day; at Trumpets, the Israelites in Egypt ceased
their slave labor and the ten Mosaic plagues were sent forth. Scripturally,
Trumpets is the enthronement day for Kings and the Day of the Great
Resurrection.  Clearly, the theme of the Feast of Trumpets is “new birth,
rebirth, empowerment, deliverance” and Jubilee, and we would therefore
expect the “birth” of the Man child ministry to occur on the date of the
Feast of Trumpets. But the prophecies of Hosea and the 40 “wilderness
jubilees” time cycle point to this year of Jubilee, which began and ends in
the The Last Jubilee,   29.

spring, 1998-1999. Can we resolve the discrepancy? Yes, and illuminate God’s
plan for the Great Tribulation.

     God declared to Jeremiah (25:11-12, 29:10-14), “seventy years in the
desolations of Jerusalem”, i.e., that after 70 years of desolation, the
tables would be turned: Babylon would be punished and Jerusalem would be
restored. Studying Jeremiah, as the time drew near, Daniel engaged the
matter in prayer. God revealed (9:24) that, regarding the ultimate
restoration, “seventy weeks are determined upon thy people”. “Seventy weeks”
of years means (70x7=) 490years, each seven years equating somehow to one
year. Now both Jeremiah (70) and Daniel (490) were accurate and correct:
hold the idea that 70 years equates to 490 years, that one year can stand
for seven. This is the source of the Essene concept that Isaiah’s “Year of
Favor” equates to the “final week” of Daniel. After the 70 years of
Babylonian captivity, Israel returned under Ezra and Nehemiah and the work
of restoration began under the prophetic encouragement of Haggai and
Zechariah. It didn’t take long for them to realize that their own meager
work of restoration didn’t measure up to what was being prophesied (Haggai
2:1-14), that God, through Daniel, Haggai and Zechariah, was prophesying
restoration on a much higher, more lofty, ultimate plane or dimension that
they were accomplishing. The question (Zechariah 1:12 KJV) had to be asked,

“ O Lord of hosts, how long wilt thou not have mercy on Jerusalem and on the
cities of Judah, against which thou hast had indignation these threescore
and ten years (LXX: “this seventieth year”)?

We have the luxury of retrospection: we can see that Daniel was shown the
details of the restoration from desolation of the heavenly Jerusalem, which
was also the object of the prophecy of Haggai and Zechariah. And they
recognized that, although 70 years might have passed on an earthly plane,
God had not yet “completed”, on a spiritual plane, His 70th year of
indignation or “desolation”. Nor has He yet.

        Daniel learned that for each of the seventy years determined upon
earthly Jerusalem,  seven years of earthly history would pass toward the
Jubilee for heavenly Jerusalem. Now picture the face of a clock: the “hour”
hand, the “minute” hand, and the “second” hand: each  moves at a different
rate across the same span of time. One circuit of the hour hand
circumscribes twelve circuits of the minute hand and 360 circuits of the
second hand. Their motions describe “circles within circles within a circle”
, or wheels within a wheel, etc. So is the redemptive work of God’s Glory
described as “a wheel in the middle of a wheel” (Ezekiel 1:16). We know that
each yearly circuit (the “hour Hand”) of God’s redemptive purpose (70 years
revealed to Jeremiah) equates to seven yearly circuits (the “minute hand”)
of our redemptive history (490 years revealed to Daniel). Vis-a-vis Jeremiah
and Daniel, God keeps two clocks, and we are traveling at two different
rates (7:1, “a wheel within a wheel”) across the same span of redemptive
time.
 

The Last Jubilee,   30.

     The last “week” of the seventy weeks (Daniel), or the last “year” of
the seventy years (Jeremiah, Zechariah 1:12 LXX) is special: unlike the
others, it is the week of the “confirmed
covenant” (Daniel 9:27), seven years of redemption quickened, concentrated,
and favored by the Glory of God: seven years of the Roman and Great
Tribulations, the incipient last 3 ½ of which (the Great Tribulation) will
complete and perfect the redemptive work of God. Remember the two time
systems, 7:1. Therefore, these seven years of quickened, concentrated
redemption on the earth, seven circuits of the minute hand (Daniel), equate
to (are synchronous with) one single circuit of the hour hand (Jeremiah,
Zechariah 1:12 LXX), one Year, a “perfect” Redemptive year which will
“perfect” God’s work. This Perfect Redemptive Year, the 70th of Daniel,
would take seven years to transpire on the earth: the one “week” of the
“confirmed covenant”.

       The seven years of confirmed covenant and, therefore, the one Perfect
Redemptive Year, the 70th year, were divided exactly in the middle by the 40
jubilees wilderness sojourn for God’s Temple. The two divided halves of this
seven/One year period are the 3½ year Roman Tribulation and the 3 ½ year
Great Tribulations. Added together in contiguous sequence, the two
tribulations constitute the one Perfect Redemptive Year, the 70th year.  Now
think of the two tribulations as two halves of one year. The 3½ year Roman
Tribulation “measured” (spanned, was synchronous with, equated to) six
months of the Perfect Redemptive Year, the first six months of a Jewish year
(also know as the Sacred Year), from Nisan 1 to the end of Elul. The 3½ year
Great Tribulation will “measure” (span, be synchronous with, equate to) the
last six months of the Jewish year (also known as the “civil” or
“agricultural”year), from Tishri 1 (the 7th month) to the end of Adar (the
12th month). The Roman Tribulation, the first half of the “seven years”, has
passed; therefore the first half, the first six months (the “sacred year”)
of the Perfect Redemptive Year, has passed. When the 3½ year Great
Tribulation begins at the midpoint of the “seven years”, God will resume the
Perfect Redemptive Year also at its midpoint, the beginning of the seventh
month, Tishri 1, the Feast of Trumpets. The Feast of Trumpets is, therefore,
on the clock of His Perfect Redemptive Year, the immediate and impending
item on God’s agenda. Across the course of the 3½ year Great Tribulation,
God will play out the remainder of the Prefect Redemptive Year, the last six
months (the civil or agricultural year). If God holds to the pattern of
“first natural, and then spiritual”, Israel’s “natural” Jubilee this year
will transcend to or bring forth a “spiritual” Jubilee for God’s Temple (the
40 Jubilee wilderness sojourn for the Temple and its Melchisedec Priesthood
having been completed). If the “Man child” is then “birthed” by the return
of God’s Glory to the Temple (the mirror image of His departure in 66AD.),
this event would restart the Perfect Redemptive Year (the seven years of
“confirmed covenant”) at “Trumpets” and signal the beginning of the Great
Tribulation (Revelation 12:5-7). Whenever the Great Tribulation begins,
coincident with the birth of the Man child, God’s Perfect Redemptive Year
has then resumed at its midpoint: the Feast of Trumpets, the appropriate
birthday for Messiah the Prince. As usual, God can’t miss.

      God expresses or dramatizes His redemptive work in the annual Feasts
of Israel. For example, Jesus was the Passover Lamb, offered at the Feast of
Passover, 30 AD.; He was the first

The Last Jubilee,   31.

fruits (the resurrection vessel for our spirit) of the harvest, resurrected
at the barley harvest Feast of First Fruits, 30 AD.; the Holy Spirit (the
“harvester” of our soul) was given at the wheat harvest feast of Pentecost,
30 AD., and has been conducting His harvest ever since. The annual feasts of
Israel are:

“Harvest” Feasts: (Leviticus 23)
      Passover -(Passover, Unleavened Bread, First fruits)–Spring
      Pentecost- late spring, 50 days after Unleavened Bread
       Tabernacles- (Trumpets, Day of Atonement, Tabernacles or
“Ingathering”)-Autumn, and the

“Deliverance” Feasts:
      Hanukkah- (John 10:22)-early Winter
      Purim- (Esther)-one month before Passover.

In the Perfect Redemptive Year, God, by the agent of His Shekinah Glory,
demonstrates upon His Temple a recapitulation of His yearly, festal,
redemptive work: on the occasion of a feast, He revisits, reiterates,
demonstrates, dramatizes the redemptive theme of that feast. The 3 ½ year
Roman Tribulation spanned the first six months of the Perfect Redemptive
Year, in which occurred the Feasts of Passover and Pentecost. Therefore the
Glory, upon the occasion of those feasts in 66 AD., revisited or dramatized
their fulfillment upon the Temple.  At Passover he disarmed the “gate” of
the old order, leaving the way open to the Holy of Holies, just as at the
Crucifixion in 30 AD. the curtain to the Holy of Holies was “rent in twain”
(Matthew 17:51). At Pentecost in 66, the Glory left the old and “marked” the
new: He departed the physical “made with hands” Temple and abode 3½ years
upon Olivet, the symbolic “gate” to the “new” heavenly Temple (Which is
Christ-Revelation 21:22).This was just what the Holy Spirit had done in the
upper room: He had “marked” and “dwelt upon” the disciples, the “new Temple”
in Christ. The Shekinah Glory recapitulated upon the “Temple”, during the
Roman Tribulation, what God had done earlier to execute the redemptive
Feasts of Passover and Pentecost, the feasts of the “Sacred Year”, which
would redeem the “spirit” and “soul” dimensions of mankind.

       During the Great Tribulation, God intends to continue this
dramatization, this reiteration, of redemptive themes upon the Temple. We
can expect the Shekinah Glory to recapitulate, to demonstrate, the
redemptive themes appropriate to the feasts of Tabernacles (Trumpets,
Atonement, Ingathering), Hanukkah and Purim. These themes can be summarized:

Tabernacles:   Trumpets,       D. of Atonement,   Ingathering;
Hanukkah;      Purim

Glory: God’s Birth    Victory over            Final                   God’s
Political
presence enthronement   sin            Harvest               Temple
Victory
manifested Resurrection   Release           gathered              cleansed

In the second half of the Jewish year (the “civil or agricultural” year),
the thematic focus of the feasts  shifts  from  subjective  or  individual
redemption  (our own “soul” and “spirit”)  to  a
The Last Jubilee,   32.

“corporate” overcoming (the redemption of our own personal and the plural
“Body” of Christ, the deliverance of the entire material creation (Romans
8:19-23) and victory over all the enemies of God. Now, the recapitulation
will be in mirror image: where the Glory’s reiteration of Passover and
Pentecost happened upon the Temple after God’s execution of these Feasts for
the Nation, now we will see the Glory’s anointing to demonstrate the
fulfillment of Trumpets, Atonement, Ingathering, Hanukkah and Purim upon the
Temple before the execution of these redemptive Feasts for the Nation. God
will thus be fully justified, in demonstrating upon His Temple (and
therefore His two Temple Witnesses) a “Temple” Jubilee: the Birth of Messiah
the Prince (Trumpets), total release and victory over sin and death (Day of
Atonement), a “first fruits” of the millennial Rest (Ingathering), a
cleansing of His spiritual Temple (Hanukkah) and political authority and
victory over the wicked (Purim). This “Temple” Jubilee is an advance
anointing of the full “kingdom” presence appropriate to the ultimate Last
Jubilee for the “Nation”, the Feast of Trumpets and Tabernacles in 2002. If
God restarts His Perfect Redemptive Year (His Man child ministry, His
“Trumpets”, the Tribulation, and His Temple Jubilee) at the end of Israel’s
natural Jubilee year (at or near Nisan 1, 1999), the carnal Jewish calender
and the world will be exactly 180 days and 180 degrees out of phase with
“Trumpets”, the incipient feast on the Lord’s agenda. What a “perfectly”
appropriate time for the “Lord of the last minute” to begin. After the Great
Tribulation (after the last 3½ years of Daniel’s week of confirmed
covenant ) at the Feast of Trumpets, 2002 (the feast of the Resurrection),
the resurrected Nation of Israel would cross the Jordan (victory over death)
into the possession of its ultimate Promised Land, and (the last six months
of God’s Perfect Redemptive Year having passed) “keep the Passover (Joshua
5:10) even in the Plains of Jericho”.

           If the Man child is born in the spring of 1999, The Great
Tribulation would run from Nisan 1, 1999 to Tishri 1, 2002, which is the
time frame indicated by Hosea’s prophecy and forty
wilderness jubilees. Across this 3½ year time span, God’s Perfect Redemptive
Year would advance from “Tishri 1" to “Nisan 1", from the Feast of
 “Trumpets” to just before “Passover”. In other words, God’s redemptive
“Trumpets” could start just before Passover 1999, and His subsequent
“Passover” (“in the Plains of Jericho”) would fall just after Trumpets 2002.
While this may sound contradictory, look at Amos 9:13-14:

“Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the
reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed...And I will bring
(turn) again the captivity of my people of Israel”.

The “plowman” (planting: autumn work: Trumpets/Tabernacles) will overtake
the “reaper” (harvesting: spring ( First Fruits/Pentecost) and autumn
(Ingathering) work) and the treader of grapes” (autumn Trumpets) will
overtake “him that soweth seed” (Spring Passover). Also

“...rejoice in the Lord your God: for he hath given you the former rain (a
teacher of righteousness) moderately, and He will cause to come down for you
the rain, the former rain, and the latter rain, in the first month” (Joel
2:23).

The Last Jubilee,   33.

The “former rain”, the autumn rain that planted the Church, is the initial
ministry of Christ epitomized by Passover; the “latter rain”, the spring
rain that brings to fruition, is the ministry of the Man child, birthed at
“Trumpets”. Passover and “Trumpets”, the early and latter rain together,
will somehow combine at the “first month”. The “first month” here means both
Nisan (the first month of the sacred year) and Tishri (the first month of
the civil year). Passover and “Trumpets” at Passover 1999 and “Passover” and
Trumpets again at Trumpets 2002. Both of these scriptures quoted above
describe the superimposition of the last six months of God’s Perfect
Redemptive Year (“hour hand” timetable), and its appropriate redemptive
themes, upon the 3 ½ year historical duration (“minute hand”) of the Great
Tribulation.

         The original Melchisedec was the “King of Salem” and the “Priest of
the Most High God” who ministered to Abraham (Genesis 14:18). As a
“king-priest” he was the pre-figure, the Old Testament foreshadow or “type”
of the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ in His New Testament ministry: Jesus is
“a high priest forever after the order of Melchisedec” (Hebrews 6:20-9:28),
the “King-Priest”.Compared to the Old Testament Levitical Priesthood ,
Christ’s New Testament Melchisedec Priesthood (Epistle to Hebrews) is
superior in every respect. First, Christ stands as  High Priest in the
 “True” spiritual Holy Place in Heavenly Zion, and not in some mere earthly
material replica or model of His Temple or Church. While this ought to be
obvious, to many it is not (Jeremiah 7:4), and the argument over which
construct (Christ’s Holy Church in the Spirit or man’s collective Babylonian
“model” in the flesh) is the True Temple of God (Revelation 21:22), will be
pointedly settled soon: “for it is the day of the Lord’s vengeance and the
year of recompences for the controversy of Zion” (Isaiah 34:8). Second, the
Levitical Order was temporary (Psalm 110), preparatory and ineffectual: a
single High Priest entered only once a year before God in the “material”
Holy Place to procure temporary absolution for sin. The Melchisedec
Priesthood, superseding the Levitical, is eternal, ultimate and effective: a
“soon to be plural” High Priest(s) stands constantly before God procuring
victory over sin, the world, the flesh and the devil. Third, the Melchisedec
Priesthood is a dual office ministry: it is a “kingdom,” of Priests and a
“priesthood” of Kings (Zechariah 6:12-13, Revelation 1:6, 5:10). This
“duality” of office has profound implications.

         Christians are familiar with Jesus’ constant “priestly”
intercession for us before the Throne of Grace. We of necessity have been
exercised in repentance, mercy, and forgiveness through Christ’s blood, and
have been brought thereby to the “brink”, to the “incipience” of overcoming
(Revelation 12:11) by the Lord’s faithfulness as our Advocate and High
Priest. This has been the “priestly” side of Christ’s ministry: the gift of
the Gospel to humanity. And while the gift has been largely rejected by the
majority of mankind, our participation with Christ as “junior” priestly
“co-intercessors” for one another has brought forth fruit in a remnant. We
are comfortable with the priestly ministry of intercession. We are less
familiar, and less comfortable, with the “kingly” side of Christ’s ministry:
although He may rule some of the time in some of our hearts, given the
prevalent filth in the world and in the institutional “worldly” church, He
can hardly be said to have been actively “ruling” the world, nor can the
Church be described as now ready for His active, assertive dominion. But,
thank God, the “kingly” side of the Melchisedec Priesthood is about to be
revealed (Revelation 1:6, 5:10, 6:2, 12:10) and actively,

The Last Jubilee,   34.

assertively imposed, by Christ, upon a world of men and angels who have
heretofore had the arrogance to reject it.

       The current High Priest is the King (Revelation 19:16), not just of
Israel, but of the whole Creation. Built into the dynamics of that Kingship
is His intention of assertively applying His rule to His domain. Psalm
110:2-5:

“The Lord shall send  the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the
midst of thine enemies. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy
power... Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchisedec. The Lord
at thy right hand shall strike through kings in the day of His wrath”.

Reread Zechariah 3:8 and 6:11-14. The “Branch” is the corporate union
between Jesus the High Priest and those “fellows that sit before” Him. The
Branch is the plural, corporate “Priest upon His Throne”; Revelation 5:10
says,

“Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue,
and people, and nation; and hast made us unto our God kings and priests: and
we shall reign on the earth”.

The “crowns” given to “Joshua (Jesus) the high priest” are given also to His
corporate personage the Branch (LXX: “crowns shall be to them that wait
patiently, the useful men of the captivity, them that have known it”).
“Crowns shall be to them” who shall rule and “bear the Glory” and “they that
are far off”. Revelation 6:2:

“And I saw, and behold, a white horse and he that sat on him had a bow; and
a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering and to conquer”.

The “bow” (Habakkuk 3:9), the “crown” (Zechariah 6:11), and the “white
 horse” (Revelation 19:11,14) positively identify this rider as the Branch,
the Man child, the plural Melchisedec ministry, and God intends them to “go
forth conquering and to conquer”. The office of “King” demands that God
“rise up” (Isaiah 33:10) at a “set time” (Psalm 102:13), in the day of “His
power” (Revelation 12:10), to “take to (Him) (His) great power and reign”
(Revelation 11:17);
a holy King must restore righteousness, justice and His dominion to His
domain. This idea so pervades the Scriptures (Zechariah 9:12-16, Isaiah
63:1-6, etc.) at every level that it is the very “Hope” of the Church (Titus
2:13, 2 Thessalonians 1:7-10) and the “dread” of the world. Given the dearth
of justice accomplished under the “theocracy of Man”, it is obvious that
only the assertive Rule of God can save the shredded tatters of a blind
humanity. The suddenly asserted rule of God is the dynamic event descried in
The Last Jubilee Scroll (quoting Isaiah 52:7), “Your God has now claimed His
kingdom”, and in the Book of Revelation (11:12), “Now is come salvation, and
strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ”. The
“enthronement” Psalms (47, 93, 96-99, traditionally read at the Feast of
Trumpets and associated with its fulfillment) declare:
The Last Jubilee,   35.

“The Lord reigneth; let the earth rejoice...A fire goeth before Him and
burneth up His enemies round about. His lightings enlightened the world: the
earth saw and trembled...The heavens declare His righteousness, and all the
people see His Glory...The Lord hath made known His salvation: His
righteousness hath He openly shewed in the sight of the heathen...With
trumpets...make a joyful noise before the Lord, the King...for He cometh to
judge the earth”.

How does He accomplish this? By “birthing” the Man child, the plural
Melchisedec ministry, by “crowning” the Branch of Zechariah (3:8, 6:11-15,
Jeremiah 23:5, 33:15) and the “overcomers” of Revelation (1:5-6, 6:2, 12:11)
and anointing them with the Kingdom Glory, by fulfilling the Last Jubilee.
These are those who “have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice” (Psalm
50:5), the “sacrifice” (Romans 12:1, Zephaniah 1:7) of self demanded
everywhere in the New Testament. If the doctrine of the Cross, of “self”
crucifixion, has been largely set aside by the Church for more fun and
flashy doings, for pharisaic power and mammon, for collective comfort and
consensus security, well, it can be recovered “in twinkling of a eye”; there
is always a remnant.  There are those who “rejoice in My highness” (Isaiah
13:3), rather than their own, and they walk only and precisely in the paths
which God shows them (Joel 2:7-8). And they know how to wait (Isaiah 25:9).
If we have failed to walk heretofore with such dedication and holiness,
cannot God accomplish this for those who ask? Cannot the Maker of the
universe effect a quick, decisive rectitude? He alone discerns the intent of
our hearts, and (Philippians 2:13) “worketh in (us) to will and to do of His
good pleasure”.

     When the Man child is born, He (they) are “caught up unto God and to
His Throne” (Revelation 12:5). This is as much of a pre-tribulation
 “rapture”* as the Church is going to get: not a physical “removal”, but a
“catching up” of our focus to Reality, an anointing of our conscious
perception, a “revelation” of what already exists. There is “war in Heaven”’
and satan is ejected, “the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which
accused them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10, Zechariah
3:1-2). satan is “cast into the earth” (12:9,12) where,  for the duration of
the Great Tribulation (13:4), he is given authority to “try them that dwelt
upon the earth” (3:10, 13:11-18). The Church has always given the devil more
credit than he deserves, and they do so over his role in the Great
Tribulation. But whatever power and authority he will have on earth will
only be over those who give or surrender that power and authority to him. It
will be “given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them”
(Revelation  13:7,
 

*At the Resurrection, which is after the 3 ½ year Tribulation (Revelation
11:7-12, Matthew 24:29-31), yes, the Church is “caught up...to meet the Lord
in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). But where do we go? To Israel (Ezekiel
37:11-12) for Armageddon. Where does it say that we  depart before the
Tribulation and go hang out for the duration in some fluffy, secluded corner
of heaven, avoiding the scarey Tribulation scene for 3 ½ years? No way.
After directing the Tribulation (Revelation 11:3-6), the Two Witnesses and
the entire resurrected Nation (Ezekiel 37:11-12) are “transported” like
Philip (Acts 8:39) “in the air with the Lord” (Holy Ghost Airlines) to
Israel’s Plain of Jezreel for the last battle, not too hard a feat for a
resurrected Army.
The Last Jubilee,   36.

Daniel 7:21), but he can only overcome those who refuse to renounce their
“religion” and participation (Revelation 17:16-17, 18:4-5) in the great
Babylonian harlot (the worldly, “carnal” church), those who refuse to make
an exodus to Christ in the wilderness. Those who make that exodus are
protected in the wilderness for the duration of the Tribulation (12:6,
14-16). God also has every right to try us (Daniel 11:35, Matthew 24:9) and
prove His work: an element of our “overcoming” is that we “love not our
lives (Greek: “Psuche”: “psyche”: the “soul, soulish life, the self” and our
self-agency) unto the death” (Revelation 12:11). But we had better realize
that the moment satan is booted our of heavenly places, the tables are
turned: for him it’s all over but  for the shouting, flapping and transient
“wrath” of the Tribulation.  If satan has been given authority on the earth
to deceive (Matthew 24:4,5,24 ) those whom God has appointed for delusion (2
Thessalonians 2:9-12), the Two corporate Witnesses of Christ are given
authority on the earth and in heaven “to stand in the evil day” (Ephesians
6:13) and to “destroy” satan’s false advent “with the brightness of His
(Christ’s) coming” ( 2 Thessalonians 2:8). Daniel, in his vision (7:21-27),
saw that the devil

“made war with the saints and prevailed against them, until the Ancient of
days came and   judgment was given to the saints of the most High, and the
time came that the saints possessed the kingdom (which they do at the Last
Jubilee)...They shall be given into his hand (satan’s) until a time, and
times, and the dividing of time (the 3½ years of the Great Tribulation). But
the judgment shall sit (LXX: has sat), and they (the saints) shall take away
his (satan’s) dominion, to consume and destroy it unto the end”.

What does that say, saints? Doesn’t it say that, at the Last Jubilee, when
the saints finally possess their kingdom inheritance, when the Glory of God
comes into His Temple, which they are, that satan’s hold and deception will
be broken, and that for the 3½ year period of the Great Tribulation, the Two
Witnesses of Christ will conquer, consume and destroy satan’s work unto the
end? Isn’t that what it says? So what , if the Two Witnesses are killed at
the end of their prophecy: big deal; they are resurrected in just 3½ days
(Revelation 11:11-12 ), along with every other righteous soul who ever
lived, “an exceeding great Army” (Ezekiel 37:10). The dumb-head devil never
learns; every time he kills Christ singular (1 Corinthians 2:8) or Christ
corporate (Revelation 11:11,17,18; 19:14, Ezekiel 37:10-12), the Lord
returns with greater reinforcements. It is in the time of the Great
Tribulation that Daniel says (12:1) God’s people will be delivered. It
behooves us now to stir up our gifts, gird our loins, trim our lamps, shake
ourselves from the dust, awake and put on strength. If we want the double
anointing of Elisha (Isaiah 61:7, Zechariah 9:12), we had better be looking
at what God is doing prophetically with Elijah.

        Whatever access satan has enjoyed before God’s throne in the midst
of heaven (Job 1:6,  2:1, Ephesians 6:12, Zechariah 3:1), to “accuse”,
“hinder” and “buffet” Christians (Revelation 12:10, 1 Thessalonians 2:7, 2
Corinthians 12:7), the Door is about to be slammed in his face. We have been
“accused, hindered and buffeted” in the Gospel by satan’s subliminal, and
sometimes overt, suggestions of guilt, fear, doubt, and envy: “you’re never
going to make, you’re not good enough; God’s never going to accept you; God
won’t help you now, He can’t, not this time; this
The Last Jubilee,   37.

time you really blew it; you better do this, you better do that; at least
thank God your not as bad
as that ignorant reprobate, that self-righteous, snooty, that, that sinner
over there”. Just as Jesus was tempted of the devil 40 days in the
wilderness, so has each Christian been tempted every day for the 40 long
jubilees of our dispersion. Often we listen more to satan’s subliminal
whispers of fear, condemnation and accusation (directed at us, by us, and
through us) than we do to the “still, small voice” of grace. Heretofore, as
we have believed the Gospel, God has used satan’s legalistic skills of
accusation and condemnation as a “dark foil”: an instrument to illuminate,
by contrast, the overcoming power of Grace, of Christ’s blood, mercy, and
peace, of the power of His Faith by which He keeps us (1 Peter 1:5): every
time we reject a demonic lie, we are strengthened in the Truth; we rely less
on us and more on Jesus; we get littler, Christ gets bigger. Thus we
overcome. But every time we are deceived by “the accuser of the brethren”
(whisper: “this time you’ve gone too far; this time God won’t protect
 you...”) and believe his lying voice (condemnation) rather than the voice
of the Holy Spirit (conviction), we sink further into the bondage and
deception of religion: guilt, fear, envy and self-righteousness by works.
Guilt is really just fear of the past (God hasn’t forgiven me); fear is just
really guilt of the future (God won’t forgive me and protect me); both fear
and guilt are unbelief, doubt of God’s truthfulness and power. Sectarianism
is the solace of self-righteousness to which we flee because of ignorance
and unbelief; the Church (and all of us in it) have wallowed too long in
this mire. Thus are we hindered in The Faith (and we don’t even know it’s
the devil) and thus we are restrained from participation in God’s kingdom.
This is the work of the “accuser of the brethren” (Revelation 12:10): to
“hinder”, “restrain” (Greek: katecho: “to hold fast, hinder, prevent,
repress”) Christians; it is the “mystery of iniquity (lawlessness)” before
God’s throne: why is it I feel so condemned as I approach the throne of God?
If God loves and forgives me, who is it that whispers, suggests, implies all
this fear, failure and guilt? Romans 7:21: “when I would do good, evil is
present with me”. We forget that even now the sneaky devil, the mystery of
iniquity, stands against Christ our advocate before the Throne to accuse
(Zechariah 3:1) and will do so until the specific time when God brings forth
the Branch (Zechariah 3:2,8) and the accuser is “cast down, out of the
 midst” of the righteous:

“And now that which restrains (“katechon”: hinders”), ye know, for him to be
revealed in his own time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already working:
there is one (the accuser of the brethren) who alone restrains (ketechon:
“hinders, represses”), until he be gone out of the midst (of the saints).
And then shall be revealed the lawless one, whom the Lord shall consume...”
(2 Thessalonians 2:6-9, G. R. Berry).

Note that “that which restrains” is that which is “to be revealed in his own
time”, and that “then shall be revealed the lawless one”: i.e., “that which
restrains” is “the lawless one”. All this time we thought the Holy Spirit
was the one “restraining the mystery of iniquity”. Sorry, it’s not in his
job description (John 16:7-14). Think about it: it is not the Holy Spirit
who stands before the Throne of God “restraining” satan; rather it is Jesus.
It is not the Holy Spirit or Jesus who “restrains, represses and hinders” us
before the Throne of God; rather it is satan. It is not the Holy Spirit Who
restrains satan on the earth (otherwise satan would hardly be so
unrestrained);
The Last Jubilee,   38.

rather it is poor little old us (James 4:7, 1 Peter 5:9), the remnant,
praying Church, wrestling, flailing, failing, getting our butts kicked (2
Corinthians 4:5-12), barely hanging on with a promise, with a “just enough”,
first fruits, “down payment” anointing (Ephesians 1:14, 2 Corinthians 1:22),
waiting for the Jubilee: “until judgment was given to the saints of the Most
High and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom” (Daniel 7:22).

        When the Man child is born, the ministry of the Melchisedec Branch,
He (they) are “caught up” to Heaven: the virtual Kingdom of God becomes
actualized. The actual reality of God’s throne and their authority, as kings
and priests (Revelation 5:10), is revealed. There is war in heaven; there
has to be: there is not room in that domain for both an “accuser” and
“overcomers”. satan is thrown “out of the midst” of the saints in heaven
(Revelation 12:10, Zechariah 3:2) and down to the earth. Then comes the
Jubilee, the release, the cleansing of the Temple, and the Kingdom
anointing:

“Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the
power of His Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which
accused them before our God day and night. And they overcame him by the
blood of the Lamb , and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not
their lives unto the death. Therefore, rejoice, ye heavens (Jubilee!) And ye
that dwell in them”.

What a release and empowerment that is going to be: no more fear, no more
doubt, no more envy, no more condemnation, no more subliminal, nagging
whispers that God “can’t” or God “won’t”, no more need to defend an
indefensible “self”. The “Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus” (Romans
8:1-2) will have set us free from the law of sin and death, free to walk
with Christ without worldly demonic traffic in our souls and with
demonstrated assurance of overcoming. But

“Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and sea! For the devil is come down to
you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he has but a short time”.

When satan is cast down to the earth, “then shall that wicked be revealed”
 2 Thessalonians 2:8). satan’s “wrath” is to anoint with deception and
delusion (Revelation 13:12-18, Matthew 24:24, 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12), to
empower man’s pride, carnality and lust for the “old” lie (“you shall be as
gods”, Genesis 3:5, Isaiah 12:14), to anoint with deception a corporate

 “man of sin...the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above
all that is called God...so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God,
shewing himself that he is God”.

How does satan do this? When he is cast down to earth, he anoints the flesh,
the Self, the pride, the self-righteousness, the religion of those people
who are not “possessed by Christ”. This anointing is delusionary; satan
stages a false second coming of “corporate Christ”:

The Last Jubilee,   39.

“And then will be revealed the Lawless one, whom the Lord will consume with
the breath of His mouth and annual by the appearing (Greek: epiphaneia: the
“manifestation”, literally the “shining upon” by the Glory) of His coming;
whose coming is (lit. “Whose is the coming”) according to the working of
Satan in every power and signs and wonders of falsehood” (2 Thessalonians
2:8-9, G. R. Berry).

Clearly, Christ’s True Coming at the end of the Great Tribulation (Matthew
24:29-31, Revelation 11:15) will not be “according to the working of satan
in every...falsehood”. The coming of the false corporate christ, the
“Lawless one”, is the “working of satan”, and it pretends to be the coming
(“whose is the coming”) of Christ. “For many shall come in that day saying I
am Christ; and shall deceive many” (Matthew 24:5). For there to be a
“falling away” (the great apostasy) before the Day of Christ (2
Thessalonians 2:2-3), there must be a false “kingdom” manifestation, a false
“coming of Christ” to which lukewarm religious apostates will “fall away” in
delusion (2:11). If ever the world was ready for delusion, it is ready now.
Having prepared the world with deception (evolution, socialism, liberal
theology, political correctness, the endless media manipulation of truth,
the new-age thirst for “cosmic” or “Christ consciousness”), the world is
certainly now primed for deception. The culminating deception is personal
Messianic delusion, the kingdom of ecumenical Mystery Babylon: “Ye shall be
as God: Christ has come and WE are Him; We can do the work of God”. Reread
Matthew 24:5, “For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ”. “Then
shall his mind change, and he shall pass over, and offend, imputing this his
power unto his God” (Habakkuk 1:11), “so that he as God sitteth in the
temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (2 Thessalonians 2:4).

      If we think that our “act”, or “agency” of believing it what saves us,
we open the door to unbridled self-righteousness, conceit and deceit: a
“christian” religion; when we recognize that we are saved by Christ Jesus’
past, present and future “act” of believing (His agency), and we then seek
to walk only within the dynamic of Grace which works solely by His Faith, we
have Christianity. While “humanism/communism/evolution”, and the other
“-isms” which promote the delusion that you, I, “Israel”, collective
humanity, or “every man” is Messianic God, have gained ground since the
1850's, the false messiah “man as God” must yet “sit in God’s temple”and
prove to “himself that he is God” by exercising global sovereignty. We are
so close to this mass messianic delusion that the Church may misinterpret
the event if it searches only for a singular “Antichrist” figure. satan has
been staging and must yet fully stage a fraudulent “advent” of the kingdom
of Christ/Man upon the earth (the ultimate “abomination of desolation” of
Matthew 24:15) into which God will gather the tares/goats/stubble, the
lukewarm, the presumptuous and the Gospel-corruptors to be identified for
destruction (Revelation 3:16, Matthew 7:22, Galatians 1:9). That
“identification” is the purpose of the “mark of the Beast”.   The Glory of
God, the epiphaneia, upon the true Temple, “annuls” this kingdom
counterfeit: “whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth”. God’
s Two Witnesses are anointed to “rule in the midst of thine enemies” (Psalm
110:2) so that “fire proceedeth out of their mouth and devoureth their
enemies”(Revelation 11:5). So is this false “coming” and “kingdom” of Christ
held at bay for the 3 ½ year Great Tribulation, that the souls of men may be
sorted, and
The Last Jubilee,   40.

so is this false kingdom destroyed at and after the Resurrection of whole
Nation of Israel (Revelation 19).

       But what a Tribulation for the unsure, for the complacent, for those
needing “proof” by supernatural signs and wonders (Matthew 24:21-14, 2
Thessalonians 2:9, Revelation 13:13-14). No doubt the “false prophets”, with
convincing miraculous prodigies, will claim to be the Two True Witnesses,
and label the true as false (since we have been so well trained lately to
accept true as false and false as true); no doubt they will convince many
that the advent of their anointing, which is satanic (2 Corinthians
11:14-15) and delusionary (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12), is the advent of Christ,
the “millennial reign”, the “true” global, socialist kingdom of God for
every man; no doubt they will proudly persecute the “rebellious”, those who
refuse the Beast’s mark (Revelation 13:15-18), their fraudulent “Seal of
 God” (Revelation 7:4). You can see the issues will get “sticky”, and
difficult to accurately discern. One wants to trust his walk with “Christ”
only  to Jesus, and to no one else than Jesus (the Word of God): not to
failed clergy, elders, “wise” men, friends (Micah 7:5), and not to “old
manna”, yesterday’s direct revelation. We will have to learn to get it fresh
ourselves.

 Jesus told the true and faithful Church at Smyrna (Revelation 2:10),

“Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall
cast
 some of you into prison, that you may be tried; and ye shall have
tribulation ten  days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a
crown of life.”

The “ten days” is always the period of trial: ten days of prayer in the
upper room between the ascension of Christ and the pouring out of the
promised gift, the Holy Spirit, ten days for the Hebrew children in Babylon
to prove that their “common food” would sustain them. The “ten days of
tribulation” mentioned above may well refer to the “ten days of penitence”,
traditionally the ten days between the Feast of Trumpets and the Day of
Atonement. Leviticus 23:27, 29:

“Ye shall afflict (humble) your souls, and offer an offering made by fire
unto the   Lord... For whatsoever soul it be, that shall not be afflicted in
that same day, he   shall be cut off from among his people”.

The purpose of these Old Testament “penitential” days was to prepare one’s
soul for the Day of Atonement: was Israel sufficiently humbled, repentant
and obedient before God that He would accept the High Priest’s ministrations
and absolve the Nation for another year? The New Testament application ought
to be pretty clear: are we really prepared for a revelation of God, for His
Jubilee? Have we really emptied ourselves, abandoned our sanctimonious
agendas, put everything of “us” on the altar, entered fully into Rest? If
not, we will, for that is God’s agenda for us on “the Plains of Moab”.  We
try so hard to get everything “nailed down”, to make all the puzzle pieces
fit, to “get understanding” of all the details (exposition is certainly an
exercise in that), as if understanding (rather than Wisdom) might justify
us. But a sovereign God is not about to be confined by  any box of our
understanding.  He intends to  “confound the wisdom of the
The Last Jubilee,   41.

wise”. Remember the two “clocks”? The ten penitential days of God’s Perfect
Redemptive Year would transpire as 70 days of Tribulation history, 70 days
in which the Man child/Branch ministry of the Two Witnesses would be born,
there would be war in heaven, satan cast down, possibly a false “coming” of
Christ with intense religious revival and attendant false miraculous signs
and wonders. It is obvious that these events will be misunderstood and
misapprehended by most of the world and most of the Church. What happens in
the transcendent Spirit may explode into the material realm or it may
“trickle down” incrementally*. We may even now be
in the midst of these events; God may have begun already in the Spirit
domain, or He might choose further delay for purposes unknown to us. He is
God, and not required to operate within the limits of our puny
understanding. But in the frantic hurricane of deception, confusion and
destruction about to fall upon the world, there will be one calm eye in the
center: the Lord Jesus. It behooves us now to present ourselves before the
Throne of God continuously and let Him search and heal our hearts.

3b. Israel on the Plains of Moab

      The spiritual Nation of Israel finds itself “on the Plains of Moab”
near the end of its long wilderness journey of 40 jubilees; the “wilderness”
for the Temple is about to end, hopefully at or near the end of this year of
Jubilee, and for the Nation, 3½ years later, at the Feast of Trumpets, 2002.
The 3½ year difference in the arrival of these two events is dictated by the
3½ year difference between the two departures of the Shekinah Glory from
Temple and Nation which circumscribed the Roman Tribulation. A first fruits
company of saints (Revelation 7, 14:4), God’s Two Witnesses, is about to
cross its Jordan and obtain the possession of its long awaited inheritance.
The Spiritual Nation will enter after the Great Tribulation, after
completing
 
 

*in the impending heavenly war, God intends to “wound the head out of the
house of the wicked” (Habakkuk 3:13). If there is one single person alive
today who acts as the titular “head” of the “new world” order or “stands” in
the prophetic office of the Kings of Tyre and Babylon, it is Bill Clinton.
We can see from Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14 that the king of Babylon and Tyre
is obviously satan or one of his high lieutenants, as is the “accuser of the
brethren” (Revelation 12:9-10). These demonic personages, possibly one and
the same, are all “cast down to the earth” in the near future time frame
which we are considering. Clinton’s failed impeachment, the “casting down”
of his reputation, if not his presidency, is a sort of “trickle down”, a
“fore-shadowing” from the transcendent spiritual reality of the impending
war in heaven. The revelation of symbolic, spirituality significant,
fore-shadowed “natural” events in the material domain is determined by the
reality of “spiritual” events in the transcendent heavenly domain: God rules
in the affairs of men, and begins to show His hand. In like manner rumors
from archeologists like Vendyl Jones and Ron Wyatt of the soon expected
recovery/discovery in the material domain of long lost First Temple
artifacts (Ark of the Covenant, ashes of the red heifer, etc.) forecasts the
impending revelation of the True Temple Artifacts (Revelation 11:19) from
the heavenly domain. This “trickle down”, fore-shadowing effect signifies
the impending revelation of the transcendent spiritual domain. The pattern
in 1 Corinthians 15:46 holds: first the “natural” event, then the
 “spiritual” event.
The Last Jubilee,   42.

 its “revival” in the wilderness. The secular Nation of Israel, the
political entity we see grubbing with the Arabs for the dirt of Palestine or
squabbling with the Moslems for the “Temple Mount” in Jerusalem (a city last
referred to by God as “Sodom and Egypt”, Revelation 12:8), is not the Nation
of Israel (at least not yet ) which God long ago (Exodus 19:6) defined as “a
kingdom of priests, and a holy nation”. Peter expands this definition (1
Peter 2:9, G. R. Berry) and applies it to the Church:

“but ye are a chosen race, a kingly priesthood (Melchisedec), an holy
nation, a people for a possession, that ye might set forth the virtues of
Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light”.

The present conduct of secular Israel (or the present conduct of the carnal,
institutional, Babylonian “church”) can hardly be called”holy”. Despite the
good will, piety and zeal of Jewish (and Christian) religionists, the
ritual, liturgy, traditions, policies, programs, worship and works without
Christ are only dead, empty, arrogant, presumptuous posturings, effecting
“the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof” (2 Timothy 3:5).
Without their Messiah (Whose active Lordship most of Western Christianity
has also rejected), Jews and secular Christians inevitably sink into “works
religion” and the miasma of self righteousness, hardened hearts and arrogant
“jihad” mentality. Look at modern history: what is “holy” in the
self-justifying “slaughter of the innocents” inflicted far and wide “in God’
s name” and in the pretense that religious doctrine (Christians, Moslem or
Jewish), rather than the Person of Truth, can save?

        But God is about to redeem the “whole house of Israel” (Romans
11:15-29, Ephesians 2:11-16, Revelation 7:3-9). It is important to emphasize
that He will do so only through the Person of Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12, John
10:1-9, 14:6, Hebrews 1:1-2), and that the “chosen race” or “generation” is
a “spiritual” lineage through Christ and not a matter of carnal genealogy (1
Timothy 1:4, Titus 3:9). There is no “righteousness” whatever in the dubious
claim of tracing one’s own bloodline to Abraham (Galatians 3:16, Romans
4:13,24), whether the claim is made by modern “Jews” or Moslems, or Mormons,
or “British Israelites”, or whomever. God demands from everyone an “identity
crisis” of gigantic magnitude and cataclysmic effect upon our past  personal
and collective identities. The big “Me” and chauvinistic religious “labels”
have to go. Sooner or later, God “requires the soul” (Luke 12:20), an
accounting of “Self”, from all who would deal with Him, from “Christian” (1
Corinthians 3:3-23), “Jew” (Hosea 1:9-2:23, Revelation 2:9), and “Gentile”
(Isaiah 65:1, Romans 2:13-16). As God sifts and shakes and breaks up fallow
ground, old identities fade, prior definitions pass away. As the “Nation” or
“Body politic “ of God, our status as “Jew” (Romans 2:28-29), or “Israelite”
(Romans 9:6-8), or “Christian” (John 1:13) is defined by events of the
ongoing Spirit and not events of past religious or carnal experience. The
whole House of Israel (Romans 11:1-29), to be precise,  involves an
ingrafted “gentile” branch (Revelation 7:9) and a regrafted “Israelite”
branch (Revelation 7:4), both of whom become both “Christian” (Ephesians
2:12-18) and “Jew” (Romans 2:29). Beyond our identity effected by and in
Christ, our own carnal attempts to identify with “christian” and “jewish”
religion is entirely a self-deceptive waste of time.
 

The Last Jubilee,   43.

        Of the present “whole House of Israel”, however, only a “very small
remnant” (Isaiah 1:9) will be saved (“strait is the gate, and narrow is the
way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it”–Matthew 7:14):
those few who will continue “steadfast” to the end (Colossians 1:21-23,
Hebrews 3:6,14, Matthew 24:10,13) to pursue Christ both in and by the Spirit
(Romans 9:6-8) to the demise of their flesh and former religious identities.
At the end of our wilderness sojourn (1 Corinthians 10:1-12) the word is:
“wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall”: no
matter how much the Church may boast that it now possesses the Kingdom of
God, in fact it does not yet possess fully, and can lose what little it now
thinks it does possess (Hebrews 4:1,11, 1 Corinthians 3:15, Matthew 7:21-23,
Revelation 2:5, 3:5). What it possesses now is a “first fruit” anointing,
the “earnest of our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:17), a hope for the kingdom, a
promise contingent on remaining obedient to the “Faith of Jesus” (Revelation
14:12) throughout the duration of the Great Tribulation apostasy and
deception (2 Thessalonians 2:3, 9-12, Isaiah 6:12-13). In the midst of acute
millennial madness, Babylonian revival, false messiahs, “comings” of Christ
and eruptions of self-righteous xenophobia in the “kingdom” of a deluded
“church” (Revelation 13:7,12-18,  17:3-6, 2 Thessalonians 2:9, Matthew
24:21-26),

“The remnant of Israel, and such are escaped of the house of Jacob (natural,
“unconverted” Israel: Genesis 32:28), shall no more stay upon (LXX: join
with, trust in) him that smote them (“Pharaoh”, “Egypt”, “Babylon”, “Tyre”,
the world, satan and their own flesh and religion), but shall stay upon the
Lord, the Holy one of Israel, in truth. The remnant shall return, even the
remnant of Jacob, unto the mighty God” (Isaiah 10:20-21).

In the midst of false, religious, tribulation “revival”, a remnant will make
an exodus from Babylon (Revelation 18:2-5, Micah 2:10, Zechariah 2:7), from
the great House (2 Timothy 2:20-21) of institutional religion (Hebrews
13:10-14) to Christ “in the wilderness”, where “the way of the Lord” will be
prepared (Isaiah 40:3).

     To that end, God first brought a “natural” Body politic, “the House of
Jacob” a carnal, unconverted, secular, but potential “vanguard” of the
Nation of Israel, into the land, the physical dirt, the ancient material
land of Promise, the foreshadowed pre-figure of the Kingdom of Heaven, in
1948. While this was only a shadow, a pre-figure of the return of the “whole
house of Israel” to the possession of the Kingdom of God (which Ezekiel
37:11-14 places after the Resurrection), it put in motion the Law of Jubilee
and began the legitimate countdown to Daniel’s “Messiah the Prince” Who
would restore a remnant of unconverted Israelites to the true “Commonwealth
of Israel” (Ephesians 2:12-13), the Body Politic of Jesus Christ: the True
“Israel”, the “Prince of God”, the holy Nation. God did this with an eye to
the rigors of prophecy: the secular “hallowed year” (Leviticus 25:10), the
Year of “natural” Jubilee, fell precisely upon the dates anticipated by the
most element prophetic themes: the “six day/6000 year” sabbatical cycle,
Hosea’s “two day/2000 year” prediction, the metaphor of “40
 years/40jubilees” in the wilderness, and the Feasts of Israel. He did it
also with an eye to historical precision, figuring a subsequent ultimate
Last Jubilee in the Spirit, a 3½  year Great Tribulation to “restore all
things” (Acts 3:21, Hebrews 9:10) and bring modern history into alignment
with the original schedule of sabbatical years. He even brought in a “John
the Baptist” from the ancient Essenes, a Voice crying from the Judean
wilderness, a Scroll named to bear
The Last Jubilee,   44.

witness to His plan for The Last Jubilee. It would seem that God has gone to
some considerable effort to arrange Scripture, history, archeology and
modern political events to produce this elaborate “coincidence”; it ought to
make plain to Christians the issue of modern Judaism and secular Israel:

“As concerning the Gospel, they are (have been) enemies for your sakes: but
as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes” (Romans
11:28),

at least a “remnant” of them (“144,000", Revelation 7:4), are “beloved”, a
remnant as equally beloved and equally anointed (and maybe equal in number
to) the gentile Christian remnant which will awaken to God’s voice, gird up
its Laodicean loins and flee the “Babylon” of man’s current, carnal,
ecclesiastical construction. In the gathering strife of the impending
Tribulation (given both the hope of God’s undeserved mercy and the promise
of “severity” for those who fall, Romans 11:22), both Christians and Jews
who would seek God ought to go gently, kindly, and supportively with one
another.

    Despite the political maneuvering of modern Israelis and the pompous
posturings of  “christian” or “jewish” religionists, the true Nation of
Israel (the finished work upon the two spiritual remnants) remains
prophetically (or shall we say, positionally), still in the wilderness
(Hebrews 3:17-4:11) until the end of the Great Tribulation when the 40
jubilee wilderness sojourn for the Nation is finished. It is instructive,
therefore, that we may understand where we really are prophetically, to
examine the Old Testament “type” (the Nation’s wilderness sojourn under
Moses) and its New Testament “antitype”, the 40 Jubilee sojourn under
Christ. Under Moses, the first “national wilderness sojourn” of 40 years
began and ended with two “40 day” related events. The first event was a 40
day period of “spying out the land” by the twelve spies (each spy
representing a tribe, Numbers 13:2,25) whose majority unbelief provoked God’
s “breach (or “revoking”) of promise” (13:34) and their consequent 40 years
of wilderness “exile”. The second event at the end of 40 years, but
inclusive of the 40 years, was a 40 day “revival” on the Plains of Moab
which began Adar 1 (Deuteronomy 1:3) and ended Nisan 10 (Joshua 4:19), when
Israel crossed the Jordan. In this second 40 day period, Israel was
 “revived” in the Word: Moses gave them “Deuteronomy”: the “Repetition” or
“Second” coming of the “Law”), Joshua (Jesus) took command of the Nation,
and two unnamed spies (Joshua 2:1-2: unnamed, but representing Joshua and
Caleb, the original two faithful Witnesses) were sent into Jericho, the
enemy stronghold, to deliver Rahab and the other faithful. Meanwhile, twelve
representatives, one form each tribe, crossed the Jordan before the Ark of
the Covenant, which held back the flood while the nation crossed, and the
second 40 day period (and the 40 years in the wilderness) was ended: the
Nation of Israel was in the Promised Land.

        The New Testament fulfillment of this type is just ahead, and the
symmetry is breathtaking. The 40 Jubilee wilderness sojourn of True Israel
began and will end with two related events: the 3 ½ year Roman and the 3 ½
year Great Tribulations . In the first event, the Roman Tribulation
culminated 40 years of spying out the true Promised Land of the Spirit under
the leadership of
 
 

The Last Jubilee,   45.

the 12 Apostles, each representing a tribe*. The majority of Israel rejected
the true testimony of these “spies” (the Apostles) which provoked God’s
judgment on the Nation (faithful “Joshuas” and “Calebs” included) and the
consequent 40 jubilees wilderness exile. The second event, the Great
Tribulation, comes at the end of that 40 jubilee period for the Nation, but
is inclusive of it. Corresponding to the 40 days upon the Plains of Moab,
the 3 ½ year Great Tribulation will “in the wilderness”, prepare the way of
the Lord (and) make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah
40:3): the Nation will be revived with a “Deuteronomy”: a “second”
revelation of the Law” of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus, face to Face
(Ezekiel 20:35), the second half of the Year of Favor, the week of
“confirmed covenant”, a revival, by God’s Glory, of His true Temple in the
wilderness. Where Joshua replaced Moses in the type, now the Man child, the
plural Melchisedec ministry of “Messiah the Prince” replaces the old ruling
“priestly” order (Ecclesiastes 4:13-15, Isaiah 22:15-25, 1 Samuel 3:1-14)
and prepares the Nation for the command of Jesus the King, the “Captain of
the Lord’s Host (Joshua 5:14) and for the combat to come (Revelation 19). As
the two spies in the Old Testament type penetrated and paralyzed Jericho, so
do the Two Witnesses of Revelation 11 penetrate and paralyze “Babylon”, the
satanic religious and political counterfeit of God’s Kingdom which bars the
way to the “Promised Land”, and the faithful “Rahabs” are delivered. As the
twelve tribal representatives crossed the Jordan before the Nation crossed,
so do now 12,000 representatives of each tribe “cross” before the Nation
(Revelation 7:4-8, 14:1-5) into the manifested presence of Jesus, the Ark of
our Covenant Who holds back the flood for the Nation to cross.

       Where we are prophetically (at the start of the Great Tribulation) is
where the Old Testament Israelites were at their second 40 day revival: in
the wilderness (on the Plains of Moab) facing the fortress of “Babylon”
(Jericho) but not yet ready to cross the Jordan. There is yet a
“circumcision” (Joshua 5:2) to undergo, “a seal of the righteousness of the
faith” (Romans 4:11) in the foreheads “of the servants of our God”
(Revelation 7:3). While there may be a great Apostasy ( a “revival” of false
religion) about to occur, hopefully there will be a great Exodus of the
faithful from Babylon (Jericho) to Jesus (Joshua) “in the wilderness,
outside the institutional corruption of establishment “ecclesiastical”
religion. Remember that it is “into the wilderness” that God calls us to
make our feast to Him (Exodus 5:1, Hebrews 13:10-14); let us examine only a
little of what happens there (on the Plains of Moab) to the Nation of
Israel: a revisitation to the whole Nation of a New Testament “Deuteronomy”,
a “Second” revelation of the Law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus.

       Note that the Woman who brings forth the Man child (Revelation 12:1),
who is symbolic of heavenly Jerusalem, the Mount Zion of the True Church and
all the faithful remnant who dwell therein (Galatians 4:26, Revelation
21:10, Hebrews 12:22-25), “flees into the wilderness” (Revelation 12:6,14)
for the 3 ½ year period of the Great Tribulation. Heavenly Jerusalem, (Mount
Zion, the Church) is the Temple of God in the Spirit  (Revelation 21:10,22,
Hebrews 12:22, 1 Peter 2:5, 2 Corinthians 6:16), and it is in the
wilderness, free from the “strange gods” (Psalm 81:9) of worldly Egypt,
where the Temple  is revisited at last by God’s Shekinah Glory.

*Revelation 21:14 shows the 12 foundations of heavenly Jerusalem to be named
for the 12 Apostles; this was prefigured by the wilderness camp of Israel
under Moses which was also foursquare, three tribes on a side. This
associates each tribe with a foundation named for an Apostle.
The Last Jubilee,   46.

   When we, the Church, “flee into the wilderness” from false worldly
religion, from “ecclesiastical” deception and persecution, from the “wrath”
of the devil and his dupes trying to play God (and impose by force and fear
their false messianic “kingdom”-- Revelation 12:12, 13:7-8,  2 Thessalonians
2:3-4), we must realize and trust that we will be protected by God
supernaturally from the devil’s wrath: the Shekinah Glory of God will stand
about us as “a ring of fire” (Zechariah 2:4-5). Just as God’s protection of
the Israelites was total during the Egyptian Tribulation (the lamb’s blood
of the first Passover on their doorposts protected all the Israelites from
the death angel), during their Exodus (14:19-20) and throughout their
wilderness sojourn (13:21-22), the Shekinah Glory, Christ’s manifested
“kingdom” presence, will also physically pass over and effectively defend
the Church during the Great Tribulation, during her Exodus and during her
revival on the “Plains of Moab”:

“And the Lord will create upon every dwelling place of Mount Zion, (LXX:
“yea, all the region round about it”) and upon her assemblies, a cloud of
smoke by day, and the shining of a flaming fire by night: and upon (above)
all the Glory shall be a defense” (Isaiah 4:5).

Now, nobody messes with God’s Glory, period (1 Kings 18:38-40, 2 Chronicles
7:1-2, Isaiah 6:5,  Daniel 10:17, Acts 9:3-4, Revelation 1:17). satan may
try to deceive us with a counterfeit glory (Revelation 13:13), but he is
utterly helpless before the genuine manifestation (Revelation 11:5, 2
Thessalonians 2:8). Now the whole creation itself, long awaiting the

“manifestation of the sons of God...that the creation itself shall be freed
from the bondage of corruption into the freedom of the Glory of the children
of God” (Roman 8:18-23, G. R. Berry),

enters the liberty of God’s Glory and actively augments God’s plan of
protection by “swallowing up the flood” of satan’s wrath (Revelation 12:16,
Isaiah 6-9).  So, first, we must realize, we will be protected by God’s
Glory in the wilderness.

      Second, the material creation, wherever God’s family stands, like
Goshen during the Egyptian Tribulation, is released from corruption and
restored to Edenic purity and innocence:

“For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and
He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the
Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice
of melody” (Isaiah 51:3).

We too will return in the wilderness to the way of holiness (the way to
Zion); in so returning we too shall rejoice and be healed:

“The wilderness and solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert
shall rejoice and blossom as the rose...they shall see the Glory of our
Lord, and the excellency of our God. Strengthen ye the weak hands and
confirm the feeble knees...Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and
the ears of the deaf shall
The Last Jubilee,   47.

be unstopped. Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the
dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the
desert...A highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way
of holiness... No lion shall be there...but the redeemed shall walk there:
The ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and
everlasting joy upon their heads” (Isaiah 35).

The Lord intends “to proclaim” ( in fulfillment of the ultimate Jubilee, the
Year of Favor) “the day of vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:2). But notice
the very next line after the proclamation of the “day of vengeance”. In the
midst of the day of vengeance He also intends

“(3) to comfort all that mourn; to appoint unto them that mourn in Zion, to
give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of
praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they might be called trees of
righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He might be glorified...(6) Ye
shall be named Priests of the Lord”.

       Third, we must realize that it is God’s purpose to completely and
finally restore the Church, the Nation and the whole Creation in the
wilderness, just prior to Christ’s return (Acts 3:21). This will be the time
of ultimate “reformation” ( Hebrews 9:10 Greek: “diorthosis”: the time of
“rectification, of thorough straightening”. To accomplish this, God’s Spirit
and Glory will cause us to be revived in the wilderness, initially as
singular individuals, and then corporately as the Body of Christ. As
individuals, gathered one by one (Jeremiah 3:14, Isaiah 27:12,51:2), coming
into our own lonely obedience and exodus from our own peculiar bondages to
the world, we each alone, in our solitary responsibility, must come out of
“Babylon” to deal directly with King Jesus, our “consuming fire” (Hebrews
12:29):

“And I will bring you out from the people, and will gather you out of the
countries wherein ye are scattered, with a mighty hand, and with a stretched
out arm, and with fury poured out. And I will bring you into the wilderness
of the people, and there will I plead with you face to face (Ezekiel 20:34).

And will this revival be orchestrated by the elders, led by evangelistic
stars, a televised “pep rally” crusade? Or will it be filled with snappy
music, manic laughter, silly barking, the charismatic hoopla of Toronto with
cheerful multitudes “slain in the Spirit”, tipping gracefully over
backwards? Not hardly;

“The sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness hath surprised the hypocrites.
Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell
with everlasting burnings?” (Isaiah 33:14);

“And I will cause you to pass under the rod, and I will bring you into the
bond of the covenant; And I will purge out from among you the rebels, and
them that trespass against me....And there shall ye remember your ways, and
all your doings, wherein ye have been defiled; and ye shall loathe
yourselves in your own
The Last Jubilee,   48.

sight for all your evils that ye have committed” (Ezekiel 20:37, 38, 43).

Yes, God will heal us, will wipe away every tear from our eyes, but not
until we, each one, ourselves, own up to the carnality, rebellion and
religion from which He wants to deliver us. Then we can cry the real tears
He so much wants to wipe away. God knows, and we ought to know, that there
is no forgiveness without repentance, and no repentance without the death of
self. The beginning of revival, of Life, is always death: “Except a corn of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). What applies to Jesus, applies to
us: “when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his
seed,  he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper
in his hand” (Isaiah 53:10). Yes, we are to accept that Jesus offered, not
just his body, but His soul for us. If our salvation is real, shall we not
do the same (Romans 12:1, Philippians 3:7-11)?

       Fourth, we will renewed in the wilderness in the marriage covenant
between Christ and His betrothed (Hosea 2:14-23):

“Therefore, behold I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and
speak comfortably unto her....And I will take away the names of Baalim out
of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered by their name....And I
will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in
righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving-kindness, and in mercies. I
will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the
Lord. And it shall come to pass in that day, I will hear (LXX: “hearken
 to”), saith the Lord, I will hear (hearken to) the heavens and they shall
hear (hearken to) the earth....And I will say to them which were not my
people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.”

However sordid and soiled, calloused and craven, befuddled and besotted the
worldly Church may have been with the filth of our own righteousness
(Zechariah 3:3, Isaiah 64:6),

“When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion,
and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the
spirit of judgement, and by the spirit of burning”,

then shall the Bride be ready to ride forth with Christ as the
“sanctified...host of the battle” (Isaiah 13:3-4, Revelation 19).

        Next, we are reconnected in the wilderness. The “carcase” (Hebrews
3:17, Matthew 24:28) of the Church, the long comatose, incapacitated,
paralyzed, separated and isolated Body of Christ is revived individually and
reconnected as the victorious Church Militant (Ezekiel 37:78):

and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones
came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the
flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above but there was no
breath in them.”
The Last Jubilee,   49.

Reconnected, but there was “no breath in them”. The Body of Christ cannot
operate as a corporate unit until it has finished its individual, “cellular”
revival in the wilderness, until every stone is dressed in the quarry ( 1
Kings 6:7), until it completes its preparations on the Plains of Moab and
each has crossed the “Jordan” of his own volitional death and resurrection
(Philippians 3:10). To stand upon our feet, corporately, as “the host of the
Lord”, the ultimate military unit, the great Army of the “whole house of
Israel”, we need the ultimate anointing (Ezekiel 37:9-10): the Resurrection
of the dead (Ezekiel 37:12-13, which comes at the end of the Great
Tribulation, Matthew 24:29-31) to fill the ranks with all the saints who
ever lived (Revelation 6:9-11). It is only after the completion of our
preparations in the wilderness (Plains of Moab Boot Camp) that God takes the
Nation across the “Jordan” of the Resurrection, defeating death forever, and
the “exceeding great Army...the whole House of Israel”, after its Passover
“on the Plains of Jericho”, goes forth for the final vanquishing of His foes
at Armageddon.

     We also will be reunited in the wilderness. The long estrangement
between the natural branch (Judah, the Jews, natural Israel) and the
spiritual branch (Joseph, the “prophetic”” Church), the Two Witnesses who
stand before the Lord (Revelation 11:4, Zechariah 4:12 , Romans 11:17-24)
will finally end. Jesus will “make in Himself of twain, one new man”
(Ephesians 2:15):

“Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For
Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another
stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the
house of Israel his companions: and join them one to another into one stick;
and they shall become one in thine hand...And I will make them one nation in
the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them
all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided
into two kingdoms any more at all” (Ezekiel 37:16, 17, 22).

    It is important to remember that the Great Tribulation tribulates those
who dwell as “inhabitants of the earth” rather than those who “dwell in the
heavens” (Revelation 12:12). Those who have “kept the word of (Christ’s)
patience (Greek: hupomone: to “abide or remain under” Lordship,
 “submission”), I also will keep (them) from the hour of temptation, which
shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth”
(Revelation 3:10).There is a big difference between “being led by the
 Spirit” and “using the gifts of the Spirit to lead”. The faithful remnant
of Zion (Hebrews 12:22-25) dwells at rest (Hebrews 4:3,9-11) in the
heavenlies (Philippians 3:20, Colossians 3:1), raised up and “seated
together in Christ” (Ephesians 2:6) in the heavenly Tabernacle. “These are
they which follow the lamb whithersoever He goeth” (Revelation 14:4).
Tribulation means destruction for the wicked, but it also means deliverance
for the righteous, deliverance from any tie that binds us to material
dependence. We are told, endlessly, by those who anticipate an escapist
“rapture”:

“but as the days of Noah were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man
be...Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other
left” (Matthew 24:37,40).

The Last Jubilee, 50.

The “Rapturists” want to say that the righteous, i.e., Noah and his family,
sailed away while the wicked were left to be destroyed. This is actually a
bit of a short term view. In reality, if you waited only until the Flood was
a little over six feet deep, long before the end of 40 days, the wicked were
taken away, and the righteous were left. And where were the righteous during
the 40 day flood of God’s wrath? They were in intimate proximity to God’s
wrath (Psalm 91:8, Revelation 11:6), but safe in the Ark of Christ (1 Peter
3:21). In the Great Tribulation, we will be walking in the earth, but we
shall be no longer of it; instead we will be of Heaven. After the
Tribulation separates the wicked from the righteous (Matthew 13:41), the
wicked will be taken away, and it is the righteous who will do the job (1
Corinthians 6:2, Revelation 6:2, 11:5, 19:14, Matthew 24:29-31, Habakkuk
3:13, Isaiah 13: 3-5, Psalm 50: 4-5). How? When? After they have been
restored, revived, renewed, rectified, reconnected and reunited in the
wilderness.

      Where do we find this wilderness? In the Spirit, in Christ Jesus, in
the Holy Tabernacle of His Person in the heavenlies, away from the “great
House” of religion (2 Timothy 2:20-21), “outside the camp” (Hebrews
13:10-14) of those who serve the manmade, institutional “temples” of their
own confused, corrupt construction (2 Corinthians 6:14-18). The gross
opulence and tinsel splendor of our crystal cathedrals, the strut and pomp
or our arrogant nicolaitan clergy (Revelation 2:6,15: “nikao”: “to conquer,
overcome”, “laos”: “the common people”), the silly Babylonian rituals, the
mechanized, pre-formulated charismatic “spontaneity”, the liturgy and
brain-dead tradition, the utter failure of the “social” gospel: Christ, and
His Glory, left all that “Churchianity” in the first century. Christians
seek “the city to come”, the true heavenly Tabernacle “which the Lord
pitched, and not man”(Hebrews 13:14,8:2,9:11,24), and ought not settle for
some mere carnal replica, no matter how convenient or pleasing to the flesh.
The Lord, Who is that heavenly Temple (Revelation 21:22), just wants us to
hang out with Him (Micah6:8) to hide ourselves in Him, like the old hymn
says, “Rock of Ages, cleft for me; let me hide myself in Thee”. The
Scripture is plain:

“Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy presence from the pride of man”
(Psalm 31:20), and

“For in the time of trouble He shall hide me in His pavilion: in the secret
of the tabernacle shall He hide me; He shall set me up upon a rock. And now
shall my head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me: therefore will
I offer in His tabernacle sacrifices of joy” (Psalm 27: 5-6), and

“Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about
thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be
overpast. For, behold, the Lord cometh our of his place to punish the
inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity” (Isaiah 26: 20-21), and

“Seek ye the Lord, all ye meek of the earth, which have wrought His
judgment; seek righteousness, seek meekness. It may be ye shall be hid in
the day of the Lord’s anger (Zephaniah 2:3), and

“Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know
it? I will even make a way in the wilderness...(Isaiah 43:19).
The Last Jubilee,   51.

4. THE AGENCY OF CHRIST

      In the Great Tribulation, those who want to flee the religious “works”
of Egypt will find Jesus in the wilderness: by His anointing poured out, by
the ministry of His Glory (Malachi 3:1-3), there will be for those people an
overwhelming, instant, face-to-Face recovery of the experience of Christ.
What the latter day Church has experienced heretofore of the presence of the
Lord is a drought compared to the outpouring of the latter rain which will
bring the harvest to fruition. Whether or not we want to admit it, the
“establishment” Church has become a harlot, mouthing platitudes about the
Cross and “Lordship” and the “centrality” of Christ, while blithely touting
its own wasteful, self aggrandizing, willfully ignorant, self-promoting and
(frankly) embarrassing, religious hype: “O go work for Jesus; He has no
mouth but yours, no feet but your feet, no hands but your hands!” What
blather. The Lord Jesus Christ is not a deaf/dumb quadriplegic. People who
spout this nonsense spend their lives either collecting religious scalps or
building a wasteland of pitiful, self-righteous, sanctimonious religion,
stubble and tinder. It will be quite a day when that pomposity goes up in
smoke, when the “kingdom” of the Church fries in the presence of the Kingdom
of God (1 Corinthians 3:11-15, Malachi 4:1, Revelation 18:18-20). Here
(Matthew: 7:22-23) ought to be a very sobering scripture:

 “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy
name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many
wonderful works? And then I will profess unto them, I never knew you: depart
from me, ye that work iniquity.”

Do we really think we will be standing by, smug in our religion, proud of
our works, when He thunders, “Depart from me!” But of course He would never
speak that way to us, only someone else (possibly the “unchurched”). Do we
think that God really needs our help to do His work? Read 1 Corinthians
1:27-29:

“God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and
God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which
are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised,
hath God chosen , yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things
that are: that no flesh should glory in His presence.”

It says that God will use “things which are not” to accomplish His work. How
willing are we to be “foolish, weak, base, despised, nothings”? Or how many
“foolish, weak, base, despised, be nothing”, Cross-walking martyrs are there
packing the pews of our fat, sleek, smarmy American churches (“God, I thank
thee that I am not as other men, extortioners,  unjust, adulterers...I fast
twice a week, I give tithes of all that I possess...I am rich and increased
with goods, and have need of nothing” (Luke 18:11-12, Revelation 3:17)?
Mostly, in America, Christians are either “lukewarm” potential sputum
(Revelation 3:16) or “activists” playing God, building little piles of
ministerial rubbish. If this were not so, if we, the American Church, really
were the successful, vibrant, spiritual Power house we imagine ourselves to
be, satan, his minions, and his deceptions, could never command the moral,
political, academic and economic life of this land as they do. The main line
Church in America has been about as effectual as the Russian Orthodox Church
in Moscow on the eve of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution,  literally debating
The Last Jubilee,   52.

how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. We have been taught to
seek comfort, social acceptance, power and wealth, an earthly, carnal,
pragmatic, political power base in the temporal and material slums of
Babylon (and we believed the teaching!) rather than holiness and the Cross,
and citizenship in the “City to come”, the true Zion, the true Tabernacle of
Christ in the Spirit. So we just do our little Bible studies, dispense our
warm fuzzies and pretend we’re saved. We trundle off to “witness” (whatever
that means) and try to do the “work of God” rather than the “Will of God”,
trying to build ourselves a Kingdom of God which already exists. No wonder
the devil gives us so much help to succeed materially: the carnality of
Christians is his greatest asset. We need to realize that “when I would do
good, evil is present with me” (Romans 7:21); if I try to do the work of
God, I am trying to be God rather than be the work upon which God works: the
workmanship (Ephesians 2:10) which He alone can do. Big difference.

      We talk a lot about the “centrality of Christ”, but we have lost
Christ as the Center, as the dynamic of our Christianity. Now we think that
we are the center and the dynamic, and so the Church in America has become
moribund and contemptible. The great end time Apostasy of the Scriptures
(Isaiah 6:12,59:13-15, 2 Thessalonians 2:3) began in the mid-to-late 1800's
with the triple deceptions of evolution in Science, marxism in political
Ethics, and liberal revisionism in Theology. Since evolution demotes the
Creator to a mythic “Big Bang”, and since socialism/communism can produce
heaven on earth for all without God, and since revisionism has reduced the
authority and veracity of Scripture to vague uncertainty, God has gradually
but inevitably faded from our conceptual landscape. In each area, humanistic
relativism has replaced objective Absolutism as the pervasive intellectual
context; if “reality” is merely what we think it is, rather than what God
knows it is, not only has our capacity for logic become damaged, but God’s
very existence has become marginalized in our critical thinking and casual
speculation. That paints the Apostasy with a rather broad brush; we will
concentrate in detail on the deception in Theology, specifically on Who does
the works of faith.

      People choose to believe things themselves, each one; they maintain
individual, discretionary “belief systems”. Indeed, God maintains their
right to do so, even to their own destruction. In this post-modern age, we
are encouraged to work up our own “theology”: figure out what we believe. In
the name of “thinking for ourselves”, most people quickly conform to “group
think”, the politically correct consensus: psychobabble replaces logical
discourse; “sensitivity” replaces integrity. Promoting conformity to
consensus and polishing the facade of the latest group-think idol has
replaced the quest for “absolute Truth”. When I believe something, it is,
obviously, I who choose what I believe, and actually do or conduct the act
of believing, even if it is “group think”. I am the agent of my choice and
the agent of my faith. Humanistic relativism pretends that my working out of
my theology, i.e., conforming to “group think”, is salvation. Education,
which use to “lead us out”, reverts to indoctrination. In the ancient, but
now eroded, intellectual framework of Absolutism, however, the focus was
upon a different Agent: God. Since God was God, it was obvious that God was
also (and still is) the Agent of His own Choice and Faith (objective
Absolutism), just as I am of mine (subjective relativism), and that what He
chose to believe was somewhat more accurate, true and desirable than what I
choose to believe. It may come as a surprise to many post-moderns, but it is
not exactly automatic that God must choose to believe the same things about
the same things as post-modern man believes. When Paul says “we have the
mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16), we moderns (accustomed as we are to
instant gratification) conveniently ignore the Cross: the self-sacrifice and
discipline required to get from
The Last Jubilee,   53.

here to there, from me to Christ. While God is not capable of acting
immorally or being deceived, you and I certainly are, and so, too, are
modern dupes of Humanism and subjective relativism. If we examine God’s Word
(His disclosure to us of what He believes), and the history of what and how
He has faithfully chosen, we find that God has an objective belief system,
the Faith of Christ, and that what God believes is absolutely true. The
omniscient Person of Truth chooses what is true; His omnipotence makes His
act of choosing absolute; His autonomy from mankind, from all created
objects, makes Him, and Him alone, objective. Truth is, by definition and
agency, absolute and objective, the exclusive currency of God; there is no
such thing as “relative, subjective” truth*. It is Jesus , the agent of The
Faith of Christ, Who, in spite of our subjective deceptions, remains the
sole, absolutely undeceived central dynamic of the Church, even if we,
deceived by pervasive humanistic relativism, have tried to usurp His
position. What Christ believes is absolutely true, regardless of how
confused, splintered and disordered Christian doctrine has become. Now He is
about to reclaim and recover His position in our thinking, with or without
our cooperation.

        After Jesus received our judgment for sin, He died on the Cross,
and, by the operation of His faith (Colossians 2:12), He bore us “together
with Him” trough death (Colossians 2:13), and ascended “together with us
(Ephesians 2:6) to His spiritual Kingdom: the true heavenly Jerusalem
(Hebrews 12:22-24), “for of us the commonwealth in the heavens exists”
(Philippians 4:20, G. R. Berry). We now reside there at rest in His finished
work, the “spirits of just men make perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). Question: when
did this resurrection occur? Answer: in His flesh and in our spirit, 1969
years ago. Problem: how, you might ask, could our “spiritual” resurrection
occur 1969 years ago, how could we then, at that time, be “born again”
 Greek: born “anothen”, “from above, from the top”) when we were not yet
born in the flesh? Now this concept does stretch us and our religion a
little, just like it did Nicodemus.

        It is important that we recover the concept of Who did and does the
choosing and believing in the Church: Who is the agent of choice and faith.
We are told that we choose Christ, and we believe, and this is what saves
us. This is such a small fraction of what is true, that to focus our
salvation here beggars Reality, and turns Jesus into some ancient mendicant,
a bit player in the play of Our salvation; we become the star rather than an
audience witnessing the spectacular pageant of universal redemption; our
praise of the Author becomes a bit casual and perfunctory if we are audience
and  actor and director of the play. In modern  times, we have lost the
vision of God and Christ as the Agent of our choice and Faith, and so
usurped His agency with our own. No wonder we are spiritual pygmies; no
wonder our vision and gospel is so mundane. Why are we saved? Because we
chose God, right? I mean I was saved at 4:42 p.m., June 12, 1961, in Aunt
Maud’s kitchen in Shreveport because I chose Jesus as my personal Lord and
savior, right? No mention of all the bloody, horrid, deadly muck Christ had
to wade through in my heart (me resisting every inch of the way) to get me
there to Shreveport, and to get me here from Shreveport. Isn’t it a little
crass and fantastical for us to take such credit for His work?
 

*Truth by definition is absolute. No way, they say: what’s true for me is
true for me, a what’s true for you, is true for you; truth is relative. To
which to we reply: is it absolutely true that truth is relative? Without the
objective existence of God as the Knower of Truth, and the Agent professing
truth to us, “truth” becomes philosophically inconceivable. Is it any wonder
the world is bonkers without God?
The Last Jubilee,   54.

     John 15:16 says that we did not “choose” God, but rather that He chose
us. Maybe, if He chose us, then God is the agent of choice, and His act of
choosing us, rather than our act of choosing Him, deserves a little more of
our attention. His choice, not ours, after all, set in motion our salvation.
It happens that only God, and not we ourselves, chose us to be in Christ
(Ephesians 1:3-5), foreknew us, predestinated, called, justified and
glorified us (Romans 8:29-30). In all that choosing, God acted as the sole
agent, since the occurrence of that choosing happened “before the
foundations of the world” (Ephesians 1:4), somewhat before we could bring to
bear our own agency. Why, then, do we spend so much time, energy and gooey
sentiment on our own acts, choices, behaviors, works, our myopic testimony,
our puerile participation is Salvation? It is not, after all, my obedience
that saves me before the Throne of God, it is Jesus’s obedience; Jesus says
He will keep from the hour of trial those who “have kept the word of my
(i.e., His, rather than our) patient endurance” (Revelation 3:10). Our
striving to obey “law” ourselves, even in a New Testament context, places us
under the old, impossibly heavy burden of “works” to obtain righteousness
(Galatians 5:1-5), which burden has now been removed by the Faith of Christ
(Romans 10:2-10). If this were not so, if our obedience, rather than Christ’
s obedience, was what “worked” our salvation, how could Christ’s Spirit
bring us from our happy rebellion and cheerful disobedience (“when were yet
sinners”) to His obedience? How could He now keep us when we still yet fall,
as we still all do (1 John 1:8, Romans 7:18-23) into temporary deception or
rebellion?

       It is not our obedience which saves us, but the fact of the Cross:
the “new Creation” revealed by God into which we awake from the death of
self; it is our volitional, subjective crucifixion of “Big Me” as the
tyrannical, selfish Lord of our lives which activates for us the power of
God (1 Corinthians 1:18) and the new Creation (Galatians 6:14-15). A
wonderful thing happens when we focus on Christ’s present time obedience
rather than our own: against all the sneaky rebellion of our flesh, the lure
of the world, and the lies of the devil, we become That upon which we focus:

“But we all, with open (unveiled) face beholding as in a glass the Glory of
the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by
the Spirit of the Lord” (2  Corinthians 3:18).

      Now, Whose belief system, Whose Faith,, was the operant dynamic 1969
years ago at the Resurrection? Only Christ’s faith comprehended His future
body and brethren? (Psalm 139:15-16, 89:50, and Himself as their
resurrection vehicle, the Ark of our salvation), and only the Father’s Faith
could act as the “agent” for our collective Resurrection when Jesus was in
the tomb. The King James Version at Colossians 2:12 says

          “Ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God”;

Martin Luther translated this as “durch den Glauben, den Gott wirfet”:
“through the Faith,   which God works”. Obviously, “our” faith, our own
subjective, personal, individual or collective systems of believing, our
agency of choice and faith, is not sufficient for this task. None of us now
living had been born in the flesh when the Resurrection happened, and the
disciples then living were blown away by the Crucifixion, choosing instead
the “belief” and obedience of doubt and fear. No individual or collective
“Christian” faith,  now or then,  was on line,  only God’s.
The Last Jubilee,   55.

Why do we crow so much about “our” faith, personal or collective, as though
it were something we generated?

      Let us be real. By Whose Faith do all things, right now in this
present time, work together for good (Romans 8:28)? Yours and mine? Whose
Faith directs, extends, prolongs, and perfects the trials which you and I
pray so fervently to avoid? How about when we are “pressed beyond life” ( 2
Corinthians 1:8) even to disbelief ( 2 Timothy 2:13)? Whose faith prevails
then? Our own? Hardly. It is the Faith of Jesus, operated by Jesus. How many
of us really believe we have been made “perfect” by the blood of Christ
(Hebrews 10:14,12:23), have been “glorified” (Romans 8:30), especially when
we really screw up for the umpteenth time? Jesus does, and sometimes He’s
the only one Who does. Having predestined us “to be conformed to the image
of His Son” (Romans 8:29), Whose faith directs Providence in all the myriad
details of grace (wisely placed way beyond our knowledge of understanding),
that are sequenced to unfold so perfectly to bring us through rebellion to
submission? By Whose Faith does History project the testimony of Prophecy,
details unknown to us before they unfold? Jesus is the “Author and Finisher
of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), yet we strut about boasting how much faith we
have, pumping up “our” faith like some old flat tire, as if the gift of
Faith (Ephesians 2:8) had some value separate from the Giver.

      The difference between Christ the Agent of Faith and us the agent of
faith is crucial to the Christian experience. We the agent of faith can
believe anything, error, lies, truth. We may believe, as true, religious
doctrine that is flagrantly wrong. We might believe that we can pray for any
presumptuous, selfish, covetous wish “in the name of Jesus” and that God
must therefore “prosper” us. We can believe in our faith as the mechanism
that saves us, and so make it an idol. Our act of believing, even that Jesus
is God, does not save us: even demons believe (James 2:19) and recognize
that Jesus is the Son of God (Matthew 8:29, Luke 8:28). Demons even seem to
obey Christ somewhat more smartly than some Christians do. No, it is Jesus,
acting as the Agent of our faith Who thereby saves us, by the process of
revealing to us that He has been formed within us (Galatians 1:16, 4:19) and
is the Doer in us of all His works (Ephesians 2:10), working in us not only
the will to believe, but the work of belief (Philippians 2:13) itself, the
Faith of Christ (Galatians 2:20).

       So what is the proper response of a Christian? If we are to be led by
God, and show forth the responsive works that justify faith (James 2:17-24),
which make faith alive, what do we do? John 6:28-29:

“Then said they unto Him, what shall we do that we might work the works of
God? Jesus answered and said unto them, “This is the work of God, that ye
believe on (Greek: “eis”: “into”) Him Whom He hath sent.”

God’s work, which He continuously works within us as the Agent of Faith,
causes us to believe: “This is the work of God, that ye believe”. We
literally give birth to Christ within us (Galatians 1:16, 4:19), so that He
might do the work of believing within us, so that He can act as the Agent of
our faith, which faith is then replaced by His. In this way we “believe into
Him”: we believe into Him doing the believing. Philippians 2:13 says, “it is
God who worketh in you both will and to do of His good pleasure”; Galatians
2:20 (KJV):

The Last Jubilee,   56.

“I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ
liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the Faith
of the Son of God”.

G. R. Berry’s translation of this verse clarifies Christ as the Agent of
Faith: “but that which I now live in flesh, in faith I live, that of the Son
of God who”. The original Greek construction of “of the son of God who”is:
“tou uiou tou Theou, tou”, five genitive endings in a row, a deliberate
defensive underscoring by God of doctrine He knew would be attacked. To give
way to a place for Christ to do the believing within us is an expression of
the Cross: we abandon trying to do the believing ourselves; we trust Him to
do the believing; we enter into Rest. Thank God., in our trials of ignorance
and confusion, Jesus knows what to believe: “if we believe not, yet He
abideth faithful: He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13). If it is my
agency of faith, my doing the believing, upon which I must depend, there is
frankly, not much hope for me.  Very often, I know not what to believe, what
to pray, and I fail. Sometimes I doubt; sometimes I believe fear or guilt or
some other satanic lie. Sometimes I’m too tired to believe anything. But if
it is Jesus, the Agent of Faith, Who is doing the believing inside of me,
then Faith becomes His instant, constant, overcoming presence, “the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews
11:1). To get to His Faith (if we recognize that we need have none of our
own), all we have to do is rest. Faith then indicates the dynamic presence
of Jesus and His kingdom within. It is Christ in us Who is our hope of
Glory, not what we believe, not our faith, not our works, not our agency.
Jesus knows what to believe, how to pray (Romans 8:26) and never fails. So
what is our proper response? The Cross: we abandon our agendas, our
opinions, our belief systems, our agency of believing, our “faith”, and we
trust, like a little child, to the Faith of Christ, and to His perfect
knowledge and abilities as our Agent.

       Now just for fun, pick up any old King James Bible and compare it to
any revised version (including the New King James) at Romans 3:22, Galatians
2:16, 20, Philippians 3:9,  Colossians 2:12 and Revelation 14:12. Where the
old King James and the Lutheran Bibles, the two translations which fueled
and fed the Protestant Reformation, clearly present the Faith of Christ, His
agency, as the operant dynamic of Christianity, the “revised” translations
obscure the agency of Christ and promote our agency, our faith in Christ, as
the dynamic of salvation. This is obvious deception and corruption of the
word of God, subjective relativism displacing objective Absolutism. Read the
Septuagint (LXX) of Habakkuk 2:4: God says “The just shall live by My faith”
. It is not our faith in Christ (our agency), nor can it be, which we are
required to keep and maintain in the midst of a false revival that promotes
man as God (our agency). No, we must keep the Faith of Christ (Revelation
14:12) which shows Christ as God’s Agent; the testimony that Jesus is Christ
is to be honored, defended, not the testimony that we or “every man”is
Christ. How can God intend that we think ourselves to be “justified” by  our
own (rather than His own) faith? People, most Christians included, believe
all manner of silly things that aren’t true, and there is all manner of
diametrical contradiction in the “statements of faith” or collective schemes
of belief in the multitudinous different sects of Christianity. Jude (3)
tells us that we “should earnestly contend for the faith which was once
delivered unto the saints”. Just for whose faith are we earnestly to
contend? Our own? Mine? Yours? Baptists? Charismatic? Some tepid, ecumenical
consensus? Some reincarnated Babylonian cacophony? No. We will never come
into “the unity of the faith” (Ephesians 4:13) until we recognize that it is
Christ’s Faith (His agency) into which we are supposed to enter.   The Faith
belongs to a living, omnipresent, omniscient
The Last Jubilee,   57.

Jesus Who does the believing. We cannot continue to abuse either The Faith
or the Agent by usurping His agency. We would not dare to believe otherwise.
Woe to them who do.

       When we focus on our agency rather than His, which is what the
Revised versions of the New Testament require us to do, then we must
increase and Christ must decrease. If we are saved because we believe, then
we have reason to boast before God: we can earn our salvation by believing,
and we can earn a better salvation by believing better*. People afflicted
with this delusion bustle about trying to establish their own righteousness
(Romans 10:3) by the application of their own subjective faith to
situations, works and plans outside of God’s ordination. God’s righteousness
can only be revealed from and by the Faith of Christ (Habakkuk 2:4 LXX, KJV
Romans 1:17, Philippians 3:9); the faith of man, even man’s faith in Christ,
would reveal only man’s righteousness (of which he has none without God,
but) which is still very appealing to the flesh, deceptive and deadly. Men
therefore,

“Being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their
own righteousness ( by carnal works of subjective “faith”), have not
submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God” (Romans 10:3),

which is revealed only by works of the Faith of Christ (Philippians 3:9,
Romans 1:17). Their “faith”, in this case, becomes presumption, and their
reasoning subject to deceiving spirits. Perfecting their own faith, since
that is the source of their righteousness, becomes their highest priority:
they became “faith” fanatics: sowing presumption, they reap arrogance. There
are plenty of “faith teachers”, Kenyon, Roberts, Hagan, Copeland, Tilden,
who pander to this error, and the “Faith movement” has corrupted, to some
degree, the entire American Church. Works of “power” (rather than the Cross)
and accumulation of material wealth (1 Timothy 6:6), rather than freedom
from material need, become objects of desire and “proof” of the
righteousness of “our” faith. So we gradually descend into a pit of
self-worth, self-righteousness, and egotistical worldliness. Laodicea
strikes again.

      Self-righteousness causes people to compete. Because our
self-righteousness depends on what we do, person A must always compare what
he is doing with what person B is doing, and do better. It’s not needful to
look to Jesus at all if what we want to do is to  perfect our own
righteousness: other people become our measure. In order to increase his own
righteousness, A must either do better than B, or denigrate what B is doing.
One way for A to win is to make B lose. A can stand a little closer to
heaven if he stomps down and stands on top of B. A improves his lot by
grouping with a lot of As (power, safety and, obviously, quantifiable
superiority in numbers), so “teaming up” against the Bs becomes a winning
method. If salvation is by perfecting one’s own faith (thereby perfecting
one’s own righteousness), the As work overtime at perfecting their
groupthink “statement of faith” and criticizing the Bs’ statement of faith.
This
competitive, judgmental, nitpicking spirit leads not only to irresolvable
differences between A and B but also to the subdivision of A into A1A and
A2A, which further divided to A1A1A, A1A1a, A1a1A...ad nauseum.

*While it is true that we receive reward for works which make it through the
fire (1 Corinthians 3:4), it is also clear that the only works which will
survive are the works which we permit Christ to do within us.
The Last Jubilee,   58.

       We now have thousands of “christian” denominations worldwide, all
carefully grooming and polishing their respective, subjective statements of
groupthink faith, proclaiming  that they, compared to other denominations,
are the most “right” or have the “best” doctrine, that they are the “most”
saved and witness the “best” testimony. Whoopee. Our attempts to package
this confusion with ecumenical cardboard and to  peddle it as the “church
universal” must keep  the angels in stitches. Meanwhile the creation groans,
and a lost, despairing humanity looks elsewhere, anywhere, for Jesus. To
“denominate” means more than just to “divide”; it means to “take a lesser
name than”. Christian denominations “take a lesser name than” Jesus Christ.
That would seem a pitiful and dangerous thing for a Christian to do. Much of
modern sectarianism and its root, self-righteousness, inevitably results
from our focusing upon the wrong agent of faith, ourselves, and can be
traced to the deceit of the “Revised” versions which obscure the true agency
of Christ. This “self” promoting vanity will “self” destruct on the Plains
of Moab.

        When “the Spirit speaketh expressly, that in the latter times some
shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits” (1 Timothy
4:1), it is clear that it is Christ’s faith from which they are departing.
But it is more than that. It is the agency of Christ which we have
abandoned, in favor of our own paltry, but far less threatening, agency. We
have been seduced by the spirits of theologians who would exalt man as the
agent of his own salvation; none of the modern “revised” translations
present (let alone contend for) the faith of Christ; they obscure it. They
focus on our present, subjective act of believing (our faith in Christ); as
the dynamic of Faith rather than Christ’s objective, omnipresent,
omniscient, and omnipotent act of believing (The Faith of Christ); they
suggest, then, that we can “work the works of God” somehow without God
working His works in us. Therefore, we can be God (Genesis 3:5, 2
Thessalonians 2:4). Clearly, the more adamantly dogmatic in his own belief
system and own agency a person is, the more unteachable and self-righteous
he becomes: he’s certainly not going to depart from his faith, or what his
assembly has decreed as their dogma, even if it becomes so ecumenically
watered down as to be meaningless; he will still blindly stand there and
adamantly defend it. Yet Christ’s agency and His Faith need no defense
whatsoever; they are inviolable, unchanged and unchangeable. They need only
be discovered or recovered, into the Church. My believing in Jesus will
never measure up to His believing inside me. Compared to the mud hole of our
collective, subjective faith, The Faith of Christ is an infinite ocean on
which to safely sail, in which “we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts
17:28). If we want to hold

“faith, and a good conscience; which some having put away concerning faith
have made shipwreck” (1 Timothy 1:19),

if we want to be “on the Ark” in the forthcoming Great Tribulation, if we
want the rest and restoration of the Last Jubilee, we had better release
back to Jesus the helm of the Ark and the agency of The Faith.

       There you have it, at least the beginning of it. It should be obvious
that “that which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already
been; and God requireth that which is past” (Ecclesiastes 3:15). History
moves, not in a circle, but in a helix, returning to the vicinity of past
events, but advanced to a new significance. Well, history is alive, and full
of information, like DNA.
The Last Jubilee,   59.

     You know who you are. Some of you are in the Babylonian church; some of
you are in humble little independent fellowships led by diligent and God
fearing elders who seek the Lord. Some of you are in home churches, and some
of you are in jail. Some of you are  alone on the hills, starved, pursued,
bloody, and desperate, and the last thing you want to hear is any more
damned religion. Well, Jesus knows where everybody is.

       Even as you read this, the Lord may now have claimed His Kingdom.
Soon you will look up and know  that now the Lord has taken unto Him His
great power and has reigned. You will know this because God will make it
known. In that time you will say “my Lord now reigns. The night is far
spent, the day is at hand; my Lord Jesus Christ has now claimed His Kingdom
and He will set all things right.” He is even now removing the cup of
trembling from your hand and giving it into the hand of our oppressors, and
he shall wring them out, every last, bitter, bloody, prideful drop.

        Stand up, shake off the dust and put on your beautiful garments. Do
you want to be healed? Seek the Lord; He will heal your broken heart, bind
your wounds, restore unto you double, and stand over you so you can rest. He
has come for vengeance, to render recompense to His enemies, to render unto
them sevenfold the reproach with which they reproached you.

      Be free, strengthen yourself in the Lord. The end is in sight. It
doesn’t matter what millennial madness swirls and crashes through the earth;
it’s big, strong Ark, and Christ already made room for you. “The earth shall
be filled with the knowledge of the Glory of God”, and the Glory of God has
even now begun to arise upon us.  So gird up the loins of your mind; keep
The Faith. Your work is with Jesus.

        “Who doth not answer to the Rudder shall answer to the Rock.”