About Prophecy, The Book, Serialized - Introduction

About Prophecy

The Book

—serialized—

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Printable/viewable PDF format to display Greek or Hebrew characters

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Introduction

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In literary shorthand, we want heaven when we die; we want to believe an idealized destination awaits us at the end of this voyage called life. Then the obstacles we encounter won't matter. The distance of our voyage doesn't matter. Only arriving matters. We can leave all of our problems in that metaphorical river we travel as if those problems were old tires or tin cans, oil slicks or biotoxins. (“SMITH, LOGGER, FISHERMAN, WRITER.” From the Margins. Par. 2, 2001.)

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On Thursday of the second full week in January 2002 [Jan 17^th], as I drove through Carrier Mills, Illinois, on my way to teach back-to-back sections of English Composition at Southeastern Illinois College, I began to feel unexplainable tension. I turned the radio in the pickup off, and drove in silence into Harrisburg, then turned east toward the college, six miles away. There was no reason for the tension; yet I felt something I wasn’t able to explain, and for no reason that I could conceive. Everything was going reasonably well since moving to the wrong side of the Mississippi. We were getting bills paid after nearly a decade of financial struggle. The truck was running well. My wife was driving a high mileage and high gas mileage Toyota to her job: she would have arrived at work a couple of hours earlier so I doubted that the tension was caused by a premonition about any sort of difficulty she might be having. I simply didn’t understand why the tension should exist until I turned into the college’s upper parking lot. Then about 12 minutes after ten E.S.T., I heard in an audible voice and in clearly understandable words that seemed to be “things” in my mind, It’s time to reread prophecy.

I barely had strength enough to turn into a parking space. I certainly didn’t have strength enough to walk to class; so I sat there in the pickup and wondered what it was I heard, and what the words meant … I knew what I heard; I couldn’t escape from what I heard; but what was it that I heard. There was no one in the pickup with me.

I sat still for maybe ten minutes, knowing that I needed to get to class but without having the strength to walk. Finally, with class to begin in five minutes, I opened the truck door and climbed out, my legs weak, and I set off on a course from which I haven’t deviated for a dozen years. I taught the back-to-back sections of Freshman Comp, went home and by then believing what I heard was a call to write a better version of the two-house of Israel doctrine than was currently in print, I opened my Bible to the visions of Daniel and starting writing.

Within three hours I was figuratively three miles from how I had previously understood the visions of Daniel and the vision of John. What I had been taught could not be supported from Scripture. The tidy explanations of Daniel’s visions were the physical events that sealed and kept secret these visions until the time of the end—sealed these visions by seemingly fulfilling them when the visions themselves were about spiritual [heavenly] entities and happenings that could not otherwise be known to human persons if not revealed via visions.

Since January 2002, I have written about virtually nothing but the nature of Hebrew style narratives. I have written millions of words, literally. My writing style has become redundant, pedantic, as I seek to argue positions, doctrines and dogmas that have never been expressed within greater Christendom. And what I realized early on was that I wasn’t called to make disciples, or to convert anyone. What I heard was a calling to reread prophecy. I wasn’t told how to go about rereading prophecy or what I should find in prophecy as I reread it. I wasn’t told anything other than, It’s time to reread prophecy. I assumed that because I was told it was time for a work to begin that I was to do this task of rereading. Nobody else was doing this task of rereading.

I also assumed that the voice I heard was of Christ Jesus, but I don’t know this for certain. What I know will be mostly expressed in the following pages—and my argument for having been called to do a work for God is the same as the Apostle Paul’s: my understanding of the mysteries of God (see Eph 3:2–6). But I will do better than Paul: evidence of me being called to reread prophecy will be in the occurrence or non-occurrence of a Second Passover liberation of Israel in the near future, this liberation being from indwelling sin and death through all of Christendom being baptized in, filled with, and empowered by the spirit of God immediately following death angels passing over the whole of earth slaying uncovered [by the blood of Christ] biological and legal firstborns, some two billion persons in one day. Sounds like a fantasy? It should, but so would have death angels passing over Egypt slaying uncovered firstborns at the midnight hour of the Passover before the liberation of the physical nation of Israel from physical slavery to a physical king in a physical land. Would it be a greater fantasy if a spiritual nation of Israel is liberated from spiritual slavery to a spiritual king on the night of the Second Passover?

Most of what I will write in this book has been written before. Hopefully, by saying again what I have said before I will do a better job of expressing concepts and making arguments. In much of what I have previously written, I didn’t know where I was going until I arrived. The journey to where I arrived was circuitous and at times difficult to follow. This book will be an attempt to straighten the road and shorten the travel time.

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