NOTES TO THE AMERICAN PASTOR II: FINAL RECKONINGS FOR THOSE WITH EARS TO HEAR, EYES TO SEE & HEARTS TO HEED – (WITH VIDEO)

THEOLOGY

SCRIPTURE. “Now, O priests, this commandment is for you. ‘If you do not listen, and if you do not take it to heart to honor My name,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘then I will send the curse upon you and I will curse your blessings [on the people]. Indeed, I have cursed them already, because you are not taking it to heart. Behold, I am going to rebuke your seed, and I will spread the refuse on your faces, the refuse from the festival offerings; and you will be taken away with it [in disgrace]. Then you will know [without any doubt] that I have sent this [new] commandment to you (priests), that My covenant may continue with Levi [the priestly tribe],’ says the Lord of hosts.” – MALACHI 2:1-4, AMP

KEY TERM: “TAKE IT TO HEART!” ‘Leb’ [לֵב]: “Figurative very widely for the feelings, the will, and even the intellect (center of understanding or mindedness): ‘The seat of wisdom and understanding, as well as the source of moral and spiritual life [one’s true self].’” DK: What I derive from this is a MAXIM of sorts:‘If God has our heart, He effectively has all of us. Oppositely, if our heart is divided between God and Man, or Heaven and Earth, He cannot fully ‘own’ us and we are at great risk of falling away under the trials and temptations which lay ahead.’ Selah.

QUOTATION. “‘To love the Lord my God with all my soul will involve a spiritual cost.’ I’ll have to give Him my heart and let Him love through it whom and how He wills, even if this seems at times to break my heart”. – DR. HELEN ROSEVEARE, English missionary and author of Count it All Joy, 2017; edited

COMMENTARY. “‘O ye priests, this commandment is for you’ — Or ‘Decree,’ rather, for properly speaking no commandment is here given to the priests, only Punishment is denounced upon them if they did not Repent. Which you have despised and dishonoured, by your irreverent performance of My service, Malachi 1:6. I will send poverty and affliction upon you, and you shall not prosper in any thing.

‘And I will curse your blessings’ — I will turn your blessings into curses, or rather, remove your blessings and send curses and calamities in their stead; ‘Behold, I will corrupt your seed’ — The seed wherewith you sow your ground: I will cause it to rot so that it shall bring forth little or nothing. I will make you as contemptible and vile as if some one had covered your faces with filth and dung. ‘And one shall take you away with it.’ — You shall be cast out of the temple as so many nuisances, only fit to be removed out of sight [as with the Lord’s Removal of Lampstands in Rev. 2:5]. ‘And ye shall know that I have sent this commandment unto you’ — By the Punishment which will follow upon your neglecting to lay what hath been said to heart, and ‘to give glory unto my name,’ as you are here enjoined: see Malachi 2:1-2.

‘That My Covenant might be with Levi’ — That the Covenant which I made with the Tribe of Levi, that they should be mine, and employed in my service, might continue firm to their posterity. Some render the clause, ‘Because My covenant was with Levi [God’s Old Testament Holy Remnant],’ for the Breach of which you are accountable.” – JOSEPH BENSON, Notes on the Holy Bible, 5 vols., 1811-1818; edited

II. TEACHING

‘A Great Darkness has descended upon the American Nation in recent days.’ And it is palpable; one can actually feel it, beloved. But it is not the Darkness of Secularism or those with little knowledge or care of the God of the Bible. No. It is vastly Darker than any of that. It is the unmistakable evidence of a most painful fact:

‘God’s Blaze of Truth and Honor has gone straight out of His own House!’

“THE DYING OF THE LIGHT.” When the brilliant but troubled Welsh poet DYLAN THOMAS penned this anthem around 1938, we are told that he likely wrote it for his dying father. Appropriately, I present it here to an American Nation and a Church that are both in the throes of a Nietzschean ‘Death of Father God’ Moment.

If not for His faithful preservation of a Holy Remnant out of all the fallen refuse and detritus, we should lose all hope. With that said, here are a few lines from this timely and now become epic Trumpet Blast.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

RAGE: “Anger accompanied with furious words, gestures or agitation; anger excited to fury. Passion translated to pique. Also: Vehemence, enthusiasm, rapture” (Adapted from NOAH WEBSTER, American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828; edited).

Well now, boys and girls, aren’t we taught in Church that we are never to be angry, and God forbid we should dare to enter into a state of Rage! I tell you with Him listening that God would much rather have a zealous, fiery servant of His in ‘Spiritual Outcry’ against the Darkness of the Last Days than a parlor courtesan smiling sweetly at all of it in beatific coiffure.

“PILLOW PROPHETS.” Which is precisely how I see the American Church, filled with what DAVID WILKERSON described in a well-known sermon.

“Ezekiel stood alone against all the False Prophets of Israel. These Prophets would have nothing to do with the Message of Righteousness and impending Judgment. Instead, they prophesied an Era of Peace, Ease, and Prosperity.

EZEKIEL 13 is the very Word of Jehovah against Preachers and Prophets who accommodate people with flesh pleasing words they said were from the Lord. Their words were designed to make God’s people comfortable in the face of impending Judgment.

In fact, they were not satisfied to prophesy good times ahead from their great houses and ivory beds of ease – they sought to provide a Pillow for every elbow (Ezekiel 13:18). ‘Woe to those who apply pillows unto all elbows’ (Original Hebrew by Helen Spurrell, 1885) ‘Behold, I am against your pillows wherewith ye entice souls’ (Ezekiel 13:20).

Ezekiel was horrified at the sight of Prophets who had developed an art of making God’s people comfortable. The Lord had said, ‘My people have set up idols in their hearts; they are brazenly setting up stumbling blocks in iniquity; they are all estranged from Me because of their idols’ (Ezekiel 14:1-5).” – Set the Trumpet to Thy Mouth, 1985, pp. 141-142; edited (Published exactly 100 years after Ms. Spurrell’s classic work cited above).

No description of today’s American Church 40 years after Wilkerson’s Prophecy could be more precise, beloved. The only word that comes to mind here to capture this condition is “Hideous,” defined by NOAH WEBSTER (1828) as: “Frightful to the sight; dreadful; shocking to the eye; applied to deformity; as a hideous monster or hideous spectacle.”

Given this tragic state of Church Affairs, what then can the faithful follower of Christ to confront it? In a word: ‘We must Fight!’ But just how we are permitted to do so is the challenge of the American Christian in the Epochal Years just ahead.

III. FIGHTING FAIR FOR CHRIST

FIGHTING FAIR. Just how is it then that we are to ‘Rage Against the Dying of the Light,’ especiallythat which is occurring deep inside the Priesthood of the House of God? Consider the following.

I take this no-nonsense theology from an essay by REV. W. CLARKSON, a prolific contributor to Bible Hub online Sermon Index website. This message is titled, “Cleansing the Corrupt House: Leviticus 14:33-53 ” (ret. Dec. 5, 2024; edited).

THREE MAIN PRINCIPLES ON THE SUBJECT OF CORRUPTION. “That the Divine Lawgiver should, in this Tabernacle Period of Israel’s history, anticipate a time when their future houses would be affected by some Disorder similar to Leprosy in the human skin, and that he should direct a treatment of such houses closely corresponding with that of the human leper, is exceedingly remarkable. Nothing could possibly impress the Hebrew mind more powerfully with the Idea that ‘The face of the Lord was against that Spiritual Evil of which Leprosy was the chosen type.’ How direct the argument and forcible the conclusion that, if not only every remotest particle of Leprosy itself was to be ruthlessly put away but also anything which to the bodily eye had even a near resemblance to it, and was thus suggestive of it, – ‘How offensive, how intolerable in the sight of God must that Evil Thing itself be held!’”

CORRUPTION (IMPURITY). May attach to the “House” or community as well as to the individual. We read of “The iniquity of the House of Israel,” and of “The iniquity of the House of Judah” (Ezekiel 4:5, 6); of “The House of Israel dealing treacherously with God” (Jeremiah 3:20), etc.
EARNEST EFFORT. Should be made to cleanse it from Corruption. The Leprous House of Stone was to be cleansed: The Stones in which the Plague was were to be taken away (verse 40); the House was to be scraped round about, and its Unclean Dust cast out of the camp (verse 41); Other Stones were to be placed and other Mortar used instead (verse 42): The Leprous Part was to be removed and the House renovated. ‘So must the Contaminated Community purify itself,’ removing that from it which is Evil and Corrupting its Achan, its Ananias and Sapphira, its Simon the sorcerer, its guilty member (1 Corinthians 5), etc.
ALL EFFORTS FAILING. The House will be destroyed. “He shall break down the house, the stones of it,” etc. (verse 45). A community of any kind that is incurably corrupt. (a) Had better be broken up deliberately by the hand of man; but if not; (b) Will certainly be dissolved in time by the hand of God. The history of the world abounds in proofs that moral and spiritual corruption lead on to feebleness, decay, dissolution.”

NEW TESTAMENT COUNTERPART. “I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral

people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. – But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone NAMED A BROTHER, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person. For what have I to do with judging those also who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside?” – 1 CORINTHIANS 5:9-12, NKJV

Beloved, here the Great Apostle is specifying how we Clean God’s House and keep it clean! However, I see not a stitch of this sort of Discipline exercised by the American Pastorate today.

Therefore, pay attention to the details that follow all the more for greater understanding of TWO REALITIES: (1) The Absence of Church Discipline has created the Rise of the Antichrist; (2) Its Reimposition would solve the Crisis, but I believe the current Rebellion by God’s leaders has rendered it too late for Church-wide Correction.

THE SPECIFIC SINS. Here are the SINS OF A BROTHER that we are forbidden to accommodate or associate with, but have treacherously ignored for Ten Years.

SEXUALLY IMMORAL. ‘Pornos’ [ἀδελφὸς]: “One who sells oneself to fornication [physical or spiritual]; ‘a debauchee, whoremonger.’”

COVETOUS. ‘Pleonektés’ [πλεονέκταις]: “Holding [much] but desiring more; i.e., eager for gain, avaricious; ‘a defrauder.’”

IDOLATER. ‘Eidólolatrés’ [εἰδωλολάτραις]: “A servant or worshipper of an image or idol; most often used in the context of ‘adoration of a false god.’”

REVILER. ‘Loidoros’ [λοίδορος]: “A verbal abuser, railer, a slanderer; a blackguard who causes mischief; ‘characterizes individuals who engage in insulting others, often with malicious intent.’”

DRUNKARD. ‘Methusos’ [μέθυσος]: “One who is tipsy; a sot; ‘refers to a person who habitually engages in excessive drinking, leading to intoxication.’”

EXTORTIONER. ‘Harpax’ [ἅρπαξ]: “One who is rapacious, ravenous; a robber; the term ‘harpax’ is ‘used in the New Testament to describe individuals who are greedy, grasping, or who take by force.’”

WILLIAM MACDONALD ON JUDGING. “Paul’s Two Questions in verse 12 mean that Christians are not responsible for the Judgment of the Unsaved. Wicked men in the world about us will be brought into Judgment by the Lord Himself in a Coming Day. ‘But we DO have a responsibility as far as judging those who are inside the confines of the Church.’ It is the duty of the local church to exercise Godly Discipline!” (1995, p. 1761; edited).

IV. LAST THOUGHTS

I have never before felt the liberty to ask you to do what I am about to propose. But, given the Lateness of the Hour and the Consequences of our doing nothing, here goes. But only as the Holy Spirit would grant, of course.

THE CHALLENGE. I want you to consider Speaking to your Pastors about all this if you have not done so already.

I have argued here and several times before that the Great American Crisis fits squarely on the back of the Failure of the Christian Church. If I am correct, the only possible hope is to persuade our Pastors and Leaders to change course. This is not to exclude our Primary Mission of rescuing individuals from the Coming Judgments.

To be frank: I don’t think they will listen to us, but we are Commanded by the Scriptures reviewed here to at least pray about doing so, with one Main Objective:

‘The Rescue of Souls!’

FINAL COMMISSION. “But I want to remind you, though you once knew this, that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day; as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire …

These are grumblers, complainers, walking according to their own lusts; and they mouth great swelling words,

flattering people to gain advantage. But you, beloved, remember the words which were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ:how they told you that there would be mockers in the last time who would walk according to their own ungodly lusts. These are sensual persons, who cause divisions, not having the Spirit.

But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And on some have compassion, making a distinction;but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.” – JUDE 1:5-7, 16-23, NKJV

CODA. I believe with all my heart that this must be considered as our Next – and perhaps our Last – Effort toward Rescue of Lost Souls. That is the very Reason we are left here to experience The Storms just ahead, before The Parousia, beloved.

I close with a favorite Guidance Psalm for such Momentous Decisions. “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you [who are willing to learn] with My eye upon you” (PSALM 32:8, AMP).

‘It is Time for Authentic Christianity, Pastor.’ Along with the putting away of the easier things we have all indulged for most of our blessed lives. If we truly Love our King, then we will joyfully obey His every Instruction to us in these waning hours of the Last Days.

‘For such a Time as this.’

YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/8otapPHghyI