This series has taken some time due to my own personal loss of my mother in January, and would you believe it, for various issues we have still have the funeral to do, and for us to go on, recovering from a very deep and profound experience. For this, and more purposes this series got put back, until today.
Some of the elements that will appear in this series will be those personally experienced, and personally walked out. I believe in the relevance of Isaiah 40 and the prophetic proclamation to PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD. The principle being that God desires to visit us in a way we do not normally experience Him. And for Him to visit the way must be prepared for. He does not just come. In the prophetic understanding given to Isaiah the coming of the Lord meant a new covenant, meant a new tabernacle, meant a new sacrifice, meant a new Priesthood. It ultimately meant with all these elements, a new covenant. This covenant was based on a better blood, not of animals, but of the Son of God Himself. It was based on a better priesthood, being the Aaron was a priesthood presiding over the Law of Moses, and the priesthood needed to both pre-date Moses, yet connect to Abraham, because all the blessings of the Covenant of Abraham needed to be applied in the new.
So Isaiah understood that for such changes, the time of preparation, the place of preparation, the people of preparation needed, who would know the price of preparation would patiently understand that there is a place designation for it, the wilderness. This Word came in Isaiah 35, when Isaiah prophesies to the wilderness, and declares its transformation. Noone understood this preparation so personally as John the Baptist. He walked out this very perfectly, and very personally. He saw that he simply had to withdraw to be drawn in, that is be drawn out of a priestly line as was expected of him, drawn out of the cities and activities. He is drawn into silence and the desert. There he is made acquainted of the major change that was coming to mankind.
And there is a sensation since 2020, when tyranny of many forms was exercised on the world by a corrupt class, that a new atmosphere of oppression felt first, now we know that we are being prepared for a globalist vision which is totally against Jesus and His Church. We also know that God is enlarging our vision with greater clarity of what the true context of eschatology should be, what our focus should be. And in many quarters a new fresh perspective of the Word is coming to His People. Even Paul the apostle followed this same pattern that he saw that to be drawn in to the centre of God’s activity he needed to be drawn out. It is no longer business as usual. Paul needed to understand that what Isaiah prophesied, what John the Baptist walked out meant great changes, the unveiling of the mystery which unveils the end for a season of the exclusivity of God’s covenant to the Jews and Israel.
For great changes to be unveiled in and through God’s people, I see no alternative to years of obscurity, especially in a age when things going viral makes one famous and known. It means that what is revealed must be interwoven into the soul of the one so separated. The devil has clothed separation, holiness and sanctification in a pharisaic cloke, where when talking about these we are seen as intolerant, sexist, rascist, mysogynist. They are heavy accusations, but those which obscure what the real meanings of these terms. They start in the wilderness. It starts with our obscurity in the wilderness, because it is the same wilderness where God will orchestrate the greatest changes. The most unlikely person from the most unlikely place will bring the greatest change.
For the preparer of the Way you cannot be academic, it cannot be a mind exercise. It must be a heart exercise, where hours, days, months and years of prayer are walked out so that His truth becomes part of human flesh. God is not performing a academic exercise with mankind. He is preparing us for eternity, and eternity cannot come outside of the Highway of Holiness. The confrontation with this refreshed holiness is going to be cataclysmic as purity will convict the mixtures and corruptions of a human kind who turned his back on the truth of God. Methodists who had their cornerstone in the Holiness Message of John Wesley are now accepting the inclusion of alternative lifestyles which the Bible condemns without any ambiguity. What has not been grasped is the balance between no compromise of the Word, and no rejection of the person. We need to keep the holiness standard, and where sections of society have hijacked the judicial arms of nations, the Church has tended to bend, losing sight of the standard of holiness and love. The standard of love cannot compromise the standard of holiness. When it does we have let in the world. We are losing sight of this.
The purpose of this series is to declare that we must PREPARE THE WAY, and it is not just any way it is the WAY OF THE LORD, which means the preparation has to be done His way. The preparation studied here today is the one of OBSCURITY AND SEPARATION. It is easy to get carried on with current trends, schools of thought. These ultimately corrupt and lead astray. Hence the necessity of separation because the message is uncompromising so our lives should not have any trace of what is currently acceptable. If our message is uncompromising, any compromise is hypocrisy. We must therefore allow the time of preparation, and many are examples of this in the Word. We could speak about Jacob, 21 years away, or Joseph 13 years in prison, David 13 years between his anointing, and the throne. This not even including Moses, 80 years preparation. This is a pattern that must be submitted to because God must mould His people so that He can entrust them.
This series is to prepare us that GREAT change is on the way, and those changes are going to make the world filled with God haters, and for those worshippers of the Most High will be the target of great persecution, but these same will have gone through that preparation that they shall be so filled with authority that whatever persecution they experience, the communion with the Holy Spirit will be so profound that their own sacrifice will be embraced with Joy, and this will prepare the way for the greatest judgment on Satan and his kingdom.
Let us approach this prayerfully, because we are on a journey. We are discovering the Highway of Holiness. May we be submissing to years of being rejected in favour of being accepted in the highest company of heaven. Psalm 113 says that God takes beggars off the dung hill and places them with princes. This process is started in the wilderness. May we resist the temptation to live as the world, with the things that are temporary because they are easy. We choose the hard and barren way, the narrow way, over anything that would bring comfort, but that same comfort will make way for eternal judgment.
Choices make us candidates for eternal pleasure or eternal pain. May we make the right ones and be part of the builders of the highway of holiness.
Maranatha!
Amen. Gre