Kingdom coming

As I look at the world around and feel the rumblings of a monster storm, the likes of which history has no comparison, I contemplate it with mixed emotions.  Just like the fabled king whole left eye was crying as the right one was laughing, so my heart holds both joy and sorrow.

If we had a giant time clock in the skies that counted down to the advent of Christ's second coming, its arms would probably be seconds away from midnight.  We can almost hear His steps descending on Heaven's stairway into the Now that rushed and ordered itself into waves of matter and light expelled by His breath.  We can sense Heaven getting ready to receive His bride, and a thousand times thousands wedding invitations are dispatched to fill the wedding halls with His image-bearers.  We hear the Angel set pen to paper and, in eternal books, another name is engraved with ink that cannot lie, the scarlet fountain of His blood.  Foundations are decorated in  jasper, emerald and sapphire, streets are paved with gold, clear and shimmering like crystal.  We see the party hats and the dazzling costumes and we hear the roar of hallelujahs as another prodigal has found the way home.  We see His bride shake the sleep from her soul and her eyes, dressed in garments of faith and works, scanning the horizon night and day for His arrival.  Looking upward, she girds herself for harvest, one last labor of love and suffering, even as the axe is set at the root of the tree for one last purging. 

As heaven is busy preparing for the marriage supper of the Lamb, hell is excessively diligent in  expanding its borders.  We see a flood of demons descending on portals of filth, bathing the earth in violence and bloodshed.  We hear the roar of hate masking itself as justice and good works, its cry hollow as "sounding brass or clinging cymbal".  We see confusion and its dominion in man and nature, and we see evil crowned as good and good desecrated as evil.  We hear man say, "let us make god in our image,  in our likeness; and let him bow to our lust, let him glorify in our laws; let him follow us in our corruption, let him bless our covetousness, and let him give us what is right in our own sight".  We see the young souls of the unborn sacrificed on the altar of self-gratification, and we see the lame and the maimed done away with  in the name of mercy.  We hear the growing darkness laboring the Antichrist into his kingdom, engaged in chasing Truth out of His universe.

My one eye is rejoicing because His coming is so, so close...  He is coming to take us home, a place so magnificent that Paul, a birther of words, was destitute of letters at its threshold.  I rejoice because our eyes will see The One our hearts have loved, and His eyes will brush the ashes from our souls.  The time is coming when faith will be sight, when face-to-face encounter will replace dim mirror reflections.

My other eye is weeping because of the coming kingdom of black embodied in a man of great persuasion, and eloquence, and unquestioning authority.   Under this man, "there will be greater anguish than at any time since the world began. And it will never be so great again."  (Matthew 24:21).  We are entering a time when " men’s hearts [will be] failing them from fear and the expectation of those things which are coming on the earth, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken". (Luke 21:26)  And the crowds are cheering, and ready, and waiting for this man to make his entrance. 


The time of history's greatest upheaval is at hand.  The Father is waiting for one more prodigal to come home, for one more guest to attend His wedding feast.  "Today when you hear his voice, don't harden your hearts" but come and be born of water and of Spirit.  The stakes are too high for anything but that. 



Christmas

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