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NEW BOOK—THE MIDNIGHT CRY! Prophetic perceptions on 2018-2020 including coming awakening, Donald Trump, national turnaround, more. Includes the prophetic word on the Korean Olympics and the global release of a “Moses Movement.” To receive your copy CLICK HERE.
DEAR WATCHMEN OF THE JOURNEY,
WELCOME TO THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES! Our team of 110 assembles Wednesday in Rome. Jolene and I have been here a few days already to rest and prepare for the tour. I cannot say our time has been without harassment in the spirit. Please keep vigilant on our behalf and on behalf of our team. Pray much in the Spirit. I am asking that you consider this your most important assignment for the next two weeks. Because it is genuinely bigger than all of us!
Second—it’s amazing how we are seeing exposure and shifting within the Trump administration in Washington DC after receiving together a very clear verdict from the Throne last Wednesday. To read the posting click here. That said lets keep watch over the next phase of the administration. A mid-term visitation has been decreed! Also please keep praying over the Kavanaugh hearings.
Below is some fuel for your fire for Tabernacles, as well as this Rome to Jerusalem tour. The posting is excerpted from the last chapter of our book “The Midnight Cry!”
Covenant blessings to each of you, and thank you for your investment in intercession!
THE BRIDAL CANOPY
“Behold the Bridegroom. He’s coming. Rise up to meet Him!”
We began with a midnight crisis, a midnight watch. We saw how the Lord has decreed a midnight turnaround, releasing a midnight rider with a midnight cry. At the sound of this breakthrough cry the virgins will awaken and light their lamps in the midnight hour, and enter into a glory procession to meet the Bridegroom.
This great procession doesn’t just begin sometime in the final hours of the end of days. It has already begun!
It’s a glory revolution. Even now the Glory Train is rumbling through every city and town that welcomes it in. You might even hear the train whistle sounding in the distance. Soon it will be a roar. A midnight cry.
An anointing of holy conviction is already provoking multitudes to disengage from Jezebel’s table and return to the Table of the Lord— The table of His covenant. They’ve awakened and resolved to join this great bridal procession.
All that said, where is the bridal procession ultimately going? Where does this glory train come into station?
Friends, you are actually invited to the ultimate destination wedding. Jerusalem. Jesus. Under a bridal canopy.
Since biblical days—in other words for thousands of years—the romance of a Jewish wedding has culminated under a small tent known as a “bridal canopy.” The bridegroom and his bride would join hands and hearts under this canopy, with family and friends surrounding them. Establishing covenant for life!
Here’s a fascinating detail. In former days, after the vows were exchanged, the new husband and wife would then roll the tent flaps down and actually consummate their marriage under the bridal canopy. I personally cannot imagine this. But a few of the guests served as legal witnesses that the covenant between the two had been sealed, and that the bride’s virginity had remained intact until their moment had arrived.
It’s no coincidence that, when God decided He wanted to dwell with His covenant people, He chose a tent to host His presence. The tabernacle is merely an expanded version of the chupah or bridal canopy.
According to Exodus 25 the Ark of the Covenant was to remain in the tent—an enduring witness of the marriage between the eternal God and His people. The table of showbread, the table of the Lord, was to display His covenant meal. And within the folds of the tent, the lampstand or menorah was to remain lit perpetually. A burning witness to the covenant affection which God intended from the beginning to be a hallmark of His relationship with His people.
In our relationship with the Lord, we often focus on our own need for affirmation, for affection, for Him to know our hearts. But we don’t often perceive the tenderness of His heart or His earnest desire for our loyalty and companionship. I’ve experienced many times with the Lord where His presence filled my heart, and we communed together without saying a word. I’ve also had times where His closeness was brought to an abrupt halt by my own insensitivity.
You know the feeling. In the midst of an intimate conversation, it is often very painful when your companion decides to interrupt the flow. Emotionally you simply withdrawal. I have found it’s sometimes the same with God.
Beloved, don’t break the flow. Sometimes the texts can wait. So can the call, the ballgame, the sale at the store, or any one of a million distractions. From a lover to the beloved, sometimes the highest worship, the greatest gift you can bestow, can simply be the gift of your undivided attention.
God never forgets those moments. And like you, He really wants more of them with you. Why not take some time at His table, under the tent. Give Him the gift both you and He treasure the most.
Tabernacles
I find it very poignant that as the midnight cry is heard and the bridal procession begins, the burning lamps of nations will gather in Jerusalem for this end-time marriage celebration. Probably around Mount Zion and the Temple Mount. The Lord called Israel and the nations to remembrance there, to gather in tents every year according to their tribe and celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.
Of course, this is the same location where David first set up a tabernacle, a bridal canopy to host God’s presence with 24-7 adoration celebrating Israel’s King. After David sinned, it’s where he repented. And then saw holy fire fall there, preserving Jerusalem and restoring his own heart.
It’s the place where God commanded that the fire on the altar must never go out.
Solomon opened the Temple there and the glory of God fell in such a magnitude that His priests couldn’t even stand to minister. The disciples gathered there in an upper room and the glory again swept in, baptizing them with the fire of the Holy Spirit.
God calls Zion His Throne. And His eyes will always be open, His ears attentive to the worship of His people on this mountain.
It’s on this mountain that the spiritual revolutionaries known as Maccabees risked it all to take back their heritage. They lit the burnt out candles of the menorah to reconsecrate their Temple to the Lord.
This Hanukkah miracle became a prototype for the miracle God performed at our own wedding, in a storefront church some six thousand miles from Zion’s hill. A summons had come to a faithful bride seven years beforehand, highlighting December 20. And when the Lord drew Jolene and me together, a mystery was revealed. Hanukkah marked the date this covenant bond was sealed. And God came with power. Lighting the unity candle of our menorah as all of our wedding guests watched and worshiped.
Remember it was on the anniversary of Hanukkah that God chose to descend in power and fill Miriam’s womb. She conceived the Light of the World. As this Child grew into manhood, He too fell in love and decided to get married.
This relationship cost Him everything—not only His reputation but even His own body and blood. He died on a cross just outside the gates of Zion. Most thought God had abandoned His bride. As He drew His last breath, few understood that He was giving His life to redeem her.
Then God’s power fell once more, this time to resurrect the Son of God, the Redeemer of Mankind. His bride awakened for the very first time. Like so many of her forefathers, she lit her lamp of love, of devotion and went out to meet Him. Joining as part of a glorious procession which culminates as all the nations gather under Zion’s bridal canopy, for the wedding of the ages.
Because God remembers. And His burning lamps are coming home.
Rome to Jerusalem 2018
We’re hoping to experience a foretaste of this end-time reunion in 2018, with a special prayer journey from Rome to Jerusalem culminating on the Feast of Tabernacles.
To understand its significance, lets briefly explore a piece of Jewish history surrounding the final menorah that was burning in the Temple when it was destroyed. This final Temple menorah, most likely relit by the Maccabees, was captured in Israel and carried off to Rome.
After the Maccabee revolt, the Roman empire overtook Greece and became the uniting force of global governance throughout the Mediterranean region. Jesus was born under Roman rule. Unfortunately the years following Jesus’ death and resurrection were marked by great despair for the Jewish people. In 70 AD Jerusalem again came under siege. Jews who were not taken captive escaped, and scattered over the face of the known world.
Rome destroyed the Second Jewish Temple during Tisha b’Av, the exact anniversary of the destruction of the first Jewish Temple. The Temple menorah was plundered from the Temple and carried to Rome on the backs of Jewish slaves. The freedom lamp had succumbed to captivity. The fire went out.
The Titus Door
Near the ancient forum, not far from Rome’s Campidoglio or Capitol Hill, a giant victory arch was erected to honor Rome’s global domination. The Arch of Titus famously features a sculpted panel depicting the scene of Jewish slaves carrying the Temple menorah into the city. Celebrating Rome’s conquest of Jerusalem.
Remember 2018 is the year of the door. The Arch of Titus represents the doorway by which the Jews entered into all of Europe in shame, prejudice and subjugation. Their dignity was crushed. Their most precious and sacred treasures were plundered.
Roman culture, morphed into Christianity, mentored the entire western world in hating the Jews. Pogroms and expulsions ran through the centuries, in all nations and most emerging expressions of Christianity. Ultimately this prejudice became embodied in a man and movement that systematically exterminated more than 6 million men, women and children during the holocaust.
We must do our small part, as empowered by Holy Spirit, in seeing the full reversal of this bondage.
The Roman Lampstand
Two centuries after the menorah was ripped from the Temple and handed to Rome, the Emperor Constantine sought for Rome to replace Jerusalem as the epicenter of religion. Symbolically, as the global lampstand for Christianity.
Over time, Constantine and his followers radically redefined the doctrines of Christianity. They divorced the faith of our fathers from our Jewish roots—including our Hebraic understanding of times, seasons and law.
And they hastily married Christianity to Roman beliefs and traditions. Temples became churches. The vestal virgins of Roman paganism became nuns. And as mentioned before, Constantine merged two pagan winter holidays with gospel accounts of Christ’s birth to create the winter celebration we now call Christmas.
And whereas early church leaders shunned the worship of other gods, the hybrid created by this shotgun wedding proved much more tolerant. Syncretism. Many gods simply got an extreme makeover, gaining new identities as saints.
With all this said, Jolene and I love Rome. We were surprised and delighted to sense the pure presence of Holy Spirit over the region. God is moving powerfully in the city! And it is an honor to stand for God to release His full blessing and destiny for this ancient root of the Christian faith.
And without a doubt, so much good has come from this ground. The Reformation launched by Luther is seemingly more alive in the Catholic church now than much of the Protestant world. Salvation by faith in Christ alone is now an undisputed doctrine. Curial eyes are now often much more discerning regarding idolatry than their peers in other spheres of Christendom. Catholics today lead the pack in the pro-life movement, true heroes championing the unborn.
And sincere repentance to the Jewish people over the brutal legacy of anti-Semitism has brought tremendous healing.
While in Rome recently, I believe the Lord showed Jolene and me that it is now time to apostolically reverse this journey of the menorah. He desires to restore the burning lamp this year from Rome to Jerusalem.
Though there’s a lot of speculation, nobody but God knows where the original Temple menorah actually is. But I believe the Lord desires for many of His leaders and intercessors to carry their own menorahs as a symbolic act of this restoration.
Like the bridal party that awakens at midnight, we are going to light our lamps and make a journey. This journey is going to culminate with Israel’s Bridegroom, in a great celebration under a bridal canopy in the city He eternally calls home.
Jerusalem. 2018. The Feast of Tabernacles.
Like the branches of a menorah, the lampstand of our faith branches out to all the world! But it must be centered in Jerusalem, not Rome. We are grafted into God’s covenant with the land and people Israel, not the other way around. By this journey are apostolically conveying that Jerusalem must be honored as the geographic epicenter of both the Jewish faith and the Christian faith, because God identifies Zion alone as His geographic throne.
We are declaring the restoration in Jesus—Yeshua—of our Jewish roots. Of our covenant roots.
What’s in this for Rome? Everything. Seeking God for this prophetic restoration by no means robs Rome, it frees Rome. By honoring God’s original intention for His lampstand in Jerusalem, the lampstand of the Lord which genuinely belongs to Rome in Christ will immediately become greatly empowered.
That’s the great power of God’s restoration. And I sense prophetically you will see great renewal in Rome as a result.
The burning lamp belongs in His tent! What a picture of a move of God’s Spirit in 2018 to reunite the burning lamps with the bridal canopy of His tabernacles movement. What an honor it will be to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem.
So friends, lets light our lamps—and from Rome to Jerusalem, lets go out to meet the Bridegroom in 2018. He’s standing at the gates even now, waiting for our arrival. Not by might nor by power but by My Spirit, says the Lord of hosts!
