“He hath made everything beauti­ful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end” (Eccl. 3:11).

God created Adam and Eve and began filling the earth with mankind.  God gave them dominion over the whole earth.  But they disobeyed Him, and lost their immortality, and God exiled them from the beautiful gar­den which He had given them, but He promised them a “seed” which would rectify all of the problems which that sin would cause.

But that was not the beginning, for “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”  Neither was that the beginning.  The real begin­ning was thousands of years before, when the routine of heaven was disrupted by the rebellion of the great angel Lucifer: the Anointed Cherub that covers the throne of God (Ezek. 28:1-19).  He began a revolt which ended in a war which took the lives of a third of the angels of heaven.  He fell to Earth and “made the fruitful place a wilderness” (Isa. 14:12-17).

The beginning in Genesis 1:1 was the beginning of the repair of all that damage.  There was much more to it than simply replacing the angels that fell.  He had to do it in such a way that the angels which did not fall would be able to understand that the pun­ishment which God employed was justified.  So God left Satan at lib­erty to work his wickedness among man­kind.  Satan began with the lie about the fruit, and has unceasingly corrupted God’s creation.  Now the end of the Grace Age is upon us; the marriage of the Lamb is at hand, and Sa­tan is angry, and is launching a great campaign to stop it.

It came to pass, when men be­gan to multiply on the face of the earth, God saw that every imagi­na­tion of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.  So God sent a flood and destroyed all but eight of them.

As men began to multiply upon the earth once more their sins increased also.  So, about three hundred and fifty years after the flood, about two thousand years after the creation of mankind, God found Abraham, a man of faith on whom he could depend, and chose him to be the father of His people.  Thus began the second 2,000-year period of mankind upon the earth.

By that time the descendants of Noah had become very idolatrous.  Even the descendants of Shem had begun to fall into that idolatrous life-style (Gen. 31:17-35).  God saw it, and called Abraham out from among them.  God gave them covenants and promises, including the promise of a special son.  He promised them that they would ultimately be given the land of Canaan upon which they stood.  He told them how they would first go down into Egypt and that they would come out again, a great people, and inherit the promises.

Two hundred and fifteen years later, Jacob went down into Egypt with his family, a mere 70 persons.  Another two hundred and fifteen years after that, they left Egypt with a standing army of 600,000 warriors (Exodus 1:17).  The very day when the time of the promise was fulfilled, God led them out of Egypt with this testimony, “A Syrian ready to perish was my father and he went down into Egypt, and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous” (Deut. 26:5). 

When God brought them out of Egypt, He took them directly to Mount Sinai, and entered into a covenant with them, the equivalent of the marriage covenant between a man and a woman (Ex. 34:10, 28; Rom. 7:2-7).  They had hardly made that vow before they demonstrated their lack of faith in their new husband, re­fusing to obey Him and enter Canaan and possess it.  They broke that cove­nant again and again, and, at least once, God “divorced” them, and then offered to take them unto Himself again (Jer. 3:6-15).  Therefore, about 950 years after they came out of Egypt, about 600 B.C., Israel was swept away by the kings of Assyria.  Only the Kingdom of Judah remained.  About 496 B.C., the kingdom of Judah was taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, and there was no sovereign state of Israel again until A.D. 1948.

During the next seven years after the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, Peter “confirmed the New Covenant with many” (Dan. 9:27), and finished building the Church of God.  Then he and The Twelve ordained “seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom,” and set them over the business of the Church, in the fulfillment of Proverbs 9:1-2, and God put His glory upon them (Rom. 2:6-11). “And the Word of God increased” (Acts 6:1-7).

Shortly after that, Jesus returned to earth briefly and was seen of Peter (Simeon), then of The Twelve: after that he was seen of above five hun­dred of the ministers at once (1Ki. 9:1-2, 23; 1 Chron. 4:42).  After that, He was seen of James (His brother); then of all the apostles.  “And last of all,” Paul said, “He was seen of me also” (1 Cor. 15:1-8; 9:1).  Jesus fin­ished His visit, appointing Saul (Paul) to establish the work of taking the Gos­pel of Redemption to the Gen­tiles.  That he might be God’s “sal­va­tion to the end of the earth” (Isa. 49:6).

The majority of the descendants of Abraham failed to grasp the reality of their visitation by Jesus Christ.  And all but that remnant, in Romans 9:27-28 and 11:1-8,  perished.  Thus began the third and last 2000-year period of the rulership of the sons of Adam upon the earth. 

It took only about 350 years for the leaders of the Gentile Christians to adopt much of the ancient idolatry which the sons of Ham, the son of Noah had developed those many years before.  The process had actu­ally begun shortly after the death of Paul (Acts 20:29), and during the administration of Jude (Jude 1:3-13).  By the fifth century A.D., the worship of Cush: the father, Nimrod: the son, and Semiramis (Rhea): the mother of the gods, had become venerated by the powerful Church of Rome.

The larger numbers of Christian­ity were taught, and controlled by the prelates of Rome for a thousand years or more.  But when the printing press was invented, in the fifteenth century it soon became instrumental in the teaching and learning process of the truth of the Holy Scriptures, and the power of Rome began to gradually wane.  However, those who left the can­opy of the Roman Church often did as Jacob’s wife Rachel did when they left the house of Laban.  She grabbed her father’s gods and hid them in the “stuff,” and took them with her.  Even so the Protestants of the world carried much of Catholi­cism with them these hundreds of years.

In recent years, the zeal of the Lord has almost vanished from “the kingdom of heaven.”  As it is written, “Because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold” (Matt. 24:12-14).  God has again demon­stra­ted “to the world, and to angels, and to men” that the wickedness of the world will contaminate all of the people of the world, even those who believe in Jesus Christ and are born again, as long as Satan is free to influence them.

The Bible was placed in the hands of the general public, and together with the rapid disbursement of multi­tudes out of Europe to a continent unaffected by the religions of the world, created a great opportunity for “righteousness and true holiness” to take root, and spring up, and flower, in preparation for the coming of the Bridegroom.

We have seen Christian groups of all kinds develop in the world.  They have manifested well the natural diversity of the children of the great God.  Some diversity is needed, as is revealed by the fact that the Bible calls for an “Election: the Church, the Bride the Lamb’s Wife,” and the bride’s maids, and the guests at the “Marriage of the Lamb.”

The development of the “kingdom of heaven” from the late 1800s until today has been phenom­enal.  A revi­val of the “Holiness Move­ment” be­gan in North Carolina, in 1886, followed by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in that same area, in 1896.  The transformation of Chris­tian­ity was as much as, or more than, the “Reformation” had been in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  Great revivals swept the U.S.A., and around the world.  However, the last sixty years has witnessed almost the entire “kingdom of heaven” fulfilling Mat­thew 25:1-13.  The kingdom of hea­ven has gone to sleep, and the light of the gospel has become very dim.  And now, midnight has come, and the cry is being made, “Behold the Bridegroom cometh, go ye out to meet Him.”

Please listen carefully to that quote from Matthew 25:1-13.  That passage clearly, and emphatically states that when the people of the Lord begin to think that the time of the coming of the Lord Jesus is near, He will be a little later than they expected, and they will become spiritually sleepy, and forget about it.

That began to happen at about the end of WWII, in 1945.  By 1952, when I finished high school, a large per­­cent­age of ministers were preach­ing that Jesus would return at about A.D. 2000.  In that 48-year period, Christianity, all over the world, be­came more and more unconcerned about the coming of our Lord.  It was actually strange to listen to the silence that gathered as the year 2000 ap­proach­­ed.  If there was any expect­ation concerning the Lord coming at that time, it was clouded by the “Y2K fury” of the moment.

A few weeks after that turn of the millennium was behind us, I was at a minister’s prayer breakfast, in north­western Massachusetts.  During that meeting, there was extensive discus­sion about the plans “we should be making” about the thrust of our Gos­pel work for the next hundred years.  I had known since 1996 that the Lord would come by 2012, so I asked them if maybe we should just plan for the next 12 years.  I got some smiles and chuckles.  By March, 2006, I realized that Jesus would actually come near the time of the Autumnal Equinox in 2010.

Nine of those 12 years have gone by, and a about a year ago we were informed that the Stock Market had just experienced a serious collapse.  Then, in mid-September, President George Bush made a revealing state­ment which he did not explain, in which He said, “I need this $750 Billion” to accomplish what I want to do in the next two years.  I believe that he was talking about the estab­lishment of the One-World-Govern­ment which has been the plan since the United States established the United Nations in 1945.  You can learn what that event will mean for the world, and for you, by reading Revelation 13:1-17.

The only way to avoid all of the agony and darkness of that ter­ri­ble time is to believe Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:37-39, and find the messenger of the Lord (Mal. 3:1-6).  “As the days of Noe were, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.  For as in the days that were before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage [they were intermarrying with the descen­dants of Cain] until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.”

Paul said, “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith” (Heb. 11:7).

And Peter said, “God … spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly” (2 Peter 2:4-5).  He boldly foretold that the forerunner of Jesus, this time, will be a man with seven men like those who Peter and the apostles ordained in Acts 6.

The narrative of the epic of Noah is a direct prophecy of the time of our preparation for the coming of Jesus, and “our gathering together unto Him” (2 Thess. 2:1).  In Hebrews 10:1, Paul said that these things are “a shadow of good things to come.”  They are a prophecy of the final days of the Grace age, and of the final preparation for the coming of the Bridegroom and the Marriage of the Lamb.  We are already beginning to see the fulfillment of those days.  Very soon “the enemy shall come in like a flood” (Isaiah 59:19), and God is preparing to “raise up a standard against him”: a holy nation in which “the Son of David” shall sit upon “the Throne of David,” in “The Tabernacle of David,” to rule the world for 1,000 years (Isa. 9:6-7; Isa. 16:1-5).

 From the death of Abel, God has tried to keep His people from marry­ing unbelievers, and He sent the flood because the descendants of Seth had done that very thing.  God’s children are still marrying unbelievers, and the effect, on whatever the organization, is always negative.  The free move­ment of the Holy Spirit is hindered, and the spirituality and knowledge­ab­i­lity of the entire Church dimin­ishes.  Yes, God is still very unhappy with it.

When the time of the flood drew near, God found a man He could depend on to do the necessary work, and to teach that little remnant the ways and the will of God.  God warned Noah of the coming calamity, and just before the flood came, God told him to get his wife, and his sons and their wives, and every species of the animals into the ark, and He told him when it would begin to rain.  Even so, God shall fulfill this allegorical prophecy by raising up a man to direct the preparations for the return of Jesus.  Then, at the critical point, Jesus will tell that prophet when to go in to the wedding, before the door is shut, and the enemy shall come in like a flood.

The time for preaching the Gospel of redemption is almost over.  Remember that when the Bridegroom comes, He will no longer be sitting at the right hand of the Father, pleading our case.  He is coming to unite with His bride and to begin to take control of the whole world, “King of Kings.”

We now anxiously await the gath­ering together of the Lord’s faithful, in the unity of the faith.  God is ready, and we are here today, urging all of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, to assemble together, and search the Holy Scriptures until we can find “the Unity of The Faith.”  It may be that we can go in to the Wedding together, the Lamb, and the Bride the Lamb’s wife, and the guests (Eph. 4:8-16).  The Lord God Almighty is good, and worthy of all praise.