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The work of the house of Joseph, part 28

On the sixth day of the feast of Tabernacles, the priests in the temple customarily read Psalm 81:6-16, a psalm commemorating Israel’s complaint at Meribah in Exodus 17. This is where God told Moses to strike the rock in order to give water to the people.

The Problem at Meribah

We read in Exodus 17:7 that “they tested the Lord, saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’” Having run into adversity, running out of water, the people thought that God had forsaken them. The lesson in this is that we should believe His promises and eliminate the idea that adversity or hardship means that God has forsaken us.

Psalm 81 commemorates this event, as we see in verse 7,

⁷ You called in trouble and I rescued you; I answered you in the hiding place of thunder; I proved you at the waters of Meribah. Selah.

The rest of the psalm is an admonition to hear His voice—that is, to believe what He says and to have confidence that He will fulfill His word. Essentially, this is a call to New Covenant faith—Abrahamic faith—as described by Paul in Romans 4:21, 22,

²¹ and being fully assured that what God had promised, He was able also to perform. ²³ Therefore it was also credited to Him as righteousness.

It was customary in the temple to read the entire psalm every Thursday, because the incident at Meribah had occurred on a Thursday, the 40^th day of the Pentecost cycle. This day was also said to be the day of Elijah’s ascension (2 Kings 2:11), and the day of Jesus’ ascension as well (Acts 1:1, 2, 3). This suggests that these ascensions gave the appearance that Elijah and Jesus had forsaken the people. Hence, the question, “Is the Lord among us or not?” is really a prophetic question that had a broader application than what was seen at Meribah.

Therefore, also, Hebrews 13:5, 6 says,

⁵ Make sure that your character is free from the love of money, being content with what you have; for He Himself has said, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,” ⁶ so that we confidently say, “The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What will man do to me?” [Psalm 118:6]

The statement in verse 5, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you,” is from promises given to Jacob (Genesis 28:15), to Israel (Deuteronomy 31:6, 8), to Joshua (Joshua 1:5), and to Solomon (1 Chronicles 28:20), saying, “He will not fail you or forsake you.”

It was thus a divine adage to those with ears to hear that God would never withdraw His presence (“leave”) or His help (“forsake”).

Again, at The Last Supper, when Jesus spoke of His ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit who was to represent Him during His absence, He told them in John 14:18,

¹⁸ I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. ¹⁹ After a little while the world will no longer see Me, but you will see Me; because I live, you will live also.

Among Jesus final words to His disciples as He was about to ascend to heaven, we read in Matthew 28:20, “and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

This was a reiteration of the promises given to the saints in the Old Testament, which answered the basic problem at Meribah, where the people said, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

His Presence During the Threat of Armageddon

As I wrote earlier, Psalm 81:6-16 was read on the sixth day of Tabernacles, when the sixth bowl of wine and water were poured out on either side of the altar. We must, therefore, connect the psalm with the threat raised when the angel poured out His bowl upon the Euphrates in Revelation 16:12.

The actions of the sixth angel were meant to alarm the spiritual powers ruling the word under the system of Mystery Babylon, so that they would react by gathering their Deep State supporters to fight against Christ, His people, and His coming Kingdom. Indeed, this has occurred since we poured out the sixth bowl at Fruita, Colorado on September 26, 2005. The supporters of Mystery Babylon fell into a state of panic and have declared an all-out war on Christian government, culture, and lifestyle.

The sixth bowl of wine forced Mystery Babylon to speed up their timetable, and this will be their undoing. Having been put on notice in 2005, they have scrambled to eliminate all traces of the Christian-based Constitution with its specified God-given rights and forms of government. But in doing so, they have only succeeded in awakening the people—especially the church—to the existence of the Deep State and the threat of overturning the Constitutional form of government.

As the church awakens, it is first startled to find that the “conspiracy theorists” were right after all. Theory is fast giving way to conspiracy fact. The threat is real. But the awakening is not the full solution. The solution is to recognize that God is sovereign, that the angel of God is responsible for stirring up the threat, and that Christ will never leave us or forsake us.

In other words, we are on the winning side, regardless of outward appearances. Proof of this is seen in the seventh bowl of wine that is poured out upon Babylon. Babylon falls, and the Kingdom of God emerges victorious. The church must awaken not only to the threat of Babylon but also to the promises of God. That is why John wrote in Revelation 16:15,

¹⁵ (Behold, I am coming like a thief. Blessed is the one who stays awake and keeps his clothes, so that he will not walk about naked and men will not see his shame.)

Those who know and understand and believe the divine plan will have no reason to panic. We are on the winning side. Armageddon is not a threat to us, but to Mystery Babylon. We are not fleeing; we are advancing steadily, and there is no power on earth that can stop us. The outcome of this battle has been predetermined in the Providence of God.

Countless people from past generations have desired to live in this time. We ourselves have engaged in hundreds—or even thousands—of spiritual battles, all designed to force the secret government of “Mystery Babylon” into the open for all to see. Now that it has happened, now that our prayers have been answered, should we be frightened? Nonsense! Or as Paul would say in the KJV, “God forbid!”

The Admonition in Psalm 81

Psalm 81:8, 9, 10 says,

⁸ Hear [shema, “hear, listen, obey”], O My people, and I will admonish you; O Israel, if you would listen to Me! ⁹ Let there be no strange god among you; nor shall you worship any foreign god. ¹⁰ I, the Lord [Yahweh], am your God who brought you up from the land of Egypt; open your mouth wide and I will fill it.

The main admonition is to obey the First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods before Me” (Exodus 20:3). Our Declaration of Independence stated categorically that all rights come from God alone.

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men…

This is what the agents of Mystery Babylon hate most. They have therefore worked to confuse rights with privileges, thereby making government the source of all rights—when, in fact, government can only grant privileges. Governments are given to secure God-given rights, not to grant them. This idea was unique in that the monarchies of Europe had claimed that God had given them the right to grant rights. America’s Constitution, written under the authority of the Declaration of Independence, overturned that idea and thereby put the American government under the authority of God Himself.

Mystery Babylon hated this and began to reverse the Constitution by removing God from His position over men’s government. Government thus usurped the place of God and then began to grant rights that God has never granted and to remove rights that God has granted.

The law of God, at its root, establishes the rights of God and men. Three of these basic rights are enumerated in the Declaration as “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The latter right, by a later Supreme Court ruling, was the right to work and to the right of security, that is, to retain the fruit of one’s labor without fear of government theft through taxation.

The point is that the foundation of the American form of government was the First Commandment. This is why the Babylonians today hate it with a passion, and this is the root of the present-day conflict. This is also the main admonition in Psalm 81:9, which, in turn, is the relevant prophecy of the sixth bowl of wine poured out upon the Euphrates.

There is no way to fulfill the Fruitfulness Mandate of Joseph-Ephraim, Ephrata, and Euphrates apart from returning to the First Commandment. This is, in fact, the meaning of the biblical phrase, “the fear of the Lord.” It is not about being frightened by God. It is about respecting His right to rule that which He has created.

Proverbs 19:23 says, “the fear of the Lord leads to life.” The Declaration of Independence says, that when God is recognized as having authority over governments, we will be guaranteed the unalienable right of “Life.” That is a restatement of Proverbs 19:23. Life is inherent in the Fruitfulness Mandate of Joseph, not only in man’s right to bring forth natural life but also God’s right to bring forth the sons of God.

It is, therefore, no surprise that this issue would come to the forefront in the latter days. The government-granted privilege to murder the unborn strikes at the heart of the Birthright of Joseph on one level, while the opposition to the Sonship message strikes at the heart of God’s right to bring forth the manifested sons of God.

The rise of the house of Joseph, then, with the support of the house of David, has been the key to the divine plan in our time. These two houses are God’s weapons of war, empowered by the Spirit of Truth to win every court battle and every enforcement action in the field. We cannot lose as long as we hear and obey Him, recognizing Christ’s authority to rule the earth, and knowing that He will never leave us or forsake us.