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Chapter 6

The Bible says that in the last days after waiting two thousand years Israel will finally get their chance to rebuild their temple, and the antichrist will be the one to give them that opportunity. Why would the antichrist help Israel worship God according to the laws and regulations of the Old Testament? Christ abolished old covenant worship when He fulfilled the requirement of the law two thousand years ago by sacrificing His own body on the cross. To resume offering sacrifices for sin on the altar of Jewish tradition would be an insult to the spirit of grace and the ultimate blasphemy against the blood of Christ. That is exactly the reason Satan would help them, but blaspheming the blood of Christ, similar to the Catholics’ version of communion, (transubstantiation) doesn’t fully explain his motive. Why would he help Israel worship their god? A great endtime revival is scheduled to occur, starting with messianic Christians headquartered in Jerusalem, sparking a Christian revival in the Jewish community and extending to the gentiles. This will happen shortly after WWIII, when societies are in utter chaos and the world economy has completely dissolved, when Satan is establishing his New World Order over all the people. A newfound interest in Christianity will surface among the gentiles, yet without effective leadership. This Christian effort will flounder, until God raises up His two witnesses in Jerusalem, who will subsequently raise up the 144,000 Jews spoken in the book of Revelation, who will take on the role of leading the gentile revival that will blossom in unprecedented proportions. Much of Israel will turn from their unbelief to become the most powerful Christians the world has ever seen. They will become Jewish apostles similar to Paul, all preaching a message of repentance and faith toward God, orchestrating the global endtime revival as spoken by Joel, all under the watchful supervision of the two witnesses, who are directly under the watchful eye of Christ.

The Jews expected their messiah to come and set up His kingdom in Jerusalem (Jn 6:14,15), which they rightly derived from Old Testament teachings, but those teachings were meant for the last days. Now that those days have come, God will call upon the Jews to be leaders in things pertaining to God, and this time they will answer His call by rallying together, twelve thousand from every tribe of Israel, and will preach a gospel of repentance in preparation for receiving the kingdom of God, reminiscent to the ministry of John the Baptist. The Jews who once hated Christianity will now lead the world into the greatest spiritual revival of all time, just as God intended it from the very beginning. It doesn’t matter how far back you look, even while God was delivering Israel from the Pharaoh of Egypt He was thinking ahead to this very moment in which His people would do battle against Satan for the souls of mankind. The enemy of goodness, righteousness and truth will finally be put in its place through the weakness of human flesh.

The satanically driven man of pure evil who is busy building his world monetary system will see the revival transpiring under his nose and will surrender his economic hat to a man who will manage his money for him, the false prophet. The spirit of absolute malevolence will then put on a new hat, the one the pope is wearing, in a desperate attempt to quell the spiritual restoration without violence while the world is watching. He will appeal to Israel’s ancient religion of the orthodox Jews who have wanted nothing more than to rebuild their temple. Without the temple they virtually have no religion. He will attempt to obfuscate the work of God by injecting the poison of obsolete Jewish temple services into God’s new covenant Christian worship. His goal will be to create confusion as usual. This will be the cause of the antichrist choosing Jerusalem as his capital city for his world empire, requiring the antichrist to make a deal with Palestine. He will demonstrate his depth of influence on humanity by convincing the Middle East to let Israel rebuild their temple. No one else has had the charisma or cunning to smooth out the differences between Israel and their neighboring Muslim enemies, extending all the way back to Jacob and Esau. Once the temple is rebuilt, the antichrist will pose as Israel’s messiah in a desperate attempt to divert peoples’ attention off the global revival. His plan is, once he quells the revival, to resume his position as richest man in the world that he temporarily gave to the false prophet, but these plans will never be realized, because God has plans of His own to undo the kingdom of Satan through the flesh of His saints, who are possessed by the Holy Spirit.

As the antichrist enters the holy of holies even the orthodox Jews will gasp in horror at the blasphemy of such a man and kick him from their temple. This will mark the beginning of sorrows, the beginning of Christian martyrdom on a global scale, which is all the antichrist really ever wanted in the first place. He prefers murder over deceit if he can get away with it. The antichrist will order his false prophet to institute an economy wherein no one can buy or sell without receiving the mark of the beast. People will know exactly what they are doing when they take the mark, that it will represent their vote to exterminate Christians, and will irreversibly bar them from heaven. Those who take the mark never really believed in God anyway, and because of their hollow stomachs and hoping their lives will return to a semblance of normalcy they will take the mark, but they will never see their old life again. Sanity will never return to this planet so long as Satan is in control, until the glorious age of millennium is finally unveiled.

Throughout the millennia Satan has always remained in the background, hidden in the darkness, enslaving the nations by his malevolent spirit, but just as he is laying the capstone on his world empire, Jesus Christ will rise from His glorious throne for the first time since His ascension, when He took His seat at the right hand of the power of God. He will initiate His worldwide kingdom that will grow in size and affluence throughout eternity, starting in Jerusalem and expanding outward around the globe by raising up two men that He has prepared for that day and hour. The two witnesses will coax him from his dark lair of the spirit realm to take on human flesh as the antichrist, subsequently revealing himself as the man of lawlessness in a panic after all his efforts have failed to stop this revival. Satan has worked throughout the generations to finally become leader of a one world government, only to see it slip from his grasp from an international Christian revival led by Israel, who will finally realize that Jesus Christ is indeed their Messiah.

The benevolent wisdom of Joseph and Daniel will appear in Jerusalem, submissive to authority, until the antichrist enters the temple and emerges as Satan in human flesh. Then these two anointings of Joseph and Daniel will undergo a transmutation that will resemble a type of Moses and Elijah, who called down fire from heaven and kept the earth from raining on their enemies for three and a half years, and Moses who released the plagues against the pharaoh of Egypt until he let them go. They will lead God’s people from the Babylon of Egypt into the wilderness in search of the promise land of the Millennium. When mass starvation and poverty strikes at unprecedented levels, the church will symbolically journey to Egypt to buy grain from their brother, Joseph, whom they left for dead decades earlier. There, the church will finally discover the will of God at the point of starvation, for their brother Joseph the prophet, has prearranged everything in advance. God will provide a way of escape for His people through these two witnesses. God intends to enact a solution very similar to the story of Joseph in the last days to take care of His people during times of severe hardship.

Joseph was the son of Jacob, who earned the name ‘Man who wrestles with God,’ which literally means “Israel.” Jacob’s offspring are hence the sons of Israel, who were essentially the church of the Old Testament. Joseph was compliant with the will of God, unlike his father and brothers. Joseph was faithful with the dreams and visions that God had gaven him, and for that reason his brother’s hated him, and threw him into a pit. They collected his tunic and dipped it in goat’s blood, and gave it to their father, telling him that a lion tore Joseph to pieces, so Jacob believed he had lost his youngest son to the beasts of the field and grieved his loss for years. What really happened to Joseph was that his brothers sold him as a slave to some countrymen who were passing through that area on their way to Egypt. Joseph’s dream was about binding sheaves in a field, and his brothers sheaves bowed down to Joseph’s sheave, and his brothers said,

Are you actually going to rein over us, and are you going to rule over us?” Then he had another dream, the sun, moon and stars were bowing down to him, so he related it to his father and his brothers, and his father rebuked him, saying, “What is this dream you have had? Shall I and your mother and your brothers actually come and bow down before you to the ground? And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept these things in his heart.  Gen 37:6-11 NIV

Joseph represents the last-days’ contemporary prophets, who are currently suffering under a silent persecution. The church is an institution that claims to love God but demonstrates its love for money far more earnestly, consequently hating their prophets as Jacob’s sons despised their brother Joseph. After pulling Joseph from the pit and selling him cheap to some travelers on their way to Egypt, he found himself servant to the house of Potiphar, who was the pharaoh’s chief guard, a man of high standing with the king, who treated Joseph as one of his own sons, until Potiphar’s wife desired relations with Joseph. He continuously resisted her, but on one occasion when they were about to be discovered during one of her flirtations, she made it appear that he was attempting to rape her, whom the authorities believed over Joseph the slave, which furnished him a bed in prison. After spending many of his youthful years incarcerated it eventually became known to the king that Joseph was an interpreter of dreams, and the opportunity to administer his gift as a prophet finally surfaced by interpreting the pharaoh’s dream that no one else could interpret. Pharaoh then released Joseph from prison and raised him up as second in command only to himself in the most powerful nation in the world at that time.

After telling Joseph’s story it becomes clear that he too had a wilderness experience, but not like Moses, who literally wandered in the desert as he sought the will of God for his life, and then when he finally realized it, he spent another forty years wandering in the desert with the sons of Israel because of their disobedience after their exile from Egypt. Therefore, wilderness experiences are what Joseph and Moses had in common. A second thing they had in common was they were on opposite ends of the same story. Joseph’s story told how Israel came to live in Egypt; his brothers and father journeyed there in search of food and eventually settled in the land of Goshen, while Moses story told how they wore out their welcome in Egypt and had to flee for their lives through the power of God.

Joseph’s story also interfaces well with the character of Daniel in that they both had rank as second in command only to the king in the greatest nations of the world in their respective eras, using a common gift from God of interpreting dreams to find favor with their kings. Joseph’s interpretation of the Pharaoh’s dream was a set of instructions to gather grain for the next seven years, after which there would be seven years of drought. Pharaoh kept the dream’s interpretation a secret so that Egypt would be the sole suppliers of grain to their region during the years of want, which made Pharaoh very rich. Hunger led Jacob and his sons to Egypt, who comprised the nation of Israel in its infancy, who thousands of years later the Assyrians led them into captivity to Babylon in the time of Daniel, whose king had a dream of a statue made of different metals that represented the last kingdom on earth that was demolished by a rock that was hewn from the side of a mountain without human agency.

The comparisons are now drawn between the figures of Joseph and Daniel, whom God will use in ways that parallel Moses and Elijah; the stage is now set to explain the biblical prophecies of their wilderness experiences and what they mean to us who live in the present day.

First of all, it is an important distinction that hardship, not persecution, will be responsible for causing this endtime revival. A second observation, if there were no revival, there would be no reason to persecute the church, since it would not pose a threat to Satan’s kingdom, but more importantly, if persecution prompted the revival, it would suggest that God were depending on Satan to persecute the church before He could initiate His endtime revival, but God does not depended on Satan for anything! Rather, Satan’s martyrdom of the saints is a reaction to the work of God among His people. This subtle difference in event sequence paints the picture of global economic hardship hitting people who are losing their jobs, forcing many families to live together under one roof and sharing everything in common as in the days of the early church. Communal living will become a survival strategy, establishing the platform that God will use to rebuild unity in his people as the first of many steps leading to the greatest spiritual awakening of all time. People will begin having church in their homes, since organized religion will be obsolete from a lack of funding. Once the obstacle of materialism is removed, people will begin rediscovering their faith as they seek God for answers to real problems.

However, the church has been disobedient, reminiscent of the times of the Babylonian takeover before the days of Nebuchadnezzar and Daniel. The Major Prophets prophesied against their disobedience: Isaiah warned them to repent, Jeremiah told them it was already too late but prescribed a course of action to minimize their judgment, Ezekiel explained in detail their future suffering that was coming by another nation that God was sending against them resulting from their disobedience, and the book of Lamentations served as poetic justice for an obstinate and degenerate Israel who failed to heed the admonition of their prophets. Their deeds repaid them sevenfold for their callous hearts who proved incapable of contrition. This is precisely the case with the church today. Stemming from their unbelief, people in our contemporary age who call themselves by the name of God are spiritually starving to death, and one day they will have no choice but to get up and go to a place of bondage where there is food and buy it from strangers, who would enslave them, except that Joseph is waiting for them, whom they once despised and persecuted.

The church will soon run out of options and have no choice but to listen to the prophets. Joseph represents one of the two witnesses, whose ministry begins as a benevolent leader of the saints before God calls them to prophesy against the world for martyring the saints. It says in Rev 11:3, “And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for twelve hundred and sixty days, clothed in sackcloth.” Who are these two witnesses, where did they come from, and what were they doing prior to their 3-½ year ministry? These are the are first two that God spiritually raises from the ashes of unbelief, who will finish raising the remaining army of God through His power consisting of 144,000 Jewish witnesses, according to an often quoted passage of Scripture, describing the valley of dry bones.

"Prophesy to these bones and say to them, `Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the LORD.'" So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them… Ezek 37:4-8 NIV

God will raise up His two witnesses to walk the streets of Jerusalem. For many days they will tread among a people who have not obeyed the will of God or even heard the voice of a prophet for millennia. These two witnesses will walk among the spiritually dead in the valley of dry bones (Israel), prophesying in the streets of Jerusalem a message that God has risen off His glorious throne and is about to reign in the world and especially among His people, and the message will resound in the ears of those who have been thus prepared, and they will rise in their spirit and answer the call of God. The purpose of the two witnesses is to extend God’s invitation of eternal life to His chosen people the Jews, calling them first to become His witnesses, who will lead the church of the gentiles into the greatest revival of its 2000-year history. Many Jews will spiritually awaken and arise from their unbelief. Flesh that has rotted off bones will figuratively appear, tendons and ligaments will stretch over skeletons, blood will once again race through veins and arteries. God will put breath into their nostrils and they will stand on their feet as a mighty army, who will fight to the death with the weapons of the word of God and prayer, by which they will come to know the truth and by that truth they will carry an anointing more powerful and more pure than any gentile, for the anointing was made for the Jew first, then for the gentile, as was the gospel of our Lord.

Once the world sets a bounty on the two witnesses, their formal ministry will begin. They will hand over the reigns of the church to the 144,000, who will lead the gentile church into the wilderness, while the two witnesses make war with the antichrist. They will act as a diversion for the church, like a mother duck draws attention to herself to protect her chicks from predators. Joseph and Daniel were both made second in command in their respective kingdoms because of their divine wisdom, even as the two witnesses will have profound wisdom from God and become second in authority only to the antichrist, who will come to Jerusalem in attempt to stop the revival, first by using deception and confusion. During these times their relationship will resemble that of Daniel and king Nebuchadnezzar. After being kicked out of the Jewish temple and realizing he is not fooling anyone, the antichrist will switch his tactics from deception to murder and mass genocide, a strategy he prefers over deceit. The Bible teaches that God will establish His church right under the nose of the antichrist, saying in Ex 9:16, “I have raised you up [Pharaoh] for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” The story of Moses delivering the children of Israel from the hand of pharaoh will rewrite itself in the last days.

In Exodus chapter one it says that the king who did not know Joseph came to power in Egypt and saw that the Israelites were becoming more numerous than the Egyptians, and thought that if war broke out, they would join their enemies, and prevail over them. For this reason they oppressed them with forced labor to make them fear the Egyptians, but the more they oppressed them the more numerous they became, “so the Egyptians came to dread them” (Ex 1:12). Pharaoh punished the Israelites out of fear. So it will be in the last days when the great endtime revival begins and Christians multiply by the tens of millions while the antichrist is simultaneously coming to power, he will persecute both Jew and gentile Christians from fear more than hatred. Hitler’s Germany also persecuted the Jews from fear (though they claimed it was from hatred). They were better merchants and bankers, and were pushing out the German markets, and were afraid that over time the Jews would economically oppress the motherland under Jewish capitalism. Instead of competing with them in the marketplace, they eliminated them. So it will be in the last days. When the devil takes on human flesh, he will come to the same conclusion, and seek to eliminate Christians, who are spiritually competing against his one-world empire.

"Do not harm the land or the sea or the trees until we put a seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God." Then I heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel… After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: "Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb." All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying: "Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honor and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!" Then one of the elders asked me, "These in white robes-who are they, and where did they come from?" I answered, "Sir, you know." And he said, "These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.  Rev 7:3-14  NIV

Revelation chapter seven talks about the sons of Israel sealed with the seal of God on their foreheads, suggesting that their association with God will be obvious to all. Then a few verses later it talks about an incalculable multitude of saints in heaven so large they cannot be counted, clothed in white robes and gathered around the throne. Based on these verses, it is not a stretch to nominate the 144,000 Jews collectively as the woman in Revelation chapter twelve. She will be responsible for this multitude of gentile Christians who are her children. While the antichrist is establishing his one-world government, God will be establishing the gentile church through His Jewish ministry, gearing up for the greatest spiritual battle of human history.

There is another wilderness story that corresponds with the woman of Revelation and her children, the story of Elijah in 1Kings 17, who provides food for the old woman and her son in the desert. Then the next chapter tells the story about his conflict with king Ahab, Jezebel and the false prophets. After a drought had seized the whole land God told Elijah to go to a certain old woman who would provide food for him, for the drought was very severe. When he got there she had nothing to eat, but a little flour and a little oil at the bottom of two jars. She was in the process of preparing for her and her son the last bit of food they had when Elijah showed at her door, and told her to make a cake for him too, promising that if she obeyed the word of the Lord, the flour and the oil would not run out of the jars until the drought was finished. She believed him at his word and did as he instructed her, and it happened just as Elijah said; the flour and oil never ran out until the drought had run its course. 

It was through Elijah’s word that the woman fed herself and her son, but it was the woman’s faith that made Elijah a cake when it was the last of her supplies, and it was her faith that continued drawing flower and oil from the vessels until the draught ended and the rains returned. God required much faith from the widow, who represents the 144,000 Jews of Revelation chapter 7, but her son merely received God’s blessing. Very little was required of him, who represents the gentile church. The word of the Lord from Elijah could have just as easily been the words of a shyster, who was conning the woman from her last meal, but she made him a cake because she believed him to be a prophet without any signs to prove his authenticity. In other words, she discerned he was a man of God, implying that one of the gifts of the spirit that will come in very handy in the last days will be a healthy gift of discernment. Before the beast makes his mark on the world the saints will need a way of identifying one another. God’s answer will be to disseminate the Jewish seal of the 144,000 upon the gentile church by endowing them with a powerful anointing and with it a powerful gift of discernment to read the seal. God loves to put His people in positions where they need to walk in faith. In this way the two witnesses will provide the word of the Lord for the 144,000, who will provide for their children, the gentile church. The higher you go in authority, the stronger the anointing and the more faith is required, suggesting that God’s demand on His gentile believers will be minimal compared to His expectations on the two witnesses and His Jewish church.

When you look at the story of Elijah helping the old woman and her son, it becomes apparent that Elijah needed the woman as much as the woman needed him. They were codependent on each other. As the two witnesses call down fire from heaven against their enemies, so they will also call down manna from heaven for the church, whom the 144,000 will distribute to God’s gentile church, even as God miraculously provided manna for Moses, Aaron and the Israelites during their exile through the wilderness, also similar to Jesus feeding the five thousand. After His disciples reminded Him that they had assembled in a desolate place and had nothing to eat, Jesus said to them, “You give them something to eat” (Matt 14:15), so they used their own hands to supply the needs of the crowd as Jesus continued reaching into the basket and pulling out more bread and fish until the people were satisfied. In this case Jesus represents the two witnesses, His disciples represent the 144,000, and the multitude represent the church of the gentiles. All that is required of the gentile believers is to accept the teaching of the two witnesses, and to receive their ministry.

When Jesus came the first time, God provided a minister to introduce Israel to their messiah. In the same manner, God will again provide a minister to reintroduce the Son of God to the world at His second coming through the office of the two witnesses, who will have a ministry similar to John the Baptist.

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. And [he] preached, saying, There cometh one mightier than I after me, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to stoop down and unloose. I indeed have baptized you with water: but he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.  Mark 1:1-4,7-8 (KJV).

The purpose of John the Baptist was to prepare Israel for the ministry of Jesus Christ with a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. His ministry laid the foundation for Jesus’ baptism of the Holy Spirit, a concept central to the gospel that people have misconstrued, butchered and emasculated over the millennia. Jesus said that His spirit would be in us (Jn 14:17). Most everyone understands the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but when we are baptized, water does not enter us, so it’s not a symbol of the indwelling Holy Spirit, but wets our extremities. Baptism illustrates the process of drowning (give up trying to fulfill the law by the flesh Rom 7:1-6), then being resurrected from the water a new person to serve Christ through the Spirit. The anointing is at the center of this ceremony. Baptism is not about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, but about an outward manifestation of His inward work, similar to Jesus’ parable in Matt 13:33, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three pecks of meal, until it was all leavened” NASB. In this parable we see God instilling His eternal life within the believer that matures to externally manifest as the anointing, but it appears that no one wants any part of this anointing. The name Christ literally means “anointed one,” so if we are Christians, then we must be the anointed ones. Where is the anointing in the church today? People think they can do the will of God without walking in the Spirit of His anointing, but if we want to obey Christ, we must learn to carry His anointing, because we can do nothing without Him (Jn 15:5). God will finally get His way among His people by fully expecting us to walk in His strength before He returns as a means of surviving in the last days.

Jesus’ baptism of the Holy Spirit is the one thing the church as a whole has resisted throughout the ages. It is the one thing Jesus wanted to get through to us. The anointing is like the trinity in that it is rarely if ever mentioned in the Bible, yet it is central to the gospel. The anointing is the power of God that He promised to those who believe in Him, but after the apostles fell asleep it was the first thing to disappear, since it requires an abiding relationship with Christ and a deep understanding of the Scriptures in order to walk in it, along with a strong commitment against religion to avoid replacing it with the doctrines of demons. It also happens to be the only threat to Satan, and therefore his primary target, making the anointing an elusive entity indeed.

It is this anointing that God earnestly desires to restore to the church in preparation to receive the kingdom of God in the millennium. The purpose of the two witnesses is to “restore all things.” Jesus handed the bread and fish to His disciples, who distributed them to the five thousand. So, the two witnesses will reinstate the anointing by delivering it to the 144,000 Jews, who will distribute this lost knowledge of God to the gentile church throughout the world. This will have the effect of unifying the church as a global entity, ending all schisms and abolishing all religions and denominations within God’s true church, so they all agree with one truth according to the instruction of the Holy Spirit. This will become the first and greatest miracle that will make the world stand up and take notice as it says in Rev 12:1, “And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman [the 144,000] clothed with the sun, and the moon [Satan] under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (NASB). This transformation of unity must first happen to the woman before she can bestow it on her children.

The disciples learned from the scribes that there was a connection between John the Baptist and Elijah the prophet, and they asked Jesus about it.

The disciples asked Him, saying ‘Why then do the scribes say that Elijah must come first?’ And he answered and said, ‘Elijah is coming and will restore all things; but I say to you, that Elijah already came, and they did not recognize him, but did to him whatever they wished. So also the Son of Man is going to suffer at their hands.’ Then the disciples understood that He had spoken to them about John the Baptist  Matt 17:10-13 NIV.

For Jesus to compare John the Baptist with Elijah, and for Elijah to display many of the attributes of the two witnesses suggests that the two witnesses will possess the traits of both John the Baptist and Elijah, whose ministries both had the restoration of God’s people in common. The ministry of John the Baptist was to prepare Israel to receive their Messiah, so the two witnesses will prepare the 144,000, who will in turn prepare the global church of the gentiles to receive their savior at the second coming of Christ. The two witnesses will bring back the anointing to the church that was lost almost immediately after the apostles fell asleep. They will cause millions of people to walk in the power of God for the first time in two thousand years, giving them hope and faith to establish God’s purpose in a dark and foreboding world where love has been misplaced. If you recall from the book of Acts, the apostles along with a handful of other people went about the countryside performing miracles and preaching the gospel in the power of God, but instead of twelve apostles there will be 144,000 Jews that will have the gift of God in their fingertips and they will speak the unadulterated word of God with boldness in the last days, along with millions of other gentile Christians who will use their gifts to strengthen one another in the church and will evangelize their communities until the hammer falls, and then God’s people will be forced into the wilderness. This period of evangelism will be short but effective.

The Scripture says, “I will send my messenger [John the Baptist] ahead of you,” so in the last days God will send His two witnesses ahead of the second coming of Christ to pave the way for His kingdom to be established on the earth. After the antichrist turns up the heat and the world begins persecuting the saints to death, based on the sixth seal (Rev 6:9-11), God will have transformed His two witnesses from benevolent shepherds of God’s church to adjudicators of the world’s unbelief, sent forth to defend the saints by afflicting the earth with as many plagues as they desire, and they will later defend the church through their own death by becoming a diversion and a scapegoat to alleviate the pressure off the saints, so that more souls by all means may be saved.

I was given a reed like a measuring rod and was told, "Go and measure the temple of God and the altar, and count the worshipers there. But exclude the outer court; do not measure it, because it has been given to the Gentiles. They will trample on the holy city for 42 months. (Rev 11:1-3 NIV)

These verses were meant as an analogy to depict the church in the last days, who ventured into a spiritual domain with God that not even the early church had experienced; it will be a spiritual realm where the world will be excluded. The temple’s Holy of Holies, not the literal one, but a spiritual domain where their enemies cannot follow them, analogous to entering heaven, depicts their anointing. The church will go there to hide in the anointing (the wilderness) from the wrath of the dragon, who is barred from entering such a holy place. Note the paradox that the antichrist will enter the holy place of the actual temple (Matt 24:15), but like Jesus who never entered the Jewish temple while in the flesh said to His enemies, “Where I am going you cannot come” (Jn 7:34), so the devil will be unable to follow the church into the real sanctuary of God’s presence. Therefore, the place that God has prepared for the church to hide from the wrath of the dragon is the very presence of God, a place where Satan is neither welcome nor willing to go.

According to the verses above, the city along with the outer court of the temple are trampled underfoot, implying that the domain of the outer court belongs to the natural realm of the flesh and therefore does not apply to the heavenly realm where God intends to hide His people during the reign of the antichrist. Once you step behind the veil into the most holy place, you are standing on holy ground, where strangers and strange spirits are not permitted to bring in their stained flesh and demonically inspired doctrines. The outer court, therefore, depicts the domain of the five foolish virgins, who refuse to walk in God’s anointing, and will ultimately be rejected by God and trampled underfoot by men. God told John the revelator to measure the temple and count the worshipers in it. To count them is to mark them as on a tally sheet, similar to the book of life. Prior to calling down fire from heaven, Elijah assembled the people and asked them a single question in 1Kings 18:21,22. It will be the same question God will ask the church in the last days when the semblance of order is breaking down and all hope appears to be lost, “Elijah went before the people and said, "How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.’ But the people said nothing."

God intends to call huge masses of people into His eternal kingdom through a colossal endtime revival, but will not protect those who refuse to incorporate divine worship into their religion. Those who partake of the endtime revival will have to put down their unbelieving flesh in order to hear and obey the voice of the Holy Spirit. Many who are part of the church today will refuse to integrate into God’s endtime revival, because the doctrines handed down by the two witnesses and the 144,000 Jews will conflict with their religion, essentially charging God with error instead of suspecting their old worn-out doctrines conflicting with the Scriptures. Ancient mainstream religious doctrines are stained by centuries of malpractice, according to Paul’s own words in Acts 20:29-30, “I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them” NIV. These same distorted doctrines all designed to reject the teaching of God’s anointing are still in effect today. God intends to reveal the flaws of the gentile faith and its various denominations, many of which began at the very onset of church history, proving that the gentiles have not carried the gospel in its purity any better than Israel followed the old covenant, “for we have already charged that both Jews and Greeks are all under sin; as it is written, ‘there is none righteous, not even one…” (Rom 3:9-12).

The church today is so steeped in their manmade religions that most people will not be able to give them up, not for the love of God and and not even for the hope of eternal life. Some will recognize the signs of His return, but will still harden their hearts. Remember what happened to Israel, “That which Israel is seeking for, it has not obtained, but those who were chosen obtained it, and the rest were hardened.” (Rom 11:7) NASB. Many within the church today will go the way of Israel in the last days, and miss the second coming of Christ. It is written that Israel was broken off as a branch so that the gentiles may be grafted in their place to the wild olive tree (who is Christ), “…They were broken off for their unbelief, but you stand by your faith. Do not be conceited, but fear; for if God did not spare the natural branches, neither will He spare you. Behold then the kindness and severity of God; to those who fell, severity, but to you, God’s kindness, if you continue in His kindness; otherwise you also will be cut off” (Rom 11:20-22) NASB. Those who resist the coming anointing will vehemently oppose the endtime revival, contrasting the plan of God with their religion and their enraged jealousy will drive them to receive the mark of the beast and will turn against the true saints.

The chapter after the story of taking care of the woman and her son, Elijah goes to battle with the false prophets of Ahab and Jezebel in 1King 18:15-40. The false prophets represent the false brethren in the church today, who will not give up their religion when God raises up His church; they will stand in opposition to the anointing that God is establishing among His people. Elijah challenges the false prophets of Ahab to call down fire from heaven as an opportunity to prove they are serving the true God of Israel, so they dance around the altar from morning to afternoon, cutting themselves with knives to attract the attention of the gods to no avail, while Elijah stands back mocking them as the blood gushes from their self-inflicted wounds. Late afternoon it’s Elijah’s turn; he rebuilds the broken down altar and prepares the evening offering, ordering a trench dug around the altar and water poured on the offering until it fills the trench. Elijah then calls upon the God of Israel, and fire comes down from heaven in the presence of his enemies and consumed the evening sacrifice, even licking up the water that surrounded the altar. Once he has proven who was who, he orders the false prophets rounded up and slaughtered. The difference between this story and the account of the two witnesses in Revelation 11 is that instead of calling down fire on the evening sacrifice, the two witnesses call down fire directly on their enemies. In other words, the enemies of God’s true church are the evening sacrifice.

And I will give power to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees and the two lampstands that stand before the Lord of the earth. If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes from their mouths and devours their enemies. This is how anyone who wants to harm them must die. These men have power to shut up the sky so that it will not rain during the time they are prophesying; and they have power to turn the waters into blood and to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they want. (Rev 11:3-6 NIV).

Another purpose of the two witnesses is to give the world an opportunity to repent, forcing everyone to make a conscious decision to either follow Christ or to follow Satan after such strong evidence had been presented in their favor as servants of the most high. Some will repent, but the rest will harden their hearts. According to the above verses, the city is trampled underfoot by the antichrist while the two witnesses are prophesying against him in Jerusalem. Their prophecies and plagues will deliver the saints from their enemies by creating a distraction in order to defer the rapture, that God might lead His church through the trumpets of God’s judgment, corresponding with Moses and Aaron, who delivered the Israelites from Pharaoh and through the devastation of Egypt.

This theme of delivering the church through the tribulation runs throughout the discourse of endtime prophecy. The two witnesses will protect the church by fire that proceeds from their mouths as they speak the oracle of God and strike the earth with as many plagues as they desire. The fact that the two witnesses performed miracles similar to Moses and Elijah strongly suggests that they hold offices and carry anointings similar to these two ancient prophets. When God judged Pharaoh, Israel lived nearby in the land of Goshen but were unaffected by the plagues, because God made a distinction between the land of His people and the land of their enemies. So, we can trust that God will again make a distinction between His people and their enemies by ordering His true church into the wilderness that God will set apart as a type of Goshen. This suggests that God will call His two witness to aim their plagues at metropolitan areas, implying that He will call His people to migrate from all the major cities of the world and set up communes in the country, where people can live and worship God in preparation to receive His coming kingdom. Rev 18:4 says, "Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues” (NIV).

In the process of Moses delivering Israel from the land of Egypt as it says in Ex 7:8-25, Aaron threw down his staff and it became a serpent, so Pharaoh summoned his Egyptian magicians and they also were able to duplicate many of the plagues of Moses through their secret arts. Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. That’s actually pretty resourceful for a sorcerer without the help of God to turn a piece of wood into a snake, except they did it through trickery, just like the magicians of our day, who can do some pretty amazing things, like temporarily removing the statue of Liberty from it place as David Copperfield claimed to have done in 1983. People in the last days will have an affinity to believe in the devil, greedily accepting his irrational explanations for rejecting the message of the two witnesses after seeing their signs and wonders for 3 ½ years.

It says that the two witnesses will turn water into blood, just as Moses did in Exodus chapter seven. Aaron stretched out his staff over the waters of Egypt and they turned into blood, but the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts and pharaoh’s heart was hardened. So it will be in the last days that the two witnesses will perform miracles in the presence of the false prophet, who will summon his sorcerers of divination to duplicate their miracles to discredit their message of repentance. After the two witnesses are killed and are raised from the dead and ascend to heaven in the presence of the whole world, Rev 13:13 says that later the false prophet will call down fire from heaven after he had ample time to figure out a way to do it. This will also give time for the message of the two witnesses to become a distant memory in the ears of those who refuse to believe, so he can begin casting doubt in peoples’ minds, raising the question, ‘Were they really prophets of God?” and raising the possibility that the antichrist is the true god. This is a similar tactic that the serpent pulled on Eve in the Garden of Eden when he asked her, “Did God really say…?” (Gen 3:1).

The church will remain present during the seven seals of God’s judgment. The seals are not like His trumpets and His bowls in that the four horsemen represent the wrath of Satan, implying that God intends to use Satan to judge the world. That shouldn’t surprise anyone, since God often used wicked nations to judge Israel throughout the Old Testament. It is fair to say that God will not judge the world for rejecting Him, but for choosing absolute evil instead. The Bible says that God is a jealous God, meaning that if someone else replaced Him, and treated His creation with tender loving care, God would still have a problem with that. However, such a scenario does not exist in the real world, because whatever seeks to replace God is intrinsically evil, since no one can desire the throne of God for good reason. Lucifer proved that by turning into a monster in his evil pursuit of absolute authority.

The Holy Spirit incorporated John the Baptist’s wilderness experience into the anointing that he bestowed on Christ at His baptism, which subsequently led Him into the wilderness for forty days and forty nights to be tempted by the devil. The two witnesses will have lived in the wilderness before they are revealed in sackcloth, and impart their wilderness anointing into the Jewish church, who will in turn pass their wilderness anointing to the gentile church. In this way God will lead His people by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil to receive his mark for 3 ½ years, while the two witnesses shield them from the antichrist, after which the two witnesses will be killed. Then, after 3 ½ days their bodies will be raised from the dead and caught up to heaven in the clouds in the resurrection of the righteous. This is the rapture of the dead in Christ, whose bodies rest in their tombs waiting for His call. These are those who have died in faith since Adam; it is the blessed first resurrection; then we who are alive and remain will be caught up with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thessalonians 4).

There is a steep grade of severity from the seals, to the trumpets to the bowls of God’s judgment, blood being what they all have in common, as it says in Rev 16:6, “For they have shed the blood of your saints and prophets, and you have given them blood to drink as they deserve" NIV. Following the same pattern, the sixth seal calls for an earthquake that will rock every mountain on earth, while the seventh bowl calls for an earthquake that will completely remove the mountains (Rev 16:17-21), creating a more spacious landmass in preparation for the millennium. God has kept His church here on earth as a witness to the works of God to show Satan that something as weak as human flesh is stronger than all the power of evil when people obey the Holy Spirit. God will protect His people from the seals of Satan’s horror and from the trumpets of God’s anger by providing them with a way of escape in the wilderness that God has prepared for the woman and her children. He will supernaturally provide everything His people need during that time, as He did for Elijah during his wilderness experiences with the woman and her son, and for Moses and the Israelites during their forty-year trek through the desert.

Following is a comparison/contrast of the two witnesses, John the Baptist, Moses, Elijah and the bowls of Gods judgment.

1. Fear and jealousy are the prime motives of the antichrist’s campaign against Christians.

1. Moses and Elijah were hotly pursued by their enemies

2. The two witnesses will be pursued and killed after their ministry is complete

3. John the Baptist was killed after his ministry.

2. Moses and Elijah characterize the two witnesses

1. They both had wilderness experiences

2. They both met Jesus on the mountaintop during His transfiguration.

3. The two witnesses turned water into blood, as did Moses. The first seal and two bowls of God’s judgment pertain to turning the oceans into blood and fresh water streams and rivers into blood, making it the most common, hence the most significant type of judgment. The blood will be oil.

1. God used blood to judge the world for martyring His saints (Rev 16:3-7)

2. We can use it as a scale of frequency and intensity regarding martyrdom.

4. The two witnesses called down fire from heaven to destroy their enemies

1. Elijah called down fire to consume the evening offering (2King 1:10-12).

2. The false prophet will call down fire using his magic arts as a way of discrediting the two witnesses.

5. The two witnesses will protect the woman and her children (the Jewish and gentile church)

1. Elijah took care of the woman and her son in 1Kings 17.

2. During this time, signs, wonders and miracles will be commonplace, similar to the days of Moses in the wilderness.

6. The two witnesses wore sackcloth, which many of the Old Testament prophets wore while fasting, similar to John the Baptist, who wore camel’s skin. These garments are symbolic of living in the wilderness.

7. The two witnesses stopped the rain, as did Elijah. One of the bowls of God’s judgment is a scorching sun, implying a drought, which would account for the drying up of the River Euphrates, another bowl of God’s judgment.

Revelation chapter eleven says that the two witnesses were allowed to afflict the world with as many plagues as they desired, which may include some or all the plagues that Moses called on the Egyptians including but not limited to: a swarm of frogs, a swarm of gnats, a swarm of flies, a swarm of locusts, cattle of the Egyptians died, and the Egyptians first born were slain.

James R. Wuthrich

jimwuthrich@yahoo.com