Transcript: Understanding the 144,000 in Revelation: God's End Time Church

The End Time Church I'm starting to visualize, in very practical terms, how God is very likely going to bring together the supernatural end-time church that the Bible talks about. As the title of this video suggests, I believe it is going to be much bigger than what happened on the day of Pentecost some 2000 years ago. This end-time church is described in the Revelation as a bride adorned for her husband. She wears a spotless, wrinkle-free garment, which has been made pure through something called the blood of the Lamb. You don't have to look far in organizational religion today to see that such a spotless bride does not exist anywhere on earth at the moment. What we see everywhere is lukewarm, half-hearted double-talk drenched in disobedience and lies. Some have become disillusioned with the counterfeits, and they have set off looking for a hypothetical, one true church. I have, for decades, cautioned against assuming that something we may do is going to be any better. What is going to make this end-time church so special is simply that it is neither started by nor maintained by human control. The controls will all be in the hands of God. We may participate, but that is all, and we will only be able to do it as He decides. Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build it. And that is where so many Christians and so many Christian organizations have missed it over and over again. For more than 40 years, I have been saying that all of our building plans must conform to the principles laid down by Jesus in his great Sermon on the Mount. Ironically, as I have tried to follow those principles, those same principles have, over and over again, blocked normal organizational growth. No one wants to do it Jesus' way, and we often fail ourselves. Nevertheless, along with a tiny handful of friends, I have spent 40 years producing articles that describe this search for truth in the teachings of Jesus. Over the past four or five years, we have been producing videos which teach even more about the things that Jesus taught. They are gradually being translated into other languages. We are working full-time to build this kingdom that Jesus spoke of, but our growth is almost imperceptible. We have asked ourselves how it would be ever possible to reach the seven billion people in the world with the message of the Gospels, when it takes so much effort just to find one other person who will leave everything to come and work with us, in total dependence on God for our daily bread. We tried to stay open to the possibility that there are other communities and other individuals teaching the same truths from the same four Gospels but it has been a disappointing effort trying to find any of them But throughout the year 2020, the COVID-19 virus gradually opened my eyes to just how simple it would be for God to very quietly and very quickly Get the entire message that Jesus taught out to the entire population of the world, with or without us. I'm going to explain that in this video, and I'm going to invite others of you to become a part of this. We've always had a quiet hope that the 12th chapter of the Revelation might refer to what we have imagined will happen in the last three and a half years before Jesus returns, and that we might be able to be a part of it. That chapter talks about a group of people who are protected and provided for in a place which is described as the wilderness. It sounds like this group of people are the same ones described elsewhere in the Revelation as numbering 144,000, and as being people who faithfully follow Jesus, who is referred to as the Lamb, wherever he goes. Among ourselves, we have guessed that literal obedience to the teachings of Jesus, the Lamb, would be the primary requirement for membership in this special group. We would often talk about hiding out in a cave during three and a half years of the Great Tribulation. We knew the cave could be literal, but we also considered it to be symbolic of our ostracism from the rest of society. The wilderness could just be isolation from the rest of society, even while in the midst of dense metropolitan populations. Perhaps we will be able to preach the good news right up until the end, despite our isolation. As I write this now, we find ourselves scattered around the world and in isolation from the rest of the world as a result of something called lockdowns. As vaccines start to ease the infections, others around us may return to more normal interactions in their day-to-day grind. But for us, we may have discovered something that is going to characterize our ministry for years to come. Are you getting a hint of what I'm talking about? Imagine an army of 144,000 dedicated followers of the Lamb faithfully pumping out the truth on social media all over the world. They could be homeless people preaching in the silence of local libraries. They could be teens preaching in the privacy of their rooms. They could be travellers preaching from laptops plugged into powerpoints at train stations and other public buildings. But they would all be preaching roughly the same message, the one that Jesus preached the message that the early church was starting to forget, even before the Bible as we know it today, had been fully compiled. If 144 people could each reach 150 people a day by the end of one year they would have reached over 7 billion people the entire population of the world They would, of course, be directing each of those 7 billion contacts to the teachings of Jesus and possibly to literature, videos and other individuals who are preaching the same thing around the world so that all seven billion would have been offered the chance to leave everything to learn from the Master himself. All the thousands or millions who might respond in that first year of ministry could take the message further in face-to-face encounters in their local villages and within the borders of their own countries to people who do not have access to computers or the Internet. Training could be as simple as jumping in the deep end and starting to paddle as fast as you can. If there is literature to help with many of the problems that might come up newbies would be able to quickly internalize those teachings and pass them on to others as we all move closer to the return of our Master in the flesh. The world today is moving steadily closer to total domination by a dark force called artificial intelligence. We are learning to live with it every day. Decisions about the future of the world are taken out of the hands of people everywhere and dictated by superhuman computers. But something similar could happen in this new worldwide Church of Jesus Christ. No training schools, no system of accountability, no governing bodies... none of this beyond what might exist in a local community of such dedicated individuals, much like it was in the first century Church of Christ. So how would this be bigger than Pentecost? It would be bigger, for starters, just in numbers and in geographic scope. But, while many previous attempts to get back to first century Christianity focused on signs and wonders, this one will be far more informed. It will focus on the miracle worker himself and his impending return. But the message will be the cross of Christ millions of times over as evidenced through his followers. In that sense, we could say that it will be bigger than the Bible too, for the Bible stops short of the great suffering that Christians endured during that first century, And yet, it has been said that the seeds of the Christian faith sprouted in the blood of those early martyrs. What we are looking forward to, albeit with much fear and trepidation, is a worldwide movement of martyrs. A movement that will shout the truth in the most powerful way possible to a godless and self-centered world. Our message will be that there really is something better than life itself. Eternity is real. That so carpenter from Nazareth really does have the key to experience this thing we call eternal life If only we would be willing to take up our cross and follow him Earlier I mentioned that wedding garment which Jesus described for his end church It is made pure through the blood of the Lamb. The revelation tells us that these people who follow the Lamb will overcome all those forces of darkness that will line up against us, not only through what we preach, but through our willingness to die for such a message. The Revelation says, they overcame him through the blood of the Lamb, and through the word of their testimony, and because they love not their lives even unto death. This world has never heard such a message coming from the church since the first century. Maybe a spiritual giant here, or a powerful saint there, but not through the effeminate, watered-down, lukewarm gospel of the masses. But all that is going to change soon, and I'm inviting others of you to join us in getting prepared for it. We are preparing by following Jesus now, in loving obedience to all that he taught. Come join us in our cave, or in a cave of your own. Let us preach together this message, knowing that when we have reached the entire world, then the end will come, and our Lord will return. Praise God! Do you want to be a part of it? Then find a Bible and start reading the four gospels, with a view to becoming a 21st-century disciple, just like those disciples of the 1st century, taking up your cross and following Jesus. Contact me if you like, and let me know what country you live in. I'll try to put you in touch with someone who has been living like this for a few years now so that we can support one another. But above all, take the time to listen to the Jesus of the four gospels. Listen to him, believe him, and then start acting on the things he has told us to do if we want to build the kingdom that he is coming back to rule over. Before you go, if you subscribe to this channel and click on the bell icon, you'll be notified as new videos come out. This channel is being slowly strangled through censorship on YouTube, but we are uploading these videos in other places as well. We would encourage you to do the same thing, almost as step one in getting this message out. As Paul said to Timothy, a young believer in the early church, The things that you have learned from me in the presence of faithful witnesses pass on to others who will be able to share them with still others as well. It worked for Paul and the first Christians, and it can work again today. When we stop building organizations and we just concentrate on preaching the truth as it has been revealed to us through the teachings of Jesus Christ, our coming King and Lord. God bless you. you