The Comings and the Kingdom Now

God's coming to humanity unfolds in three movements. The first coming was Bethlehem: God with us, in flesh. The second coming is the Holy Spirit: "I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you... he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." As John the Baptist came "in the spirit and power of Elijah," Christ comes in Spirit through the baptism of the Holy Ghost. Rapture means joy, abounding joy, "righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." The third coming is the believer coming to Him.

Throughout Scripture, God comes to people: walking with Adam in the cool of the day, visiting Abraham at his tent, and named Emmanuel, "God with us." "Yea, though I walk through the valley... thou art with me." Religion reinforces that God is with us to heal, bless and fill, and it's true. But it neglects the other side: "Come unto me." Peter asked, "Bid me come unto thee on the water." The virgins heard, "Go ye out to meet him." On the cross, the repentant thief asked, "Remember me" (the opposite of dismember: put me back together), and Jesus answered, "To day shalt thou be with me." Crossing the line means moving from God with us to us with God.

The rescue-from-the-world mindset is one of the most damaging ideas ever taught to church people. If salvation is only about being ready to leave, believers sit in church with no purpose, "hanging on till Jesus comes." It feeds poverty ("any minute I'll be out of here and have a mansion"), and it turns spiritual security into spiritual insecurity: attending church to feel a thrill and confirm "I'm still saved, in case He comes tonight." God never left His people. Believers are saved for His purpose in the earth now.

"In my Father's house are many mansions" doesn't describe houses in a heavenly town "the size of Atlanta." It describes places, dimensions, in God. Jesus said, "We will come unto him, and make our abode with him." Believers already "sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus." "The kingdom of God is within you" and "cometh not with observation"; it wells up from inside like a spring. Heaven is all around us, unseen, like radio and television signals waiting to be tuned in. That's why we pray, "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven."

In the parable of the pounds, a nobleman "went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return." The far country is death. Christ went into death and hell, took the keys of death and the grave, and returned three days later having received the kingdom. At the Last Supper He said He wouldn't eat again until it was fulfilled in the kingdom of God. After rising, He ate fish and honeycomb before His disciples and, for forty days, spoke "of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God." The citizens who said, "We will not have this man to reign over us," were His own religious people. The kingdom is not coming someday. It was established.

In 2024 this was named the dividing year, given as a direct word from God, the kind of word rarely claimed. It marked the start of the dismantling of the organized institutional church, "because what we call church has never really been the church." The picture is Israel crossing the Jordan at harvest: a season of shaking and sorting, as people move from institutional ideas and religious theory into a personal experience of hearing, fulfilling and manifesting the voice of God. Gathering together remains precious; the change is in what believers depend on.

After Elijah was taken up, Elisha returned to the Jordan with Elijah's mantle, struck the water, and it parted "hither and thither," this side and that. The Jordan is the line of demarcation, and every believer must strike it in their own thinking. On this side, God was with us. On the other side, we are with God. When the priests' feet touched the water, the river rolled back. That doesn't mean there are no more battles or giants, but the promised land is entered. Everything true from the past comes along; the old system stays behind. The sons of the prophets then recognized that Elijah's spirit rested on Elisha, a picture of the manifestation of the sons of God.

"The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force." Suffereth means allows: the kingdom permits those who press to take it. Luke says "every man presseth into it." It doesn't come automatically in a prayer line, from the laying on of hands, or from an emotional experience. It is entered, "through much tribulation." The third coming is believers actively taking hold of the kingdom.