The Gifts Are For Today and They Will BE 100% Essential for the Tribulation Time That Is Yet to Come (very soon)

 Peterism and Amillenialism, in whatever form that they come are heresies of the worst kind. The God of Israel who promised faithfulness to an ethnic people and a geographical land for a 1,000 generations is certainly not in the business of changing His mind.

To say that the gifts have somehow expired is to proclaim a lie and to exalt the written word above the Holy Spirit.

The pre-trib rapture is often taught alongside this cessationism and they do go hand in glove, but at least there are some who stay away from cessationism even while teaching the totally unbiblical pre-trib nonsense.

Messiah's community will be under severe persecution in the end times. They will need unusual discernment, as a gift of the Spirit. They will need prophecy to determine the proper direction. They will need supernatural hospitality, when it would be easier to just shut out the Jew and those fleeing the wrath of the anti-Christ.

Each of the gifts will be needed. There will be no more hiding people behind a book shelf, the technology that is out there at this time is scary in its accuracy and what it can reveal.  

We will be put in a place of 100% weakness where we rely 100% on the Spirit and the gifts of God. Maranatha!

Perfectly Good, But Perfectly Wrong

 Isn't it amazing how if you repeat a false claim or a lie often enough it becomes something that people claim to be true.

These words were in an otherwise very good Bible study I was a part of yesterday. 

"Of all the major world religions only Christianity claims its founder was resurrected from the dead."

Do you want to follow me down the rabbit hole?

In the eyes of the God of Israel, God Most High, God the Father, who sent God the Son to be the fully human, fully divine, entity on earth for 33 years, there is no such thing as "Christianity" and since it does not really exist, it was not "founded" on Pentecost.

Pentecost is the Greek name for the Jewish Festival called Shavuot in Hebrew.

In English when I look at a tree, I call it tree, but if I were French I would call it arbre. My point is, it is still a tree even though different languages have different words for it. The dividing of the languages was a curse from God Most High. 

So "Pentecost" was a Jewish festival being celebrated by Jewish believers in the God of Israel. Shavuot is a fascinating study, the fourth of the seven annual feasts and the one commemorating the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people. Obedience to the Torah given by God is one of the things that separates the ethnic Jewish people from the rest of the nations, the gentiles. There is a Jewish teaching that says the stone tablets carried their own weight down the mountain after Moses received them from God, that blesses me mightily, because it indicates the beautiful truth that the Law was never meant to be a weight that we had to carry. God empowers it with the ability to carry itself in us. 

What did happen on the Shavuot after the resurrection of Yeshua? 

The Holy Spirit was poured out on all those gathered in the upper room. This event is a fulfillment of one of the things to be accomplished by the Messiah of Israel. God the Spirit now enables the body of the followers of the Messiah of Israel to obey and follow Him, to the glory of the Father. We "bear the Name" in the midst of the nations and our lives point them to the God of Israel. 

If we are reading the Bible with the thought that there is an Old Testament and a New Testament you are perfectly good, because even the highly regarded King James Bible has those pages dividing the book so it must be true, right? Wrong! The new covenant spoken of in Jeremiah and Hebrews is a covenant made with Israel and Judah, kind of hard to make that something that just gets started at the Pentecost after the resurrection and is centered on gentiles and a "church"! Well NOT JUST HARD, THE WORD I AM LOOKING FOR IS IMPOSSIBLE!

If we read 1 Peter 1:10,11 "10 Concerning this salvation the prophets, who prophesied about this gracious gift of deliverance prepared for you, sought wisdom and searched carefully for understanding, 11 trying to make out the kind of person or the appointed time concerning which the Spirit of the Messiah within them was giving them and more clarity, as he told them ahead of time about the things that the Messiah was destined to suffer and the glorious things that would follow these sufferings." We can see that the prophets as individuals had the Spirit of the Messiah, the Holy Spirit in them, the "pouring out" on this Shavuot was different because it was a lot of people all at once who were then empowered to proclaim and live out of the resurrection life of the Messiah. 

I can't even begin to understand or communicate how the resurrection of the Jewish Messiah changed everything, but that change was the fulfillment of what the prophets of spoken and when He returns it will be the fulfillment of ALL the prophets have spoken. He will stand on the physical location the Mount of Olives in the physical land of Israel and He will see to it that ALL Israel (a distinct ethnic people) is saved. 

New would be more clearly stated as fulfilled. The idea that the sovereign God of the universe would have to go to a plan B after establishing His everlasting covenant with Abraham is patently ridiculous.

Individual gentiles who believe and trust in the Messiah of Israel are grafted into the already existing vine of Israel and they have nothing to boast in. Nothing about being a gentile is worth boasting in.