The mystery of iniquity

THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY The Antichrist Revealed ❖ REV. JOHN SHANE VAUGHN Founding Apostolic Overseer First Harvest Ministries International THE MYSTERY OF INIQUITY: The Antichrist Revealed Published by First Harvest Ministries International HisComingKingdom.com | TheTruthTv.tv All rights reserved. No portion of this booklet may be reproduced for commercial sale without written permission. Congregations, study groups, and households of faith are freely granted permission to copy and distribute this work for teaching purposes. Scripture is taken from the Authorized (King James) Version with the Sacred Names restored. Where the English text reads God, the LORD, or Jesus, this booklet restores YAHWEH and YAHSHUA. Greek definitions follow Strong’s, Thayer’s, and standard lexical usage; the numbering is given so that the reader may verify every claim personally. Printed for the FHaMIly and for the scattered house of Israel. CONTENTS ❖ A Word Before We Begin 1. The Verse Nobody Could Preach 2. Katecho: One Word Wearing Two Disguises 3. Mysterion: Not a Riddle — a Secret 4. Anomia: The Secret Is Lawlessness 5. Two Congregations in One Sanctuary 6. He Is Not Born — He Is Uncovered 7. The Man of Sin Has a Name 8. The Five “I Wills” 9. The Temple He Sits In 10. A Royal Priesthood in Working Clothes 11. The Falling Away Is Behind Us 12. Who Is Really Being Held Back 13. Consumed by the Brightness of His Presence 14. Chosen for the Love of the Truth The Charge Appendix A — The Word Study at a Glance Appendix B — Ten Places the Prophecy Chart Fails About First Harvest Ministries International A WORD BEFORE WE BEGIN ❖ THERE IS A verse in the second letter to the Thessalonians that has defeated the finest minds the church has ever produced. Augustine admitted he did not know what it meant. Marvin Vincent, one of the great New Testament word scholars, declined to interpret the passage at all because he did not understand it. Leon Morris warned his readers to handle it with care because of its notorious difficulty. F. F. Bruce observed that few passages in the New Testament have collected so many competing interpretations. Ernest Best called it exceptionally hard to know. I am not quoting those men to embarrass them. I am quoting them because they were honest, and honesty is rarer than genius. Every one of them had more Greek than I will ever have. Every one of them stood in front of that verse and said, in effect, this one is beyond me. So let me tell you plainly what this booklet is claiming, and let me tell you at the front so that no one can accuse me of slipping it in through a side door. I am claiming that the reason the verse could not be opened is that the church was reading it with the wrong man in the seat. Every commentator I have read assumed the Antichrist was coming. The text says he was already working. Every commentator assumed the restrainer was holding evil back. The text, read with its own vocabulary and read alongside Acts 3:21, will show you something else entirely — that heaven itself is holding someone back, and it is not the wicked one. That is a heavy claim. I know it is. I am not asking you to accept it because I said it. I am asking you to do what we did in the service where this was first preached: put the words on the screen, click the numbers, read the definitions, and let the text say what it says. If it does not hold, throw it out. Truth does not need my defense; it needs your attention. One more word before we start. This message will not comfort you. It was not meant to. Somewhere in these pages the light is going to come on in a room you had preferred to keep dark, and when it does, you will discover that the Antichrist you 1 have been watching for on the evening news has been keeping office hours a great deal closer to home. That discovery is not your defeat. It is the beginning of your victory. — Rev. John Shane Vaughn 2 C H A P T E R 1 THE VERSE NOBODY COULD PREACH ❖ LET US BEGIN where the trouble begins. 2 THESSALONIANS 2:7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. Ask the average believer what that verse means and you will get the answer that has been standing in for exegesis for about a hundred and fifty years: the Holy Spirit, resident in the church, is restraining evil in the earth. When the church is caught away, the restrainer is removed, evil breaks loose, and the Antichrist steps onto the world stage. I want to deal with that gently and then I want to deal with it honestly. Gently: I understand why people believe it. It is tidy. It gives the church a flattering job — we are the ones holding back the darkness — and it gives frightened people a schedule. Honestly: look around. If the church is what has been restraining wickedness in the earth, then YAHWEH help us all. I say that as a man who has spent nearly forty years inside the church. The restraining theory does not survive a walk through the parking lot. But my objection is not sentimental. It is textual, and it is fatal. Paul says the thing he is describing DOTH ALREADY WORK. Present tense. Working now. Not gathering. Not incubating. Working — in the first century, in the congregations Paul planted, while Paul was still breathing. 3 Whatever the mystery of iniquity is, it had already begun its operation before the ink on that letter was dry. Now set that beside what the church teaches. The church teaches that the mystery of iniquity is a future man who appears after a future removal of the church, at the head of a future world government. And Paul says: it is working already. You cannot take a thing that was already working in A.D. 51 and file it under an event two thousand years downstream. That is not interpretation. That is relocation. The mystery of iniquity was operational in the first century. There is a second problem, and it is the one that convinced me first. Skip down eight verses to the end of the chapter: 2 THESSALONIANS 2:15 Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle. Therefore. That word is a hinge. Whatever Paul has just finished explaining, he now applies — and he applies it to THE BRETHREN. To the men and women sitting in that room in Thessalonica. Stand fast. Hold what you were taught. Ask yourself the obvious question. If the danger Paul just described was going to arrive after a rapture that these people would not be here for, why does he charge them to stand fast against it? You do not tell a man to brace himself for a storm he will never see. Paul's warning had teeth because Paul's warning had a deadline, and the deadline was inside their lifetime. 4 So we have two immovable facts standing at the door of this chapter before we ever open a lexicon. FACT ONE: the mystery of iniquity was operational in the first century. FACT TWO: Paul expected the first-century congregation to have to withstand it. Every interpretation that fails those two facts is disqualified. It does not matter how many charts it has printed, how many conference centers it has filled, or how many study Bibles have footnoted it. If it cannot survive verse seven and verse fifteen, it is out. That is why the great scholars stalled. They were not incompetent. They were reading a first-century sentence through a nineteenth-century lens, and the sentence would not focus. Take the lens off and the verse comes clear so fast it will frighten you. Let me say something to the ones reading this who belong to a small assembly, a scattered household, a congregation that will never fill a stadium. When YAHWEH opens a word like this, it is a gift. It is not a reward for cleverness. Augustine had more education than this whole ministry put together and he walked away from this verse. Understanding is not purchased. It is given. So receive it with your head down. Now let us open the words. 5 C H A P T E R 2 KATECHO: ONE WORD WEARING TWO DISGUISES ❖ HERE IS ONE of the plainest examples in all of Scripture of how a translation choice can bury a doctrine. Read verses six and seven back to back in the King James: V. 6 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. V. 7 only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. Two English words. Withholdeth in one verse. Letteth in the next. Any ordinary reader assumes these are two different ideas — and to a modern reader, let now means almost the opposite of restrain. We say "let him go," meaning release him. They are the same Greek word. KATECHO — Strong's G2722. Look at the range of meaning the lexicons give it: ●to hold, to hold fast, to keep, to possess ●to hold back, to detain, to retain ●to restrain, to hinder; that which hinders ●to hold down, to suppress 6 ●to take hold of, to lay hold upon Think of a man with a horse on a lead. He is not destroying the horse. He is not chasing the horse. He has hold of it, and he is not letting it move until he decides it moves. That is katecho. The Elizabethan translators used let in its old English sense — the sense that survives today in one place only, on a tennis court. When the ball clips the net, the umpire calls "let." He does not mean permitted. He means hindered. The serve was held back. So the honest reading of verse seven is: For the secret of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will keep restraining, until he be taken out of the way. Now here is where I want you to slow down, because everything in this booklet turns on the next question, and almost nobody asks it. Who is being restrained? The church has answered that question for a century and a half without ever pausing over it: the restrainer is holding back the Antichrist. But read the verse again. Read it as if you had never heard a sermon on it in your life. The secret of lawlessness is already at work. If it is ALREADY AT WORK, then it is not being held back. You cannot restrain something that is already operating. The verse states, in the same breath, that lawlessness is running and that someone is being restrained. Those cannot be the same party. Something else is on the leash. 7 Hold that. I am not going to answer it yet, because you will not receive the answer until you have seen two more words and one more passage. But mark the question in the margin of your mind, because it is the hinge of the whole chapter: If the lawless thing is already loose, who exactly is heaven holding? Something else is on the leash. Notice also that verse six adds a purpose clause: ye know what restrains, that he might be revealed in his time**. The restraining has an aim. It is not a stalemate; it is a schedule. Something is being held so that something else can happen at the appointed hour. And notice the verb in that purpose clause. Not born. Not created. Not arrive. REVEALED. We will spend a whole chapter on that word, because it is the word that unravels the entire modern doctrine of Antichrist. One last observation before we move on. Paul says, in verse five, Remember ye not, that, when I was yet with you, I told you these things? He had already taught them this face to face. Which means the Thessalonians understood this chapter perfectly well and we do not. They had the oral teaching; we have the letter. The letter is compressed because the teaching had already been given. That is not a reason to despair. It is a reason to slow down and let the vocabulary carry the weight the missing sermon used to carry. Katecho is the first stone in that foundation. Now for the second. 8 C H A P T E R 3 MYSTERION: NOT A RIDDLE — A SECRET ❖ SAY THE WORD mystery to an English speaker and his mind goes straight to a locked room, a detective, and a puzzle nobody can solve. That instinct has done more damage to this verse than any deliberate error ever did. MYSTERION — Strong's G3466. It does not mean unsolvable. It means HIDDEN. Concealed. A thing kept back from the general public and disclosed only to those brought inside. The lexicons put it plainly: something secret; a religious secret confided only to the initiated and withheld from ordinary people. That is not a puzzle. That is a CLASSIFIED FILE. So the phrase is not the unsolvable riddle of iniquity. The phrase is: the secret of lawlessness. Feel the difference. A riddle is nobody's fault. A secret has a keeper. A secret implies three things at once, and every one of them matters here. First, a secret implies concealment on purpose. Nothing accidental about it. Somebody put it out of sight and intends it to stay there. SECOND, A SECRET IMPLIES INSIDERS. The lexical definition is precise — confided to the initiated. This is not a thing hidden from the church out in the world. It is a thing 9 hidden INSIDE the house, known to those running it, and screened from the people in the pews. Third, a secret implies a location. You do not hide a thing in the abstract. It is somewhere. And Paul tells us exactly where in verse four: he as God sitteth in the temple of God. We will come to the identity of that temple, and it is not in Jerusalem. Now put mysterion together with what we established in chapter one, and you have the sentence that has been sitting in the New Testament for two thousand years waiting for somebody to read it out loud: A concealed operation of lawlessness, known to insiders, was already running inside the assemblies of the saints while the apostles were still alive. That is not a prediction. That is an incident report. A riddle is nobody's fault. A secret has a keeper. And I want you to feel the pastoral weight of it before we go on to the next word. Paul is not warning the Thessalonians about a monster on the horizon. He is telling them there is a burglar in the house and the household staff have his coat. Which raises the question that ought to keep every honest preacher awake: if it was hidden then, is it visible now? Or is it still hidden — hidden so well that the very people who could name it have been trained to look somewhere else? I will tell you what I believe with everything in me. The reason every prophecy teacher in America has you scanning Rome, Brussels, Jerusalem, and Berlin is not that they are wicked men. Most of them are sincere. It is that a secret's first line of defense is a distraction, and there has never been a more 10 effective distraction in the history of the church than the future Antichrist. You cannot see what is standing beside you while you are staring down the road. Ask a man to look for a wife in a far country and he will never notice the woman sitting in the room. That is not a joke. That is the entire strategy. So we have katecho — a restraint with a purpose. We have mysterion — a secret with a keeper and an address. Now for the word that tells us what the secret actually is. And when you see it, you will understand why an entire theological system had to be constructed to keep you from seeing it. 11 C H A P T E R 4 ANOMIA: THE SECRET IS LAWLESSNESS ❖ HERE IS THE WORD. ANOMIA — Strong's G458. Translated iniquity in the King James. Break it apart the way Greek breaks apart. The prefix A- negates whatever follows. We do this in English constantly: typical / atypical, moral / amoral, symmetry / asymmetry. The root is NOMOS — law. Specifically, in the mouth of a first- century Jew writing to the scattered assemblies, THE TORAH. So anomia is, letter for letter: without law. Lawlessness. Transgression of the law. Violation of the law. The lexicons on the root give you illegal, usurper, the condition of being without law. That last one — usurper — is going to matter enormously before this booklet is finished. Hold it. Now read verse seven with all three words restored and nothing added: For the secret of lawlessness is already at work. Stop and let that stand. The thing hidden in the house of YAHWEH — the thing Paul says was already running in the first century, the thing the 12 whole world has been scanning the horizon for — is the setting aside of the Torah. Now I have a question, and I want it asked in every pulpit in this nation. How can a man stand up and preach that the law was nailed to the cross when the New Testament defines wickedness as violation of the law? Because it does. Not once. Repeatedly. And nowhere more devastatingly than in the words of YAHSHUA Himself. MATTHEW 7:21-23 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. That last word — iniquity — is ANOMIA. The same word. Read it back with the definition in place: Depart from me, ye that work lawlessness. Do you see what has happened? The church has spent two centuries teaching that the law was abolished, and the King who abolishes nothing will one day dismiss a crowd of sincere, gifted, miracle-working believers for the precise offense of living without it. Here is the trap in its full elegance. If iniquity means transgression of the law, then a doctrine that removes the law removes the very category by which iniquity can be identified. Take away the standard and you have not made men holy; you have made them unable to know that they are not. 13 That is why it is called a SECRET. Not because it is complicated, but because it is disguised as good news. Take away the standard and you have not made men holy. You have made them unable to know that they are not. And notice how it is packaged. Nobody stands in a pulpit and says, "Brethren, tonight I am preaching lawlessness." It comes wrapped. It comes as liberty. It comes as grace — a word that in the mouth of Paul meant the unearned favor that enables obedience, and in the mouth of the modern church means the divine permission to dispense with it. It comes as a "law of love" that conveniently never has to specify what love actually requires. I want to be exact here, because this is where I will be misquoted. I am not preaching that a man earns anything by keeping Torah. I am preaching that YAHWEH gets to define wickedness, and He defined it in writing. Because here is the thing nobody can escape: SOMEBODY HAS TO DEFINE INIQUITY. If YAHSHUA commands us not to work iniquity, then iniquity must be knowable. And if you get to decide for yourself what iniquity is, then there is no such thing as iniquity — there is only preference wearing a religious hat. So who defines it? He does. He wrote it down. He called it Torah. And He never took a pen to it. I know what the objection will be, because I have heard it my whole life: Pastor, that was nailed to the cross. Very well. Then explain the courtroom in Matthew 7. Explain a King issuing a verdict, in the age to come, on the basis of a standard He is said to have abolished. Explain sincere, spirit-filled, gift- operating believers standing in front of Him genuinely astonished — and understand why they are astonished. They 14 are astonished because every sermon they ever heard told them the standard had been retired. That astonishment is the most terrifying detail in the passage. It is not the astonishment of the wicked. It is the astonishment of the deceived. Which brings us to the two congregations that sit in every sanctuary on earth. 15 C H A P T E R 5 TWO CONGREGATIONS IN ONE SANCTUARY ❖ GO BACK TO Matthew 7 and count the groups. There are exactly two. GROUP ONE: those who do the will of the Father. GROUP TWO: those who work lawlessness. Now look carefully at what the second group is not. They are not atheists. They are not blasphemers. They are not the crowd down at the honky-tonk. I want to say something that will offend the religious and relieve the honest: the man in the bar room is not the subject of this passage. He is not evil because he wants to dance on a Friday night and blow off a week's frustration before he goes home. He is lost, and he knows he is lost, and a lost man who knows it is in better shape than a deceived man who does not. The second group in Matthew 7 is made up of BELIEVERS. Read their résumé. They prophesied. They cast out devils. They performed many wonderful works. And they did all of it in His name. These are not pretenders sneaking in the back door. These are the platform people. These are the ones with the anointing, the results, the testimonies, and the following. Both groups call Him Lord. Both groups attend. Both groups give. Both groups worship with their hands up. Both groups pray at night and mean it. And both groups are sitting in the same room right now — in your congregation, in mine. The only difference between them is the will of the Father versus the will of the self. Let me press on something in their protest, because it is easy to miss. They say, Have we not prophesied? Have we not cast 16 out devils? Have we not done many wonderful works? Every item on that list is something THEY DID. Not one item is something He commanded. They are reciting their activity and He is asking about His will. That is the whole tragedy in a sentence. They gave Him their heart and kept their mind. When the word of YAHWEH contradicts your practice, which one moves? And the mind is exactly where He must get in. Paul did not write be ye transformed by the warming of your feelings. He wrote: ROMANS 12:2 Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind. Your heart will follow whatever your mind has been convinced of. That is why every deception that has ever entered the assembly of YAHWEH entered through doctrine and not through immorality. Immorality gets a man thrown out of church. Doctrine gets him ordained. Now notice the verdict itself, and notice its restraint, because most preachers overplay this and I will not. He does not say, depart from me into everlasting fire. He says, I never knew you: depart from me. They are excluded from something. And what they are excluded from is named in verse 21: THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. The kingdom. The government. The administration of the age to come. This is where the church's near-total silence about the Kingdom becomes so costly. If all you have ever been taught is 17 heaven, hell, and getting your ticket punched, then Matthew 7 reads like a horror story with no exit. But the subject on the table is not the eternal destiny of the human race — that is settled elsewhere, and settled better than most men dare hope. The subject on the table is who will be trusted with rulership. There is a difference between being loved by the King and being installed by the King. These men were sincere. They will be dealt with justly and, I believe with all my heart, ultimately mercifully. But they will not be handed a throne. You do not hand government to men who spent their whole lives deciding for themselves what the law meant. That is the sifting. Not saved and unsaved. SANCTIFIED AND UNSANCTIFIED. Set apart and self-directed. And here is the pastoral question I want to leave in this chapter, because it is the only one that matters to the individual reader: You cannot control which group your neighbor is in. You cannot control which group your favorite television preacher is in. You can only find out which group YOU are in, and there is exactly one diagnostic: when the word of YAHWEH contradicts your practice, which one of them moves? If the word moves, you are in group two. If you move, you are in group one. That is the entire test, and it is administered every week. 18 C H A P T E R 6 HE IS NOT BORN — HE IS UNCOVERED ❖ NOW WE COME to the verb that dismantles the modern doctrine of Antichrist in a single stroke. 2 THESSALONIANS 2:8 And then shall that Wicked be revealed... APOKALUPTO — Strong's G601. It is the verb behind the noun apocalypse. Its meaning is not to arrive. It is not to be born. It is not to seize power. It is: ●to uncover, to unveil ●to lay open what has been covered up ●to disclose what was previously unknown ●to make manifest, to make known Do you understand what that requires? You cannot uncover what is not already there. To unveil a statue, the statue must be standing under the sheet. To disclose a document, the document must be in the file. To expose a man, the man must be in the building. The verb Paul chose presupposes presence. The wicked one is not scheduled to appear. He is scheduled to be FOUND OUT. 19 Read the whole verse now with that in your hand: And then shall that lawless one be uncovered, whom YAHSHUA shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his presence. Notice the order. UNCOVERING FIRST. CONSUMING SECOND. That order is not decorative. It is operational. Nothing gets destroyed until it gets identified. Which means the whole prophetic industry has the sequence backwards: they teach that he will show up and then be destroyed. Paul teaches that he is here and must be exposed before he can be destroyed. Roaches understand this better than theologians. A roach is not afraid of your shoe. A roach is afraid of your light switch. Flip that switch and every one of them heads for a crack, because the light is what makes the shoe possible. Now — and I want to say this as plainly as it can be said — what does it mean that a thing which is already working inside the house must be uncovered inside the house? It means the Antichrist has an address, and the address is not Rome, Brussels, Berlin, or a rebuilt temple on the Mount. Verse four gives it: he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. He sits in the sanctuary. He does not besiege it. He sits in it. He has a seat, which means he has standing, which means the congregation put him there or let him stay. How did he stay hidden for so long? I will tell you how, and it is the simplest answer in this book. He was hidden behind the light. He was not in the parking lot. He was in the pulpit. He was the one telling you the Sabbath had been moved to the first day. He was the one who swapped the appointed feasts of YAHWEH for the festivals of the nations. He was the one who split the one YAHWEH into three and called it a mystery so nobody could examine it. He was the one who read anomia out loud on Sunday and preached the abolition of nomos on the same breath. 20 A thief in a mask gets caught. A thief in a robe gets a salary. He was not in the parking lot. He was in the pulpit. And this is why I say — carefully, and with no pleasure — that the greatest service the deceiver ever performed for himself was the invention of the future Antichrist. As long as the whole church is scanning the horizon for a coming dictator, nobody will run the light along the walls of the room they are standing in. He does not mind your prophecy conference. He sponsors it. But there is a mercy in this that I do not want you to miss, and it is the reason I preach it. If he must be uncovered, then uncovering is something the saints do. That is a commission. That is work assigned to a people. And it means the victory does not wait on a calendar — it waits on a light being switched on, in a house, in a pulpit, in a mind. Beginning with yours. Which is exactly where the next chapter goes, and it is the chapter that costs. 21 C H A P T E R 7 THE MAN OF SIN HAS A NAME ❖ PAUL CALLS HIM the man of sin (2 Thessalonians 2:3). Let us find out who that is, and let us find him the honest way — by asking Scripture instead of the newspaper. Turn to Romans 5. V. 12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. V. 19 For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous. One man. Sin entered by one man. And what made him the man of sin? Verse nineteen answers it in a single word: DISOBEDIENCE. Disobedience to what? To a spoken instruction of YAHWEH. He was given a word and he set it aside and substituted his own judgment about what was good for him. That is anomia. That is lawlessness in its original, seminal form — not in a cathedral, not in a council, but under a tree in a garden, in the mind of a man who decided he was competent to determine good and evil for himself. Adam is the first man of sin. And here is the part that will follow you home: if Adam is the man of sin, then every son of Adam carries his seed. The 22 Scriptures do not call us the sons of angels or the sons of nations. They call us THE SONS OF MAN — the offspring of the man who put his own will where YAHWEH's word belonged. So the man of sin is not a secret at all, once you stop looking for a celebrity. He is a nature. He is a spirit. He is the default operating system of the carnal mind, installed in every human being from Eden forward, and he takes his seat wherever he is not evicted. Now go back to the description Paul gives, and watch how exactly it fits. V. 4 Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God. OPPOSETH. The carnal mind is an opposer by constitution. It opposes the word, it opposes correction, it opposes the pastor, it opposes the elder, it opposes the member across the aisle. It does not need a reason; opposition is its native language. That is the goat spirit, and it is in the sanctuary every week. Exalteth himself above all that is called Elohim. Not by announcing divinity. By outranking the word in practice. Watch how ordinary it looks. Show a man the dietary instruction in the Torah and he says, "That does not apply to me." He has just ruled on Scripture. He has seated himself above it. Show a man the appointed times and he says, "That is Old Testament." He has just repealed a statute. Show a woman the order of her house and she says, "That is just the way I am." She has just amended the text to fit her temperament. Show a man the plain instruction to labor and provide for his household, and watch how fast the throne defends itself. I sat 23 across the desk from a man not long ago and told him plainly that a man who will not work has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. I have not seen him since. He did not leave because I was wrong. He left because I had asked him to vacate a chair. None of these people say, "I reject YAHWEH." Every one of them says, "That does not apply to me." And that does not apply to me is the throne speech of the man of sin. He does not sit in the temple wearing horns. He sits in the temple wearing your face. “That does not apply to me” is the throne speech of the man of sin. Here is one more place he sits, and this one catches the sincere: WORRY. There is a difference between planning, which is wisdom, and compulsive anxiety, which is a throne. When you lie awake sovereign over an outcome you cannot control, you have quietly assumed an office that belongs to Someone else. He feeds the sparrow. He numbers your hair. He paid last month's bills through means you still cannot fully reconstruct. Get off the throne. So the man of sin is Adam, reproduced in you, sitting where he was never invited, and calling it just being myself. And how do you know for certain whether he is still seated? Isaiah gives you five words. 24 C H A P T E R 8 THE FIVE "I WILLS" ❖ ISAIAH 14:13-14 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Five declarations. One pronoun. This is the founding charter of every rebellion that has ever occurred in the universe, and it fits on a business card. Notice where the text locates the offense. Thou hast said in thine heart. It began as an internal sentence. Nobody heard it. There was no coup, no announcement, no army. There was a thought that went unchallenged, and everything else that has ever gone wrong descended from it. Now take the five and watch them walk into a modern congregation. "I WILL ASCEND INTO HEAVEN." — I will get to YAHWEH on my terms. My sincerity will substitute for His instructions. "I will exalt my throne above the stars." — I will place my judgment above the ministry set over me. I will grade the sermon. I will decide which portions of the word survived the cross. "I will sit upon the mount of the congregation." — I will take a seat in the assembly that was never assigned to me. I will run a shadow government from the third row. "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds." — I will build a reputation. I will be known. 25 "I will be like the most High." — I will determine good and evil for my own life. And where have you heard that fifth one before? In the garden: ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil (Genesis 3:5). The identical offer. It has never been updated because it has never needed to be. It works. So here is the diagnostic, and it is brutally simple. There are only two prayers in existence: My will be done. Thy will be done. Christ is thy will. Antichrist is I will. Everything else is commentary. There are only two prayers in existence. And notice something about the word anti while we are here. It does not only mean against. In Greek it carries the sense of in place of — a substitute, a stand-in. That is why the lexicon on anomia offered us USURPER. The Antichrist is not principally a man who fights the Messiah from outside. He is a claimant who occupies the seat from inside and issues rulings in the name of the rightful King. That is precisely what your carnal mind does every day of your life. Which means the test never requires a prophecy chart. It requires a mirror and a question: When the word of YAHWEH and my will disagree, which one yields? 26 If the word yields, you are still enthroned, and the I will is still resident, however much you love the music on Sabbath morning. If you yield — even slowly, even reluctantly, even with tears — the throne is changing hands. Anytime I will, He won't. Anytime thy will, He does. Now do not read that as condemnation. Read it as the map. Because the entire promise of 2 Thessalonians 2:8 is that this thing, once uncovered, gets CONSUMED. Not managed. Not tolerated. Consumed. But it cannot be consumed while it is hidden, and it stays hidden as long as you are watching Europe. The revelation is the victory. The moment you name the usurper in your own mind, his tenure is over, because he governed only by anonymity. A recognized thief has already lost the house. 27 C H A P T E R 9 THE TEMPLE HE SITS IN ❖ EVERYTHING NOW DEPENDS on one question, and the whole modern system stands or falls on it. ...so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God. (2 Thessalonians 2:4) Which temple? Ask any prophecy teacher and you will be handed a blueprint of a future structure on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Ask him for the verse that says so and watch what happens. It is not there. Not in this chapter, not in this letter, not anywhere in Paul. It has been assumed for so long that it now functions as a citation. Let us do this properly. Two questions, and Scripture answers both. First: to whom is Paul writing? To Thessalonica. A congregation of the scattered — the lost tribes among the nations, the house of Israel dispersed into the Greek world. He opens the chapter brethren, and the subject he names in verse one is not a Middle Eastern building program. It is the coming of our Master YAHSHUA and our gathering together unto him. There are no Jewish temple negotiations in this letter. There is no peace treaty. There is no seven-year covenant. Those things have been imported from a chart and stapled to a text that never mentions them. Second: what does the New Testament call the temple of YAHWEH? 28 Peter answers without ambiguity. 1 PETER 2:4-5 To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of YAHWEH, and precious, ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to YAHWEH by YAHSHUA Messiah. There it is. A house under construction. A house made of people. And notice the specification on the stone. Rejected of men. Chosen of YAHWEH. That is the pattern stone. That is the cornerstone. And here is a construction principle any mason will confirm: you cannot build a wall out of two different kinds of rock. If the cornerstone is a rejected stone, then every stone that fits beside it must also be a rejected stone. The pattern is set by the first one laid. Let me say something that has cost this ministry a great deal. It was not the sinners who rejected the cornerstone. It was THE RELIGIOUS ESTABLISHMENT — the men who knew the Scriptures, held the offices, and ran the sanctuary. They rejected Him not because He broke the law, but because He understood it better than all of them together and would not let them keep their traditions. If you are being rejected by the world, examine yourself; you may simply be unpleasant. But if you are being rejected by the religious for holding to what is written — congratulations. You match the pattern stone. Now watch what the Jerusalem-temple doctrine costs the church, because it is not a harmless error. It gives men permission to postpone. If the good temple is coming later, this one does not have to be good now. Say what you like about the brother in the next pew; a better building is on the schedule. Do not trouble yourself about whether your stone is dressed and fitted; the real construction starts after the rapture. That is the practical fruit of it, and I have watched it produce two generations of unpolished stones sitting in comfortable pews waiting on a mirage. 29 It also produces a strange spectacle. For as long as I can remember, I have heard that the red heifer has been located and the vessels are ready and everything needed to build is now in hand. Honey — if you have everything you need, build it. The perpetual almost is not prophecy. It is carnality with a mailing list. And it splits the stones apart. Watch this one closely, because it is the deceiver's finest work. He does not deny that you are the temple. He affirms it — individually. Do you not know that you personally are the temple of the Holy Spirit? Do you not know that you can have a personal relationship with the Messiah, just you and Him? You do not need a congregation. You do not need submission. You do not need the assembling of yourselves together. That part is optional if you enjoy it. Every sentence of that is quoted from Scripture. And the effect of it is to remove you from the building. Yes — 1 Corinthians 6:19 says your body is a temple. But 1 Peter 2 says you are a STONE, and a stone alone in a field is not a house. It is a rock. Paul's word for the assembly is fitly framed together (Ephesians 2:21). A stone becomes a temple only in contact with other stones, ground against them, load- bearing, mortared, and no longer free to roll. That is why the FHaMIly travels. That is why people drive from Ohio and fly from Florida and gather three times a year at the appointed feasts. Not for the music, because we barely have any. Not for the programs, because we do not run them. They come to grind their stone against other stones until it fits. Cowards leave a congregation. Stones stay until they find their place in the wall. A stone alone in a field is not a house. We do not quit the assembly. WE ARE THE ASSEMBLY. And that assembly is the temple in which the usurper has been sitting for two thousand years. 30 C H A P T E R 10 A ROYAL PRIESTHOOD IN WORKING CLOTHES ❖ PETER DID NOT STOP AT THE BUILDING. He named the staff. 1 PETER 2:5, 9 ...an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices... But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people. Present tense. Not scheduled. Not pending the completion of a structure in Jerusalem. Now think about what the future-temple doctrine does to that. I have friends in Jerusalem whom I love, and they are having the garments made. The linen. The sashes. The mitres. Every measurement taken from the Torah with real care. And I understand the sincerity of it. But consider the arithmetic of the deceiver. If he can keep a man occupied stitching vestments for a priesthood that has not begun, he will never have to worry about the priesthood that has. A man cannot serve at an altar and sew for one at the same time. Because here is the principle, and it holds in every area of life: if you do not know that you are the priesthood, you will not behave like it. Which brings me to a subject I would rather leave alone, and will not. You will hear from any number of pulpits: YAHWEH does not care what you put on; He looks at the heart. It is said with such confidence that nobody checks it. 31 Go check it. The Torah spends an extraordinary proportion of its instruction on the priesthood's appearance, conduct, materials, and bearing. Do not mix the fibers. Do not serve in that condition. Do not approach in this manner. Cover yourself thus. Wash before, wash after. If YAHWEH did not care what a priest wore, He wasted a remarkable amount of parchment saying otherwise. And I already know the answer: Well, that was for the priests. Correct. That was for the priests. And what did Peter just call you? You cannot claim the title on Sabbath morning and disown the standard on Monday. If you are a royal priesthood, then you are royal — and royalty is the one class of people on earth who are not permitted to do whatever they please. That is the entire point of royalty. I believe one reason YAHWEH has permitted a royal house to remain visible in the earth is so that men would retain some living picture of what carriage, restraint, and representation look like. The priesthood is not coming. It is here, and it is understaffed. Now hear me carefully, because this is where preachers get careless and wound people. I am not preaching a dress code. I am not going to hand you a list, and if I did you would keep the list and lose the point. There is no wardrobe that produces holiness, and a congregation full of correctly covered rebels is still a congregation full of rebels. I am preaching REPRESENTATION. You are not your own. You wear an office. And the question a priest asks is never what do I like? — it is what does this say about the One I serve? 32 You can be poor and be royal. I am looking at one in the mirror every morning. Royalty is not the price of the cloth; it is the awareness of whom you represent when you walk out the door. And here is the practical consequence I have watched for forty years: the people you attract are determined by the signal you send. A priest dressed like the world will collect the world, and then he will wonder why his house is full of people who want everything except the truth. Let me apply this beyond clothing, because clothing is only the visible edge of it. The same instruction that governs the garment governs the mouth, the temper, the appetite, the schedule, and the marriage. What you eat. What you say about your brother. Whether your word survives contact with your inconvenience. Whether the Sabbath governs your calendar or your calendar governs the Sabbath. Cleanse externally is in the definition of the very word Paul uses for what you were chosen for — and we will get to that word before we close. Not instead of the heart. IN ADDITION TO the heart, because a priesthood is a public office and the public can only see the outside. So do not let anyone hand you a linen ephod for a temple that is not being built while your own service goes unattended. You are the priesthood. It is not coming. It is here, it is under construction, and it is understaffed. 33 C H A P T E R 11 THE FALLING AWAY IS BEHIND US ❖ NOW WE TAKE up the other half of verse three. 2 THESSALONIANS 2:3 Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition. The Greek is APOSTASIA — a defection, a departure, a standing away from what was held. Here is what I was taught my entire Christian life: just before the end, there will be a great apostasy. And here is what I believe YAHWEH has shown me: We are not in the falling away. We are in the regathering. Let me build it. First, take Paul's own timetable. He tells the elders at Ephesus: ACTS 20:29-30 For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. AFTER MY DEPARTING. Not after two thousand years. Not after a rapture. After Paul's death. The wolves were already at the fence line and the apostle knew their arrival was tied to his absence. 34 Second, remember what we established in chapter one: the secret of lawlessness was ALREADY AT WORK. The defection was not scheduled; it was underway. Third, look at what actually happened. I do not have to speculate about this — it is documented history, and I cite Rome here only as a hostile witness against itself, never as an authority. Within three centuries, the assembly of YAHWEH had: ●moved the Sabbath from the seventh day to the first ●replaced the appointed feasts of Leviticus 23 with festivals borrowed from the nations ●abandoned immersion in the name of YAHSHUA for a formula devised by councils ●divided the one YAHWEH into a metaphysical committee and made the division a test of orthodoxy ●and above all, declared the Torah abolished — which is to say, declared ANOMIA to be the gospel That is not a drift. That is a defection, and it is the largest one in recorded religious history. If that does not qualify as the falling away, then no event ever could, and the word has no meaning. So here is my question for the men with the charts. If the falling away is still ahead of us, what do you call what already happened? And here is why the placement matters so enormously — because this is not an academic dispute. It is the difference between repentance and complacency. Watch the logic. If the apostasy is future, then by definition WE HAVE NOT FALLEN. We must therefore be standing in the truth right now. Whatever we are currently doing is, by process of elimination, the faithful position. And a church that believes it has not fallen will never look for the way back. That is the genius of the placement. Put the falling away on the far end of the timeline and you have immunized an entire 35 civilization of believers against the possibility that they are the ones who left. You cannot get up until you know you fell. It is why the Sabbath conversation goes the way it always goes. Show a sincere believer the fourth commandment and watch the response: Are you telling me we have all been wrong this whole time? He is not resisting the evidence. He cannot process the category. He has been trained to believe the fall is coming, so he has no shelf to put a fall that already came. There is a name for the condition where a captive comes to identify with his captor and defends the arrangement that holds him. Patty Hearst did not rob that bank because she was a robber. She robbed it because she had been held long enough to adopt the household of the men who took her. The church has been held for seventeen centuries. Long enough to love the arrangement. Long enough to call the ancient landmark legalism and the innovation liberty. And now hear the good news, because this booklet is not a lament. ZECHARIAH 14:7 ...at evening time it shall be light. The apostasy is behind us. What is in front of us is the RESTORATION — the sounding of the trumpet to a scattered house, the recovery of the name, the recovery of the Sabbath, the recovery of the calendar, the recovery of the appointed times, the recovery of a people who will not be moved. You cannot get up until you know you fell. That is why this message sounds so violent to the church. It is not an 36 accusation. It is the hand extended to a people on the floor who have been taught they are standing. And that recovery — that restoration — turns out to be the missing key to the hardest verse in the chapter. Which is where we go now. 37 C H A P T E R 12 WHO IS REALLY BEING HELD BACK ❖ WE NOW RETURN to the question I asked you to mark in chapter two. V. 6-7 And now ye know what withholdeth that he might be revealed in his time. For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way. KATECHO. A restraint with a purpose. And the problem we identified: the lawless thing is already loose. It is not the one on the leash. So who is? Turn to Peter's sermon in Solomon's porch. ACTS 3:20-21 And he shall send YAHSHUA Messiah, which before was preached unto you: whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which YAHWEH hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. Read that again and let it land. Whom the heaven must receive — until. There is a until on the Messiah. Heaven holds Him. Heaven RETAINS Him. And the terminus of that retention is named 38 precisely: the times of restitution of all things — apokatastasis, the restoration of what was lost to its original order. Let me be scrupulous here, because I will not build a doctrine on a sleight of hand. The verb in Acts 3:21 is not the same Greek word as katecho in Thessalonians; Peter's word is dechomai, to receive or retain. I am not claiming a lexical identity. I am claiming an identical fact, stated by two apostles, and the fact is this: Heaven is holding the Messiah, and the hold is conditional on a restoration. Now bring that back to 2 Thessalonians 2 and read the entire chapter with the right man on the leash. Look at how Paul opens: Now we beseech you, brethren, by the coming of our Master YAHSHUA, and by our gathering together unto him (v. 1). That is the subject of the chapter. Not the biography of a dictator. The timing of the Messiah's return. Look at his instruction: be not soon shaken in mind... as that the day of Messiah is at hand (v. 2). He is not warning them that the end is near. He is warning them that somebody is telling them it is near, and it is not. Then verse three: that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed. Two conditions must be satisfied before the day comes. A defection — which we have shown is behind us. And an unveiling of the usurper — which has not yet been completed. Then verse six, read now with everything in place: And now ye know what is holding back — that he might be revealed in his time. Now you know why the return is delayed. 39 And verse seven: For the secret of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will keep restraining, until he be taken out of the way. Here is the reading I believe YAHWEH opened, and I will state it as plainly as I know how: The restrainer is not the church holding back evil. It is heaven holding back the King — and He restrains Himself until the impostor is removed from His house. He will not come back to a sanctuary with a usurper on the throne. The house cannot have two husbands. The house cannot have two kings. There is a seat in the temple with an occupant in it, and the rightful King waits until the occupant is exposed and expelled. The house cannot have two kings. Until he be taken out of the way. The one taken out is the man of sin. The one waiting is the Messiah. And the times of restitution — the restoration of the name, the Sabbath, the feasts, the calendar, the Torah, the priesthood, the two houses of Israel — is the very condition Peter named. Do you see what this does to the delay? For two thousand years the church has read the delay as divine patience toward sinners, and there is truth in that. But Peter and Paul together add something the church has not preached: the delay has a work attached to it, and the work is ours. 40 That is why the last word of the prophets before the silence was not wait. It was: MALACHI 4:5-6 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of YAHWEH: and he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers... A restoring ministry. A turning back. A voice. The heavens hold Him until the house is cleaned. And the house is cleaned by a people who will lift their voice like a trumpet and expose the secret of lawlessness in the sanctuary of YAHWEH. That is not a spectator's doctrine. That is a work order. 41 C H A P T E R 13 CONSUMED BY THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS PRESENCE ❖ RETURN TO VERSE eight and finish it. And then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom YAHSHUA shall consume with the spirit of his mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of his coming. Two instruments. Look at both. THE SPIRIT OF HIS MOUTH. That is His word. It is the sword that proceeds out of His mouth in the Revelation. It is the two-edged blade of Hebrews 4:12 that divides soul from spirit, joint from marrow, and discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart. The weapon is not a bolt from the sky. The weapon is the preached word. THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS COMING. The Greek is PAROUSIA — Strong's G3952 — and its root meaning is not arrival only. It is PRESENCE. A parousia is a manifest presence, a being-there. I will grant the reader this at once: Paul does use parousia elsewhere for the final, physical, visible coming of the Messiah, and I do not deny that coming for one moment. Let no one quote this booklet as spiritualizing away His literal return. FHMI preaches it and stakes everything on it. But hear what the word permits, and what our experience confirms. His presence is not rationed to one future date. When YAHSHUA manifests Himself in a service, in a study, in a prayer at four o'clock in the morning — He has come. I have had a great many comings in my life. He came for me this morning. He will come for me tomorrow. 42 And this is exactly why the future-only reading is so dangerous. Follow the logic: If the deceiver can persuade you that the usurper will be destroyed when the Messiah returns, then you will never attempt to destroy him now. That single proposition has anesthetized the church. Why put the light on the walls of your own mind when a rescue is scheduled? Why grind your stone into the wall when a better building is coming? Why deal with the I will in your chest when the whole matter will be settled by somebody else, later, without you? The text says otherwise. The consuming is by the word — and the word has already been given to you. The destroying is by His presence — and His presence is available to you tonight. Which brings me to the order I want burned into your memory, because it is the practical center of this entire booklet: Revealed. Consumed. Expunged. And the first one is not optional. Even YAHWEH will not consume a usurper you refuse to recognize. Not because He lacks the power, but because He deals in truth, and a man who will not name the thing has not yet consented to its removal. He will not evict a tenant you keep insisting is family. Revealed. Consumed. Expunged. So the revelation is the victory. When the light comes on and you see, for the first time, that the thing opposing your obedience is not your personality, not your upbringing, not your circumstances, but a usurper on a throne — the eviction 43 has already begun. He ruled by anonymity. Name him and he is finished. Let me tell you how this looks in an actual congregation, because I would rather be honest than impressive. This ministry loses more people than it gains. That is not a complaint and it is not an accident. When the word goes forth unadulterated, people come in wanting encouragement and get exposed instead. They sit there certain that somebody told me their business. Nobody told me anything. That is the sword doing what a sword does. Some of them stay and become stones in a wall. Some of them leave and call it control. And I have made my peace with that, because I know what I am holding. What men call control is the preaching of a word that will not be edited to accommodate a throne. But understand the tenderness underneath the severity. If the light exposes you, it is because He intends to consume what it found. He does not uncover in order to shame you. He uncovers in order to destroy the thing that has been ruining you — and He will not destroy what you will not surrender to the light. So let it come out. Let it be named. Let the brightness of His presence do to the I will in you exactly what it will one day do to the I will in the sanctuary. That is not condemnation. That is deliverance with the lights on. 44 C H A P T E R 14 CHOSEN FOR THE LOVE OF THE TRUTH ❖ PAUL NOW TELLS us why YAHWEH permitted any of this. V. 10-12 ...because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause YAHWEH shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. Read the diagnosis carefully. It does not say they lacked sincerity. It does not say they lacked zeal, gifts, attendance, or generosity. It says they did not love THE TRUTH. There is a species of religion that loves the building, the music, the fellowship, the feeling, the family atmosphere — and has no appetite whatsoever for sitting down with an open text for three hours to find out whether what it believes is so. I have watched people weep in worship and then refuse a Bible study. That is not hypocrisy. It is a love pointed at the wrong object. Have you ever heard a congregation advertise itself with the line, We are not a doctrine church; we are a people church? Hear what has actually been announced. Doctrine means teaching. They have told you, in the warmest possible tone, that they do not love the truth. And I will say this bluntly: you had better love truth more than you love people, because a love of people that will not tell them the truth is not love. It is cowardice wearing a smile. Now look at the astonishing thing Paul says next: for this cause YAHWEH shall send them strong delusion. 45 HE SENT IT. The lie was permitted by the Sovereign, and it was permitted as an instrument. Why would YAHWEH send a delusion into His own house? Because a delusion is a sieve. It cannot hold anyone in whom the seed of truth has been planted. Preach the abolition of the law across seventeen centuries and ninety-nine will nod — but somewhere in the back of a room, one man's spirit will stir and say, that does not sound right. He cannot always explain it. He simply cannot swallow it. That man has just been identified. Not by his intelligence. By his constitution. V. 13 But we are bound to give thanks alway to YAHWEH for you, brethren beloved of YAHSHUA, because YAHWEH hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth. From the beginning. Not when you were born. Not when you walked an aisle. From the beginning. So if you are sitting there tonight with an overwhelming hunger for truth — not for church, for TRUTH — I want you to understand what that hunger is. It is not a personality trait. It is not the result of your education. It is a supernatural work of the Spirit of YAHWEH in your life, and it did not originate with you. You had nothing to do with it. The only appropriate response is a bowed head. Now look at what you were chosen for, because the church has misread this word for generations. HAGIASMOS — Strong's G38. Rendered sanctification. The lexicons: consecration, purification, separation from profane things and dedication to YAHWEH — and, in the older definitions, TO CLEANSE EXTERNALLY. You were not merely chosen to be forgiven. You were chosen to be set apart. 46 Set apart from what? From the profane. From the festivals of the nations. From the table that YAHWEH called unclean. From the calendar of Rome. From the I will. Separated out — and then attached to Him. And notice the order in verses 13 and 14: chosen from the beginning, then called by our gospel. The choosing precedes the calling. The calling is how the chosen are located. Which explains something about this ministry that mystifies people. We have no children's program. No choir. No production. No campaign to fill a pew. People ask why, and I will tell you why: I am not fishing with a wide net. Throw a net that wide and you will haul in everything in the ocean, and then you will spend the rest of your life sorting eels. I am not trying to fill a room. The preaching of the word fills a room with the right people and empties it of everyone else, and it does the job without my help. You were not merely chosen to be forgiven. You were chosen to be set apart. And yet they come. From Ohio. From Florida. From nations I have never visited. Not because we entertained them. Because they were chosen to have a love for the truth, and the truth is the only thing we have on offer. V. 15-17 Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught... Now our Master YAHSHUA Messiah himself, and YAHWEH, even our Father, which hath loved us, and hath given us everlasting consolation and good hope through grace, comfort your hearts, and stablish you in every good work. 47 Stablish you in every good work. For a church that was told works no longer matter, that is a remarkable closing line. He does not merely comfort you. He establishes you — in work. Which is precisely the work this whole chapter has been describing. 48 THE CHARGE ❖ SO LET ME GATHER IT INTO ONE PLACE. The Antichrist is not coming. He is seated, and he has been seated since the apostles were buried. He does not rule from a palace. He rules from a pulpit and from the throne room of your own mind, and his single legislative act is the repeal of the word of YAHWEH — that does not apply to me. He was never scheduled to be born. He was scheduled to be UNCOVERED. And the uncovering has been assigned to a people. ISAIAH 58:1 Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins. Not the world's sins. MY PEOPLE'S transgression. That is the assignment, and it has never been rescinded. So here is what I am asking of you, and it is not complicated. START WITH YOUR OWN HOUSE. Do not go hunting for the usurper in Europe. Go find him in your calendar, your table, your temper, your marriage, your mouth, and your money. Ask the only diagnostic question that matters: when the word and my will disagree, which one yields? Then find your place in the wall. Not a congregation that entertains you — a people who love the truth enough to say it to you. A stone alone is not a temple. THEN OPEN YOUR MOUTH. Somebody told you. Somebody has to tell the next one. The heavens hold the King until the house is cleaned, and the house is cleaned by voices. 49 He will not return to a sanctuary with an impostor on the throne. He is restraining Himself — waiting on the times of restitution, waiting on the recovery of His name, His Sabbath, His appointed times, His instruction, His priesthood, His scattered house. Take the impostor out of the way, and He comes. That is not a chart. That is a commission. And you are already holding it. Hallelujah. This is the gathering of the house of Israel. — Rev. John Shane Vaughn 50 APPENDIX A ❖ The Word Study at a Glance VERIFY EVERY ONE OF THESE YOURSELF. Do not take my word for anything in this booklet. GreekStron g's KJV rendering Actual range of meaning katecho G2722withholdeth (v.6); letteth (v.7) to hold, hold fast, hold down, hold back, detain, retain, restrain, hinder mysterion G3466mystery (v.7)a hidden thing; a secret confided to the initiated and withheld from ordinary people anomia G458iniquity (v.7); iniquity (Mt 7:23) without law; lawlessness; transgression of the law; illegal; usurper apokalupto G601revealed (v.8)to uncover, unveil, lay open what was covered, disclose what was unknown apostasia G646falling away (v.3) defection, departure, standing away from what was previously held parousia G3952coming (v.8)presence; a being-there; manifest arrival hagiasmos G38sanctification (v.13) consecration, purification, separation from the profane, dedication to YAHWEH; to cleanse externally apokatastasis G605restitution (Ac 3:21) restoration to a former and better state Two verses to memorize: 51 For the secret of lawlessness is already at work. — 2 Thessalonians 2:7 Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things. — Acts 3:21 52 APPENDIX B ❖ Ten Places the Prophecy Chart Fails OFFERED NOT TO WOUND SINCERE MEN, but so that every reader can test the system he was handed. 1. It relocates a present-tense verb. Paul says the mystery doth already work. The chart files it two thousand years later. 2. IT IGNORES VERSE FIFTEEN. Paul charges the brethren in the room to stand fast against it. You do not brace a man for a storm he will miss. 3. It never produces the Jerusalem temple from the text. 2 Thessalonians 2:4 says the temple of YAHWEH and never locates it. The location is imported. 4. It contradicts the New Testament's own definition of the temple. 1 Peter 2 and 1 Corinthians 3 identify a living house, presently under construction. 5. It requires a world government the prophets deny. The image of Daniel 2 ends in DIVIDED toes — iron and clay that shall not cleave one to another. Division, not consolidation, is the prophesied end-state. 6. It cannot explain the astonishment of Matthew 7. Sincere, gifted believers dismissed for anomia — lawlessness — under a system that taught them the law was abolished. 7. It turns a verb of exposure into a verb of arrival. Apokalupto uncovers what is present. It cannot introduce what is absent. 8. It has no answer for Acts 3:21. Heaven retains the Messiah until the times of restitution. A restoration must occur before the return. The chart has no restoration on it. 9. It makes apostasy impossible to detect. If the falling away is future, the present church cannot have fallen — and therefore can never be called back. 53 10. It removes the saints from the work. Everything is done later, by Someone else, elsewhere. Scripture assigns exposure to a people with a trumpet in their throats. 54 ABOUT FIRST HARVEST MINISTRIES INTERNATIONAL ❖ FIRST HARVEST MINISTRIES International is a Torah-based assembly of the scattered house of Israel, gathered around the restored Name of YAHWEH, the seventh-day Sabbath, the appointed times of Leviticus 23, and the coming government of the Kingdom. We hold no tax-exempt recognition from any government and never will — not as protest, but as jurisdiction. The assembly of YAHWEH does not apply to a lesser authority for permission to exist. We keep the three annual pilgrimages, we teach the whole counsel of the Word without editing, and we have members scattered across the nations who gather to be fitly framed together as living stones. HisComingKingdom.com | TheTruthTv.tv TOTO TONIGHT · THE BRIEFING Founding Apostolic Overseer: Rev. John Shane Vaughn 55 FOR FURTHER STUDY ❖ 1. Read 2 Thessalonians 2 straight through in one sitting, out loud, and mark every verb that describes time. Where does Paul place the action? 2. Look up katecho (G2722) yourself and read every other place it appears in the New Testament. Does it ever mean permit? 3. Compare Matthew 7:21-23 with 1 John 3:4. What single Greek word connects them? 4. Read Acts 3:19-21 and list what must be restored before the heavens release the Messiah. 5. Read 1 Peter 2:4-10 and write down every title given to the assembly. How many are present tense? 6. Read Isaiah 14:12-15 and Genesis 3:1-6 side by side. Where is the sentence repeated? 7. Ask one honest question of your own practice this week: when the word and my will disagreed, which one moved? 56 NOTES ❖ 57