He Came as a Thief in the Night

Malachi ch.4: "4 For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. 3 And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts. 4 Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. 5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: 6 And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse." This brief and eery chapter conta...

  "Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him" (1 Kings 19:18). As is typical in the Word, a term like "kiss" or "to kiss" has good or evil expressions depending on context. The kissing in the verse above represents the polar opposite of the kissing in the verse below: "Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him" (Psalms 2:12). The kissing in question represents conjunction when the symbol is positive; and when it is negative -- as in the kissing of Baal -- then it represents disjunction. We have often times seen mention of the bride and bridegroom sounding joyously versus sounding no longer as representing this contrast between conjunction and disjunction. This is to remind people that this Full vs Empty symbolism is to be watched for throughout scriptu...

  Doctrine of the Moment There is an optimum time in your life to begin to believe. God does not inspire living belief in someone before that optimum time in order to protect them from serious spiritual consequences. "(1) A man may be admitted into the wisdom of spiritual things, and also into a love for them, and yet not be reformed. (2) If he afterwards recedes from them, and passes over into the opposite, he profanes holy things. (3) There are many kinds of profanation, but this is the worst kind of all. (4) Therefore the Lord admits man interiorly into the truths of wisdom and at the same time into the goods of love only so far as he can be kept in them until the end of his life" (Divine Providence 221). The key word here is "interiorly". People who grew up in the Church but merely mouthed religious expressions and went through religion motions do not commit the dire sin of profanation if they cease to do these things. Many people go through religious motions as...

In the Word you will often encounter the pattern A : b :: B : a, which is also known in the Far East as the Yin Yang. This pattern serves as a coatrack to hang up spiritual ideas, and it can be discerned in the following pairs without being limited just to these: Cain and Abel, Zara and Pharez, Manasseh and Ephraim, and Esau and Jacob. The symbolic character Cain, the first murderer, offered a bloodless sacrifice of fruits; whereas Abel, the first victim, offered a bloody sacrifice of livestock. Without going into particular detail here, Cain represents those who merely want to believe in things of the Church intellectually without practicing them in their actual lives. So such a person would for instance memorise "He that hateth his brother is a murderer" while making no effort actually not to hate; because such people believe that Faith-alone-saves, which is a lie called separation of faith and works or the bride and bridegroom sounding no longer. If we see this relationshi...

The drink offerings and cakes of Jeremiah ch. 44 are the inversions of understanding and righteousness, what the NT refers to on the positive side as "the wine of His new testament"; which is itself a veiled reference to the marriage or association between bread and wine, eating and drinking, behaviour and understanding be it good or evil internally or externally. If someone is proud and has an associated poor understanding like the "proud men" who said to Jeremiah, who spoke truly, "Thou speakest falsely" they therefore, being interpreted, made cakes to worship her and poured drink offerings to her. The Queen of Heaven herself is a figure that signifies the sum of all spiritual errors, for stars signify the knowledges of righteousness and understanding; lest this crucial matter seem at all obscure, these knowledges are what divide and multiply when fructified by the presence of God's love and wisdom in a conjunction relationship within the believer wh...

  Isaiah 1:21 - King James Version (KJV) <21> How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers. This is the basic coatrack on which all of the prophecies are hung like so many hats in their appropriate places. This is the Full and Empty of the Lord's Churches, which rise and fall in a predictable cycle akin to the course of daylight or the change in seasons. Hence does the Word frequently refer to the rise and degeneration of the charity in the Church using imagery of day to night and spring to winter. As to this charity or love "upon which the law and prophets hang" (Matthew 22:40), charity is doing good because it is good to do so, and telling the truth because it is true, while doing the work of one's calling sincerely, faithfully and well in a spirit of service towards God and the neighbour. But when people no longer have charity, what they do instead is called  "murder", "theft...

Believers undergo two types of interior trial without which they cannot regenerate, the trial by fire (which involves love and hate) and the trial by water (which involves truth and falsehood). Here are two verses indicating the existence of these trials side by side: "Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water: but thou broughtest us out into a wealthy place" (Psalms 66:12). "And ofttimes it hath cast him into the fire, and into the waters, to destroy him: but if thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us" (Mark 9:22). If you do not pass these trials by fire and water, then you do not overcome; if you do not overcome, then you do not go to Heaven. If you pass the trials by fire, then you have the seal of God in your forehead; but if you do not pass the trials by fire, then you have the mark of the beast in your forehead. If you pass the trials by water, then you have the seal of God in your hand; but if yo...