Matthew 24:14 And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.
Continuing this study of Mashiach Ben Yosef (Messiah “Son of Joseph”), I want to focus on another aspect of the rabbis’ understanding; that Mashiach ben Yosef will come first, and prepare the world for the Kingdom of the Lord. According to their teaching he will do this by fighting God’s wars against “Edom”, which is collectively understood as the enemies of Israel in the time preceding the restoration of the Messianic Kingdom by Mashiach “Ben David” . This preparation is known as Ikvot Mashiach – the Footsteps of Messiah. Their expectation was that the entire world would be thus readied for the arrival of Mashiach Ben David, the glorious King.
Messianic and Christian believers understand that Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus) fulfilled the Old Testament prophecies of Mashiach Ben Yosef in His first coming, and we anxiously await His return to fulfill the role of Mashiach Ben David. During this long interval, we who know Mashiach “Ben Yosef”, the Suffering Servant, Yeshua, (Jesus) also “walk in His footsteps”, preparing the world for His return.
This “walk” also engages us in a war. “Edom” represents the earthly man, the man of flesh, an enemy against whom we struggle daily, facing many battles and obstacles as we prepare ourselves and our brethren in holy living for our expected Bridegroom’s arrival. Walking in His Footsteps means living a life of expectant preparation, and calling others to this walk as we preach the gospel of the coming Kingdom to all the nations.
Let us follow faithfully in His footsteps, fighting in the spirit, the battle with “Edom”, our sinful nature, and winning souls through holy living and sharing the gospel of salvation at every opportunity.
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]This is one of my favorite promises in the Bible — that God turns mourning into dancing! He takes away the anguish of being clothed in sadness and replaces it with gladness. However, notice what God doesn’t do — simply stop your mourning and make it disappear. No, He transforms it…into joy!
As we discussed last week, the word for “sign” in ancient Hebrew is “oht”. It was used in Genesis to designate God’s covenant sign with Noah, (the rainbow). And we see now the same word again, in Exodus, identified with the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tenth plague, when the angel of death passed through all Egypt to strike the firstborn. Anyone under the “sign” of the blood was spared.
Yesterday we wrote about one of the greatest moves of God … the Moravian Revival. When the community was in complete disarray, Count Zinzendorf focused on how they could live together in love despite their differences. He called all the men together for an intense study of the Scriptures to focus on how Christian life in community was portrayed. These studies combined with intense prayer convinced many of the believers that they were called to live together in love and that their disunity and conflict were contrary to the clear calling of Scripture.
In the late 1800s, an awakening in South Africa led by Andrew Murray was a powerful move of God. Studying that revival yields essential insights concerning the events occurring now throughout the United States. As the spirit of God began to move in Cape Town, Murray compared the SA revival with past experiences of revivals in Europe. He decided that the intense “emotionalism” was a false experience of God and charged in to break up the meeting. Stepping out of the church, he encountered his father standing and weeping. His father rebuked Andrew, “How dare you stop something that I have prayed to happen for 30 years!”
Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.