To help us understand the principles behind this great restoration move, let us look to the book of Joel:
The word of the Lord that came to Joel, the son of Pethuel. Hear this, O elders, and listen, all inhabitants of the land. Has anything like this happened in your days or in your fathers’ days? Tell your sons about it, and let your sons tell their sons, and their sons the next generation. What the gnawing locust has left, the swarming locust has eaten; and what the swarming locust has left, the creeping locust has eaten; and what the creeping locust has left, the stripping locust has eaten. Joel 1:1–4. It is identifying the various bugs, and farther on in this first chapter we read of the great stripping, and of the desolation that comes out of it. Joy is withered away from the sons of men.
Blow a trumpet in Zion … for the day of the Lord is coming; surely it is near, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness. As the dawn is spread over the mountains, so there is a great and mighty people; there has never been anything like it. Joel 2:1–2.
Joel then tells how this army comes forth and does not break ranks; nothing can stand before it. There is a contrasting picture here: first, the book starts out as though it were telling of various degrees of locusts and their life. Then it switches into a picture of an army that’s coming and the desolation it leaves behind it. What we must understand is that this army is not satanic, it is from the Lord; it is bringing the judgments which begin at the house of the Lord because the book of Joel is speaking about judgments. The last chapter tells of the nations coming down to the valley of Jehoshaphat (speaking of Armageddon and about the days of disaster that are before us in the tribulation period).
In Joel 2:21 we read a portion which tells how all that these locusts have destroyed will be restored.
Do not fear, O land, rejoice and be glad, for the Lord has done great things. Do not fear, beasts of the field, for the pastures of the wilderness have turned green, for the tree has borne its fruit, the fig tree and the vine have yielded in full. So rejoice, O sons of Zion, and be glad in the Lord your God; for He has given you the early rain for your vindication. And He has poured down for you the rain, the early and the latter rain as before. And the threshing floors will be full of grain, and the vats will overflow with the new wine and oil.
“Then I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the creeping locusts, the stripping locust, and the gnawing locust, My great army which I sent among you. And you shall have plenty to eat and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, who has dealt wonderously with you; then My people will never be put to shame. Thus you will know that I am in the midst of Israel, and that I am the Lord your God and there is no other; and My people will never be put to shame. And it will come about after this that I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind; and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. And even on the male and female servants I will pour out My Spirit in those days. And I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth, blood, fire, and columns of smoke. The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood” (this is prophesied in the prophecies of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, telling what will take place in Matthew 24:29, and again in Revelation 6, which speaks extensively about these signs in the sun and the moon), “before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes. And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be delivered; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be those who escape, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors” (or the remnant) “whom the Lord calls.” Joel 2:21–32.
In the third chapter, Joel prophesies how God is going to bring all nations down to the valley—the sun will go black, the moon and stars will lose their brightness as the Lord rules from Zion, and he speaks of the ultimate deliverance that is to come during this great period of tribulation and judgment.
Let’s go back and analyze why this particular thing was prophesied. Why doesn’t God start something and have it just grow up? He never does that. Whatever God does, He brings it forth in the earth, and as He brings it forth, He commits it to a certain program which is very difficult to understand. First, He brings it forth, then it dies, then it’s resurrected. Even as it was with our Lord when He came forth in the earth, He ministered, then He had to die, then He was resurrected; so also when the Church came forth, it died and went into the Dark Ages, and then it was revived. Hosea prophesied, … he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Hosea 6:1–2. Although it is difficult to understand, this has always been the plan of God: God gives something, then it is killed, then it is raised up. I don’t know why, but it always follows that way. Look at God giving Abraham a son, Isaac—God gave him to Abraham, he lived, he was beautiful—then the word came he had to take him up to the mountain and kill him. In a figure, Abraham received Isaac from the dead, as the Scripture says. He had to go up ready to put a knife into Isaac’s heart, but instead of that, God spared him.
Death, burial, and resurrection: people come into this walk, they are blessed, they go through a wilderness, and then they start coming up. Every time you make a new step in God, you go through the same process. You come forth with a word; it electrifies you, it is so blessed, and you receive it. Then you die, and then it comes forth.
Joseph received dreams, when he was a young man, and his father favored him. There seemed no reason why everything couldn’t be. Yet, he had to be sold as a slave, thrown into prison, and literally be resurrected from that situation to become the governor of Egypt. All through the Scriptures this is the way it happened. Daniel came forth honored above everyone in the land; then he was thrown in the lion’s den, and in a figure, he was received from the dead, and came up to become one of the great rulers of all time and one of the greatest prophets as far as visions and symbols of things to come.
We must understand that this is God’s way of working. Why does He work this way? When God speaks a word, it tends to light upon the wrong nature or on the wrong level. If it is spoken to an individual, it seems to stimulate the wrong nature; if it is spoken to a people, it tends to hit them on the wrong plane, on too low a plane. But that is where they’re living, so that’s where the word has to light upon them. God may be prophesying about a very high spiritual level of walk they are to come into, but they are not living on that level, so they receive the word very joyfully in their hearts, and they say: “Hallelujah, I had a word from the Lord.” Their ambitions and their self-life come up and respond; they grab hold of the word and hang onto it—it’s beautiful. They have no way to hang onto the word except on the spiritual plane on which they are living. They can’t be something they have not yet become. They have to be what they are, and they have to accept the word on that plane. So, they go through the process, and God deals with them. He crucifies that level on which they are living and it seems to go into an eclipse so they can be resurrected on a higher plane.
People receive the word and it stirs their ambitions. Then God puts them through the work of the cross and they come to utter despair. Amidst that despair there is a resurrection, and the whole promise comes forth on a different plane. So, it is not just a matter of death, burial, and resurrection; it is a matter of death on one plane, burial on that plane, and resurrection on a higher plane of life than they have ever before known.
This is the way God does it. This is the way you go from glory to glory. He has to dry up and kill the level you are moving on or you will never move up to a higher level. You will only be a worm in a manure pile until, in a cocoon, you seemingly die and go through a metamorphosis. Then you will fly among the flowers, but you will never do it as long as you’re a worm. Worms don’t care about flowers; they are more concerned about the manure pile. They have to go through a metamorphosis that changes them from one level to another.
God did that same thing with the Church, with spiritual Zion. The locusts came, one after another, and stripped everything down. Nothing was left of the vineyard of the Lord, to which Zion is compared as to a bunch of worm-eaten stumps. Then the Lord said, “I’ll send the rain on it, the latter rain.” Why? “Because the vats are going to be full, overflowing with wine and oil.” There will be days of abundance when God’s people will eat in plenty and be satisfied. But all this is mingled in with the prophecies about judgment, which is significant because God is doing two things: He is bringing forth this old vineyard Zion to the most fruitful time. The precious fruit of the Lord will be gathered unto the Lord, and then the Husbandman will come. But He is also bringing to an end and starting the flow of judgments upon an age that has rejected what He had to give. He says He is going to pour out the former and the latter rain, and the result will be that He will restore all the years that the locusts have destroyed.
Now you can understand how this process works in your own life. When God has given you a word, you have died on that word, and then you have been resurrected. Each time it takes place, you are moving on a higher spiritual plane than you were before. Every time I imagine you are muttering and murmuring in your heart saying: “This is a terrible thing that has happened to me,” but actually, God is just driving you to a higher spiritual level each time you go through that process. It just happens that way.
People walk along with the Lord, and suddenly, everything they have seems to disappear. They may be the leanest, hungriest spiritual people ever, and yet they can’t get anything. They come and cry, “I was in the Word everyday, I loved it, I was being blessed by it; it was so sweet and so precious. But for a week now, when I read, nothing comes. When I go to pray, the heavens are a bowl of brass. The Lord is gone. I can’t feel His presence.”
Have you experienced that? Why does it happen? If you constantly went back and fed on the same level, you would never grow, so God has a wonderful way of drying it up. Then when you become desperate, you seek the Lord, and after you come through it, you are dead and buried. Then the Lord resurrects you, but it’s on a new plane. That is why, when we talk about the restoration, we should amend the common translation of the Greek word in Acts 3:21: Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restoration of all things, whereof God spake by the mouth of His holy prophets that have been from of old.
But in another translation it reads “until the time of the establishment of all things that the prophets have spoken of.” Another translation says: until the times of restitution of all things. Three translations: restoration, restitution, and establishment. “Restitution” means making right a thing. “Restoration” is renewing a thing. “Establishment” could speak of the coming forth on a new level of things that have never even existed before. All three words are significant because they describe what the Lord is really doing. They describe our moving up to a new level of restoration.
If the Lord wants to lead us to a new plane of miracles that we haven’t been in before, the first thing He does is bless us and then we really begin to move in. Next, He dries the whole thing up, and we have to seek the Lord for the new level. For instance, the Lord was performing quite a miracle for Elijah at the Brook Cherith: the water kept flowing when it had dried up everywhere else, and the ravens kept dropping food for him every day. The ravens, being vultures, could have eaten it all themselves, but they brought it for him. It was a miracle, perhaps a low-degree miracle, but when the Lord wanted to perform something better, He said, in effect, “You don’t have to sit here everyday, I will send you down the hill and a good widow-woman will cook your meals while you are in this period of judgment.” So the Lord dried up the brook and took away the ravens. Elijah sat on a rock wondering, “Where are the ravens, and where is the water?” Then when the word of the Lord came to him: “Go down the mountain; I have something better for you,” he was ready to listen. He had to walk with God, so it all had to die, be buried, and become history—it was all over, and he had to come forth on a new level.
This is what God is doing with all of us. Whatever God has done in the past, rejoice in it, but don’t be like the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, who said, “O Lord, this is so wonderful. Let’s just build three tabernacles and stay here. One for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for you” (that was the thing to do around the Feast of Tabernacles). “We’ll build three booths and sit up here on the mountain.” God has more for us to do than sit on top of a mountain in a booth. They had to go down the hill and they went down all excited and ran right into a hard case, a man with a devil-possessed epileptic boy. They shook him and did everything they could to cast the devil out, but they couldn’t do it. The Lord Himself had to come in on it.
It is sometimes good, when you come down from a mountain, to fall flat on your face. It is good to get something from God and have it die almost immediately. That is the whole course of this walk. When I have prophesied over and ministered to people, God immediately stirs them up. There are some who start shaking and moving soulishly; just keep ministering to them, and soon, the shakes are gone. They go home, they can’t figure it out. The soulish reaction has disappeared, and they complain, “You quenched my spirit!” Something has to quench it or they would go on in that rut the rest of their lives. They would never get out of it. Some are accustomed to being blessed a certain way, and God has to end it, so they can move up to a higher plane. “Come on up to Zion country.” That is what God is saying to everyone of our hearts.
What happened to the Church over the entire Church Age? To get this idea of the restoration, we have to understand what God was doing. I am convinced that the early Church walked on a high plane of soul. You may say, “Soulish? Didn’t they understand the separation of soul and spirit?” Yes, they did, and I am convinced that the ministry Paul walked in and wrote about in his epistles was on a higher level than he himself perceived. But when I read the book of Acts, and see his reactions and what he did, I see there was a great deal of the soul level involved, for that was an age of soul.
Would you like a short survey of the Bible? The first age, which lasted about four thousand years, was the cycle in which God was dealing, speaking, and moving on mostly a natural and physical plane. Although the souls and spirits of men were involved, you don’t read much about soul and spirit in the Old Testament. Mainly, He dealt with them on a physical plane. If there were victories, they were because someone was smitten in the fifth rib, or that David with a sling hit a nine foot giant, or by his God, fought a troop and leapt a wall. They knew their enemies; they went out to kill Philistines, Hivites, Jebusites, etc.—they went into Canaan land and fought them. They had to be given to the Lord, but the manifestation of God came very basically and on a natural and physical plane. They were not led because God taught them all His voice, but because there was a pillar of fire out there in the night, and a pillar of cloud in the day, leading them.
It was inevitable that cycle had to die because God wanted to bring it up to a higher plane. So, He gave prophecies and words to the prophets about all that He was going to do: He was going to send the Son of David, the Messiah, and they were to be delivered and then go into captivity to die. Israel was buried, and then it was resurrected. The Lord came and nobody wanted to believe it, because they wanted “the old time religion,” just like they had in the days of Solomon. But it was not going to be like it was in the days of Solomon, or like it was with David, which was what they were looking for. They looked for it but never saw it, because when this Son of David came, He didn’t wind up a slingshot and hit giants nine feet tall. He came and dealt with principalities and powers, with Satan in the open field of the wilderness and defeated him. He came on a new level, to open up a new realm, and it was inevitable then that the Church come forth on that realm.
But then, the Church couldn’t stay in that realm, the realm of soul where they discovered the psychic forces and devils. Sometimes the mingling of the physical and the soulish was so real that they could see and communicate with angels. But spiritually they were still not approaching the realm of their spirit. Shortly after the Church was launched, Paul was writing in Thessalonians about the falling away from the faith and the man of sin coming, the son of perdition—the great falling away, before the Lord could ever come. And John was writing in his first epistle: “Many antichrists, many false prophets already entered into the world” (I John 4:1). There are the predictions of Christ that before the end would come, many false prophets would come, so the Church was launched shortly after its inauguration into the death and burial of the Dark Ages. All the locusts came to the vineyard to strip it down, and it disappeared—the miracles disappeared, the apostles and prophets disappeared, and there were a thousand of the darkest years that have ever been upon the world. There is no explanation for it because the ancient world in the time of Christ was more literate than it was at any time afterwards. Why, when people were so wise, when they had the foundation of science, the Greek philosophers and scientists, why is it that when they had all of that, everything was suddenly plunged into darkness? Because it had to go the way of death, burial, and resurrection.
And then, about six hundred years ago, we find that the restoration started to take place. You say, “Oh, how marvelous; we’ll come back to what they had in the New Testament times.” Yes, in a sense that restoration takes place, but notice that we are not being restored to the soulish realm; we are coming up into the realm of spirit which belongs to the whole age to come. We have gone through the cycle twice and now we come up to the peak … he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days, he will revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight. Hosea 6:1, 2.
We are coming into the great resurrection in the spirit realm. God knows what He is doing. This whole thing is not a battle between God and Satan in which Satan is winning once in a while, and then God has to inject something to bring victory out of it. This is not the way that God does things. The devils can jump up and down on the grave of Zion, but on the third day they won’t hold it down; it will come forth to live in His sight. The arrogance, the insolence of principalities and powers that try to convince and persuade with their lying wonders that the Church is dead—that is a lie. The Church has never come forth into greater life or a greater spiritual plane than is coming right now. The remnant of the Church is coming forth.
Some may talk about the “good old time religion,” and how we’ll never see the days like those old revivals. But we are already in a better day; they never knew what we are experiencing. They had a few times in which they would be shaken emotionally, but this resurrection is moving us from the soulish level and God is bringing us up to the spirit level, the level of our spirit where we can walk and talk with God. This is the worship God wants, for God is a Spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. John 4:24. We are coming up to the level of spirit worship, spiritual worship with our spirits. We are coming to the level of bearing the mind of the Lord. The gifts are more accurate; ministries are deeper. We will have apostles and prophets that move on even greater levels than they moved in New Testament times. If only you can see it is possible!
The restoration is more than a restoration because when it comes forth it will be like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon to manifest itself into a new realm, new interests, new appetites—a whole new world. God is raising up His people to walk, to stand in His sight, and to exist in His very presence.
This is happening right now. This message is a basic one which brings us back to the whole concept of this walk with God and what God is doing. This walk with God is not a matter of getting a few blessings and overcoming a few problems, but God is putting us through the cycle, over and over again. It could be likened unto an automatic washing machine with its cycles: “Oh, Hallelujah! I’m going to be blessed!” So God puts you in, throws in some detergent, and away you go, through cycle after cycle. He shakes you up and spins you dry. If you want to come forth to be the Bride, without spot or wrinkle, ready to walk with Him, you will have to go through the cycle. Don’t only be dedicated to what God is bringing forth, but be dedicated to the means by which He is bringing it forth. If you have to go through the work of the cross, through the old death, burial, and resurrection to get through it, go through it joyfully. Be as dedicated to the means that God uses, because He is not being any harder on you than is necessary. Drastic measures are needed to bring you out of yourself. Some of you wouldn’t be worth the gunpowder to blow you up if God didn’t constantly put you through one thing after another to bring you right into His presence. He keeps making you stand there and appropriate; He puts you in a corner where you can’t function, so that you have to appropriate more of Him, and you will come out of it with victory.
You say, “I just barely got through that!” Yes, but look carefully in your spirit. There has been an appropriation of divine blessing and nature imparted to you through that. You become a partaker of the divine nature more by doing it.
Learn by what you go through. Almost every man or woman goes through a period like that. Every one of you could say the same thing: “I’ve gone through this thing over and over again.” Have you ever felt that the locusts were gnawing, and nobody loved you, nobody cared? The Psalmist said the same thing: “No man careth for my soul.” You go through it, but out of it will come something that you have never had before, and that’s what God is doing in the Church. The Church right now is walking in more than it had even in the early first century Church, and we will probably grow more rapidly than that early Church. We will probably see more signs and wonders and have more apostles and prophets come forth, even in this remnant that God is raising up now, than the early Church had in all of its existence. This generation, this next decade will probably see more happen than happened in the whole of the New Testament time. Let’s be submissive to it.