February 8, 2024

On Thursday, February 8, 2024 the word of the Lord came to me, saying:

Nations of the earth, long have I tolerated your nation-building, world-conquering, annihilation of My creation. Long have I looked the other way while you have committed atrocities upon My earth, ofttimes in My Name. I have shown mercy when you have been merciless; I have shown restraint when you have followed your covetous desires; I have allowed you to trample My capitals when you have assaulted the freedoms of others in your quest for dominance and order and peace. My toleration of these and other sins is now ended.

In the days to come, I will upend the lordship you exercise over your constituents. When the floods come to assault your shores, I will turn your people against you. There will be riots in the streets and armed conflicts in the cities. I will set your people free from your tyranny of lies and deceptions. I will wrangle from you your power and might, and I will give it to the humble and the poor of the land.

Long I have tolerated the persecution of My people and the adulteration of My Gospel. As I judge the leaders of the church, so, too, will I judge the leaders of men. None will escape the darkness of the days to come, for you have sowed to the darkness, and you will reap what you have sown. Chaos will reign supreme in the days and years ahead; chaos and confusion—a darkness that can be felt. I will bring ruin to the fields and to the forests, to the winds and to the waves, to the corn and to the maize, to the rice and to the wheat. I will send a blight against your growings and pestilence to consume your crops and your children. I will call upon the gods you have worshipped and the knowledge you have accumulated to save you from My hand, O nations of the earth. Devastation and ruin will remain behind when bounty was ahead.

Why would I assault you in these ways, O great nations of the earth? Are My ways unjust? No! It is your ways that are unjust. You have denied My existence, pillaged My stores of knowledge, and called yourselves gods of the heavens and the earth. You have exalted your intelligence and your knowing, claiming divinity in your comings and goings. No more, great and wicked generation, who sows to the flesh and cultivates wrongdoing as righteousness. My people lay imprisoned, the poor locked out, the sick and grieving wallowing in the streets of your greatness.

Learn repentance, O great nations, and be healed. Look to the poor, the dispossessed, the vulnerable, the demon-possessed, the orphan, the alien among you. None should have so much and none so little as you deem just and right. Sell all you have and give it to the poor, and I may turn from My great wrath and delay your destruction by years or decades. But continue as you have walked, and your days will end in misery and blood.

The Word of the Lord has spoken. Amen

January 16, 2024

On Tuesday, January 16, 2024 the Word of the Lord came to me saying:

Too long have My children listened to the whispers of demons in My Name. Too long have the values of the fallen guided the children of light. Too long have My people walked in darkness while calling out My Name into the heavens. This day is the beginning of the end of the lies whispered in My Name.

I will no longer tolerate those who speak the lies of Satan in the congregations called by My Name. I will no longer listen to lessons on leadership, power, control, influence, manipulation, and prosperity. Long have these topics been the stock and trade of false prophets—the teachers and preachers who speak out of the desires of their own hearts and claim inspiration by My Spirit. The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven this generation, not now nor in the world to come.

All who claim to deliver a word from the Lord that I have not spoken or an instruction to My people that I have not given will be devoted to destruction. I will now free My people from the wolves who are shepherding My flock. For those who speak their own words in My Name, there will be no mercy. I will turn the flocks against the shepherds as I turned Israel against their Egyptian masters. I Myself will send plagues against the shepherds until they release My sheep from their sheep pens. My assaults will be relentless, and My words to the shepherds who lead them are only these: “Let My people go that they may worship Me in spirit and in truth in the wilderness prepared for them.”

I wish to see My people in tents. I will tolerate no more cathedrals. I wish to see My people pray and listen to My voice. I will tolerate no more those who claim to speak to them on My behalf. Even this voice you hear now will not be necessary in the days to come. I will shepherd My people, and I will call out to My flock. My Messiah alone will lead them, and He will come to them as a child comes—humble, submissive, ready to serve, and eager to listen.

If you know of no such children, this is not because My word is false, but because your discipleship is defective. Too long have I tolerated the despoiling of the earth and the corruption of My children. I called out to Abraham in order to preserve through Him a remnant on the earth, a faithful generation, children of righteousness who shine as the stars in the night. But those who call themselves by My Name have worshipped the false gods of this age, and their children have been corrupted by the demons they have worshipped.

No more, no more, children of the earth. My long days of silence and mercy are ended. From the dawn of this new year, 100 days are allotted for preparation for judgment. Repent, My children, if you are My children. Turn from the wickedness of your ways and the licentiousness of your teachings. Why would you be destroyed? Why would you have Me turn My face from you? Judgment is coming on the world. Need the judgment of the wicked consume My people, as well?

Separate yourselves from those who speak in My Name words I have not spoken. You ask, “How will we know Your word?” You will know My word by its fruit. And you ask, “What is this fruit?” It is the fruit of obedience to the words I have preserved through My prophets and apostles. Men have not preserved My word. I have preserved My word. Many have attempted to change it, to alter it, to corrupt it, to pervert it to their own ends. But I have protected it by holy hands and hidden places that those who wished to add and subtract from what I have said have been found out. I conscripted the wicked to prove the truthful witness I have preserved that My people might hear and learn.

Listen to what I have preserved, do what I have asked, receive who I am making you, and you will shine in the dark places of the world. Continue worshipping idols of your own making hidden within ideals, principles, laws, constitutions, and cultures you have made yourselves, and I will leave you to the gods you have chosen—gods which could not save the world in the days of Noah, which could not forestall the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which have lost every nation that they have incited to arise from the beginning to now. Never have they withstood My judgment. They live now only by My mercy.

If you believe they can save you from the curse, then worship them. But those who wish to be called by My Name must separate themselves from false and useless shepherds. Return to My word, and I will speak to you again. Return to obedience, and I will rescue you from the tyranny of your fallen masters. Return to goodness, and I will break the bonds which enslave you to yourselves. May those who have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Selah and Amen.

The Road Ahead (July 2023)

In August of 2021 I posted an update which I entitled, “Signing Off.” If you haven’t heard it and are interested you can listen HERE. As I explained in that podcast discussion, my slow walk of obedience from public to more localized service of God and His Church had begun years earlier and had come to a climax in January of 2021 when I stepped down from full-time pastoral ministry and resigned both my credentials and my membership as a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene, a Wesleyan-American Holiness Denomination. But even after that departure, I had not given up on building an online preaching and teaching platform.

I interpreted the conviction I was feeling which led to the “Signing Off” discussion in August of that year as a call to give up that pursuit. And so, from that point forward I stepped away from my attempts to build a preaching and teaching platform online by ceasing to follow the best practices recommended by those who provide advice for building, maintaining, and extending an online presence.

During that same month, the Lord led me to begin attending a small local church near my home with the instruction that I had to be prepared to lead that congregation. In obedience I began attending, and in early December one of the denominational leaders asked me to serve as an interim minister, despite my then having no credentials. I accepted and spent 16 months as the interim minister there.

I am now a month out of that ministry, and the Lord’s call to sign off has deepened. My next steps are to vacate most of social media. For the foreseeable future, I will continue to maintain a YouTube channel, this website, and a podcast. But as of August 1, 2023 I will be departing from all other social media. My hope for what remains of my web presence is that it might serve as a resource for those who are reading through the Bible personally or studying the Bible in small groups. I am currently teaching through the Gospel of Luke, and I will continue to post those lessons on YouTube and on the podcast.

Though my future, especially in terms of paid employment, is unsettled, I am grateful for the Lord’s conviction and call to follow Him into a different way of serving the Church than I had formerly imagined. I and my family are in the process of joining a local church, and we will continue to serve Jesus as members of that local body. I am also editing my previously posted sermons to remove contextual details, exhortations that were specific to a particular congregation at a particular time, and dated illustrations which were meant originally to make the main point more accessible. What remains is the core message of each sermon along with, what I consider to be, less time-constricted applications. Again, I hope that these efforts along with the ongoing teaching episodes will serve the people of God in the days ahead.

It has been nearly seven years since the Lord first began convicting me that the vocation of full-time paid pastoral ministry had been leading me away from the worship of God—that somehow both that vocation and my loyalty to a particular religious tradition within the larger Christian Church which supported it had become idols which were supplanting God in my life. I have found that the Lord is patient with His calling and conviction. If He had asked me to do all He has asked me to do at one time, I wonder if I couldn’t have managed the courage to obey. But by His grace, He has convicted me incrementally and led me one step at a time. This is the next step in that process, and I trust it will not be the last.

Thank you to those who have encouraged me in the teaching and preaching of the Word of God over these nearly twenty-three years of paid pastoral service to the church. As I said, I will continue to provide lessons from the Scriptures, and I will continue to write both on this blog and in books as encouragements to discipleship in our historic and apostolic faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

I remain convinced that we are in a season of God’s call to the Church to repent. I believe that what we are experiencing both nationally and globally are the Lord’s locusts, allowing us to sample the true nature of the world if God were to remove His providential work of creation and governance. During the last 23 years of vocational ministry, I have added my voice to the hundreds of Christian voices over the last five centuries calling the people of God to return to our first love and to the testimonies of those God has chosen to reveal His Word to His people. May those who have ears to hear, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Godspeed.

J. Thomas Johnson

For those who might be helped by them, below are links to the books I have currently published through Amazon.com. At present, I am working on a treatise on God’s election, God’s Sovereignty, and human free will, which I hope to complete in the next year.

Reflecting on the Seasons of Lent and Easter

J. Thomas Johnson

Recently, I took a Lenten quiz, and one of the questions read as follows: Why is the season of Lent forty days? It was a multiple choice quiz, and these were the options:

  • To represent the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, tempted by Satan
  • To recall the 40 days and nights the earth was flooded in the Old Testament
  • To remind us of the 40 years the Israelites wandered in the desert

According to the quiz-writer(s), the correct answer is “a”—”to represent the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, tempted by Satan.” But the quiz is deceptive. “B” is easy enough to dismiss because the earth was flooded for far more than forty days, according to Genesis. It rained for forty days, but the earth was flooded for over one-hundred fifty days. However, “c” is a bit more difficult because it gets at the deeper question as to why Jesus Himself spent forty days fasting in the wilderness.

Why did the Spirit of God drive Jesus out into the wilderness for forty days, where He fasted, was tempted by Satan, and, eventually, ministered to by God’s angels? Well, the answer to that certainly involves the forty years that Israel spent wandering in the wilderness. So, during Lent the Church may be remembering “a,” but Jesus Himself was certainly recapitulating “c.”

There are two passages that help to explain why the Father sent the Son into the wilderness for forty days after His baptism, allowed Him to be tempted by Satan, and required Him to fast and pray. Let’s start with the temptation of Satan. In this aspect of His forty days, Jesus was walking in the footsteps of Israel. Deuteronomy 8:2-3 reads thusly:

2 Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments. 3 He humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with manna, with which neither you nor your ancestors were acquainted, in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

Deuteronomy 8:2-3, NRSV

When Satan tempted Jesus by suggesting that He turn the stones surrounding Him into bread, Jesus quoted verse 3 of this passage. In part, as Israel before Him, Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness was a time of humbling and of the testing of Jesus’ obedience. God was insistent that Jesus, as the representative of Israel, walk in the footsteps of Israel. Where Israel failed, however, Jesus was faithful.

But, why was Jesus fasting? Perhaps this was simply to join Israel in their seasons of hunger in the wilderness. But, I suspect it was more than that. After all, Israel ate in the wilderness. They were fed with manna and, occasionally, with quail. Because of this, I believe Jesus’ fasting was a fulfillment of an act of Moses. The scene has been preserved in Deuteronomy 9:16-19:

16 Then I saw that you had indeed sinned against the Lord your God, by casting for yourselves an image of a calf; you had been quick to turn from the way that the Lord had commanded you. 17 So I took hold of the two tablets and flung them from my two hands, smashing them before your eyes. 18 Then I lay prostrate before the Lord as before, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all the sin you had committed, provoking the Lord by doing what was evil in his sight. 19 For I was afraid that the anger that the Lord bore against you was so fierce that he would destroy you. But the Lord listened to me that time also.

Deuteronomy 9:16-19, NRSV

After Israel sinned by making an idol and using it in their worship of God, Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights, interceding for the people and begging God not to destroy them. I believe that we are meant to see Jesus’ forty days of fasting in the wilderness in this light. Moses’s intercession for the people was a foreshadowing of Jesus’ intercession for sinful humanity. Understood in this way, Jesus’ fasted for forty days asking God to have mercy on fallen humanity. And Jesus embodied this prayer entirely, as He laid down His life for fallen humanity on the cross.

As we observe Lent, may we remember that God humbles us to test our obedience. As we observe Lent, may we remember the prayer and fasting of Jesus, interceding for us while we were still sinners. As we remember Good Friday, may we recall the way in which Jesus not only prayed for us, but lived out His prayer by sacrificing Himself for our salvation. And, as we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, may we rejoice that God demonstrated His acceptance of these prayers and this sacrifice by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Praise be to God!

Cause & Effect

J. Thomas Johnson – March 2, 2023

Sometimes I assume I have to choose between what is natural and what is supernatural. If an occurrence has a natural explanation—that is, if something can be explained according to the normal patterns of life on earth or of the universe generally—, then I am tempted to assume that it occurred naturally. If an occurrence has no clear natural explanation, then I am tempted to consider supernatural involvement. This all seems very reasonable to me, but I am becoming increasingly aware of how unbiblical this way of reasoning may be.

Recently I’ve been considering the fall of the walls of Jericho in Joshua chapter six. The Scriptures tell us that God told the Israelites to march around the city once each day for six days. Then on the seventh day, the Lord told them to march around the city seven times, with the priests marching before the Ark of the Covenant blasting the trumpets the whole time. Following the seventh time around the city, after the priests had released a long blast from the ram’s horn, the people were to shout a great shout, and the walls of the city would fall. The Scriptures tell us that this occurred precisely as God had described, and the Israelites took the city. What the Scriptures don’t say is whether anything ‘natural’ occurred at the same time.

For what I consider to be dubious reasons, most contemporary critical scholars have rejected the Bible’s date of Israel’s conquest of Canaan (i.e., 1406 B.C.) and have preferred a date of 1250 B.C. There is little archaeological evidence of a major settlement in Jericho in 1250 B.C. But, during the period in which the Bible indicates Israel came into the land, there is evidence of such a settlement. Assuming that the Bible is right both about the dates and about the events surrounding the fall of Jericho, how precisely might the walls have fallen?

Biblical historians who accept the Bible’s dating for the conquest of Canaan have suggested that an earthquake (or a series of earthquakes) might have led to the wall’s collapse. The Jordan River Valley is part of a large fault line sometimes called the Syrian-African Rift. In the last 2,000 years earthquakes have been recorded as causing landslides that have blocked the Jordan River’s flow and as having done substantial damage to human-made structures. Since the conquest of Jericho was preceded by the miracle of the Jordan River’s waters stopping for Israel to cross over, some historians have suggested a large earthquake followed by several aftershocks might have led to the fall of Jericho’s walls.

We don’t know if that is what happened, but if it were, would that mean these were not miracles—that is, that God was not involved? No. Permit me to explain.

According to the Scriptures, life is unnatural. According to Genesis, the natural state of things is lifelessness, formlessness, emptiness, darkness. God imposed life on lifelessness by speaking. For Christians, the universe is not natural, but a miracle, and life along with it. Order and life have been imposed on disorder and lifelessness by God. Nature is supernaturally sourced and supernaturally maintained.

Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the Scriptures often describe events as both natural (that is, as consequences of cause and effect) and as supernatural (as intended by God). How many earthquakes might Jericho have withstood during its history? We don’t know. However, on that day in the late 1400s B.C. God did not allow the walls to remain standing. Was this a consequence of building on a fault line? Yes. Was this judgment? Yes. Was this the fulfillment of God’s promise to Israel? Yes. As Christians we don’t choose between these interpretations. They were all true simultaneously.

Consequences of poor decisions are both natural and forms of divine judgment. The earth has been created in such a way that God can bring judgment through its design. God does not need to circumvent creation in order to use it for His purposes. God can and has worked through the very mechanisms of nature that He has created and that He maintains. As has always been true and remains true today, consequences can be both natural and forms of divine judgment simultaneously. Perhaps we should look for God’s communications and activities in the natural consequences of our choices and not only in the inexplicable or exceptional aspects of life on earth.