Jesus, Ever Present and Soon Coming

By Stephen Slack

You might find yourself puzzled about the title of this book, "Jesus Ever Present and Soon Coming." You may be asking yourself, how can Jesus be present and yet at the same time, soon coming? This book discusses the purposes God had in mind when He wrapped himself in humanely flesh to become a man, then supernaturally allowed himself to be crucified at the hands of the very people he would die to save. Then what did He have in mind with His supernatural resurrection, and why on earth would He want to come again? In what manner is His coming again significant and what this all means for us today? In all that our Lord Jesus has done, He did out of His absolute without end of Love personified for all of us humans. Come and read about this great love that He has for us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781635254938

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Jesus, Ever Present

and

Soon Coming

Stephen Slack

ISBN 978-1-63525-492-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63525-493-8 (Digital)

Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Slack

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

I - Introduction

II - The Beginning

III - Two Trees in the Garden of God

IV - The Mosaic Covenant and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

V - Looking Forward to the Second Coming of Jesus

VI - Let Us Make Man in Our Image

VII - The Seven Days of Creation

VIII - The Feast of Tabernacles

IX - The Restoration of Israel and Her Return to Palestine

X - An Afterword

About the Author

I

Introduction

For more than twenty years I have been hearing the Lord Jesus speak to me, and He has been requesting of me to write His story that others might read it. I have tried to disregard the deep quiet whisper of His voice as probably not true, as probably a counterfeit voice of the enemy attempting to lure me into some pride-filled work that was not a true call of the Lord. But I could not shake it, and with all of the prayer to submit to God, rebuke the devil and he will flee, the quiet voice would not go away. I reasoned that in the last two thousand plus years since Jesus’s Holy Spirit fell upon the 120 in the upper room on the Feast of Pentecost right after Jesus ascended to heaven, that many mature Spirit-filled men and women with great gifts of the natural and supernatural order have made their attempts to tell the story of Jesus. Therefore, who am I to undertake this work. After coming to agreement with myself in my plausible argument of self-abasement, I still hear the quiet voice, Write My story!

Tonight, November 20, 2011, at 11:00 p.m. MST, I felt compelled to begin, although not sure how.

I should be going to bed to be as awake as I might possibly be to race to the grocery store tomorrow to shop for the Thanksgiving Feast, race home with the groceries, and then race off to the UNM Hospital for a 1:00 p.m. appointment with a neurologist to apply a lumbar probe or spinal tap to draw out spinal fluid to be tested in a second process to find out with what type of neuropathy I might be burdened.

The first effort with many tests began in 2008. After the determination that I was saddled with a peripheral neuropathy in my lower legs and feet and ankles, some tests were begun by a neurologist, looking for heavy metal poisoning, vitamin B-12 deficiency, effects of heavy drinking, or diabetes. None of those were found. The doctor then went to the next step of doing a spinal tap to look for MS (multiple sclerosis). None of that was found either. I quizzed him on what the next step would be, and he replied that there was none. So that medical relationship ended.

A few weeks later, my primary care physician alerted me to a rheumatologist who had a reputation for excellent troubleshooting of the human body with sickness and diseases to the causes of the same. I made an appointment with him, and he started me on an awesome ream of blood tests, as well as MRI and CT scan and a variety of ultrasound tests. A malfunctioning parathyroid was found to be the cause of osteoporosis, which was discovered by the MRI revealing bone breaks in the spine and then performing noninvasive tests to determine bone density. The final conclusion of this doctor’s testing me, attempting to find the cause of the neuropathy, an autoimmune disease, was that my blood tests showed that there were no antibodies indicating that my body was still attacking itself. Possibly, I am now cured? Not so.

Beginning in September 2010, I hooked up with a new and intensive clinic at the UNM Hospital, which purpose was to find the type of neuropathy and possibly treat it to a cure, as some types may be cured.

And while all this is going on in the realm of the natural, here I am attempting to surrender to the Voice of the One who calls me. And if the call is objective and true as coming from my Lord Jesus, even though I may know little, through me, He may speak much. I am excited, but with the feeling of being in an unfamiliar land, and now we are to begin this new adventure. I think that I feel like the children who broke through the wardrobe into the land of Narnia, not on the global surface of this earth but into a land of the unseen mysteries revealed only to those willing to become as children. Ah me, such is the difficult task ahead and mostly to become as a child before our God and Savior! That is the death that we must embrace when we come to Jesus on His throne of the cross of Calvary. It is not the crucifixion of our physical body or any pain associated with the body, but the painful death of the ego, which sits on the throne of our heart, until the many experiences of crucifixion lay that servant of the devil, the ego, to finally be totally buried with Christ. Then at last what we have sought for all our days since we were saved in Christ Jesus, we come, as if into the garden of Eden, into the sweet peace of resurrection life, where we come to be at rest (buried) knowing how lowly we are but great in Jesus. We may not experience that fullness in this flesh while on this earth, but we have that fullness by faith as soon as we believe Jesus as our Lord and confess that the Father raised Him from the dead. Then the security of the eternal promise of heaven is absolutely locked into our self.

Humans were able to break the first covenant because it was made between an imperfect slave humanity and a perfect God and sealed with the blood of animals, but the second and last covenant was made within the Incarnate Word of God in the flesh between His humanity and His divinity and sealed with the Blood of a perfect man. Therefore, this perfect covenant cannot in any way be broken. We step into this covenant by our faith proclamation, and we are then in the center of this covenant by being in Christ. The power of this covenant keeps us and protects us once we are in Christ by faith and the duration of this covenant keeping us and protecting us is without end. It is the wedding band that displays a circle of love that is a circle without end. It is absolute. Humans did not make this covenant, and no human can break it. A saved man can live as if unsaved, but the responsibility of keeping this covenant belongs to God alone because He is the One who made it and we step into this covenant by faith. "Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? (Rom. 2:4 NAS). What is the evil in good men that expects some wrathful God to reach out to crush an unrepentant sinner, when it is Jesus, the God-man, who took to Himself all the wrath and judgement of God so that all men might be free. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world should be saved through Him" (John 3:17 NAS).

"So, then, as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so, through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men" (Rom. 5:18 NAS).

It seems unfair, at first, that a covenant God should apply the sin of first man, Adam, to all the seed, the children, that follow after him. But the same covenant God cloaks Himself with humanity to bring forth the solution by His own self being tortured and crucified for all man’s sin, resulting in justification of life to all men. Now this justification of life is not salvation, but the unbearable debt of eternal death and loss due to sin has been removed and God is no longer angry toward man as Adam’s children. He is seeking out man in His love, and He wants us who are on the earth and are of His body to reach out to everyone with that love of Jesus so that others may receive His gift of salvation. His work of the cross is Him, that awesome Divine Being that no one knows fully, putting us all on notice that He is now setting His goal to be tracking us down as the Hound of Heaven, not to harm us but to bring that infinite love of the Father to his wayward sons and daughters, and with that sweeping gesture of embrace by Father, they know that they’ll never be allowed outside of this love ever again. "For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified" (Heb. 10:14 NAS).

Let us be very clear: the Lord Almighty, who created heaven and earth, allowing first man to commit treason against Him, is not in the least angry or wrathful toward anyone but instead yearns with all His being to pour out His love upon us in a close family relationship. This is the gospel of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah.

It seems good and proper to me to bring forth that marvelous poem by Francis Thompson that so exemplifies that love of our God to pursue us in all the various activities of man that are mostly our ways of hiding from this God, this Hound of Heaven.

The Hound of Heaven

Francis Thompson

(1859–1907)

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled Him, down the arches of the years;

I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears

I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

Up vistaed hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated,

Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

They beat—and a Voice beat

More instant than the Feet—

All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.

I pleaded, outlaw-wise,

By many a hearted casement, curtained red,

Trellised with intertwining charities

(For, though I knew His love Who followed,

Yet was I sore adread

Lest having Him, I must have naught beside);

But if one little casement parted wide,

The gust of His approach would clash it to.

Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue.

Across the margent of the world I fled,

And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,

Smiting for shelter on their clanged bars;

Fretted to dulcet jars

And silvern chatter the pale ports o’ the moon.

I said to dawn, Be sudden; to eve, Be soon;

With thy young skyey blossoms heap me over

From this tremendous Lover!

Float thy vague veil about me, lest He see!

I tempted all His servitors, but to find

My own betrayal in their constancy,

In faith to Him their fickleness to me,

Their traitorous trueness, and their loyal deceit.

To all swift things for swiftness did I sue;

Clung to the whistling mane of every wind.

But whether they swept, smoothly fleet,

The long savannahs of the blue;

Or whether, Thunder-driven,

They clanged his chariot ‘thwart a heaven

Plashy with flying lightnings round the spurn o’ their feet—

Fear wist not to evade as Love wist to pursue.

Still with unhurrying chase,

And unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,

Came on the following Feet,

And a Voice above their beat—

Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.

I sought no more that after which I strayed

In face of man or maid;

But still within the little children’s eyes

Seems something, something that replies;

They at least are for me, surely for me!

I turned me to them very wistfully;

But, just as their young eyes grew sudden fair

With dawning answers there,

Their angel plucked them from me by the hair.

"Come then, ye other children, Nature’s—share

With me, said I, your delicate fellowship;

Let me greet you lip to lip,

Let me twine with you caresses,

Wantoning

With our Lady-Mother’s vagrant tresses’

Banqueting

With her in her wind-walled palace,

Underneath her azured daïs,

Quaffing, as your taintless way is,

From a chalice

Lucent-weeping out of the dayspring."

So it was done;

I in their delicate fellowship was one--

Drew the bolt of Nature’s secrecies.

I knew all the swift importings

On the wilful face of skies;

I knew how the clouds arise

Spumèd of the wild sea-snortings;

All that’s born or dies

Rose and drooped with—made them shapers

Of mine own moods, or wailful or divine—

With them joyed and was bereaven.

I was heavy with the even,

When she lit her glimmering tapers

Round the day’s dead sanctities.

I laughed in the morning’s eyes.

I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,

Heaven and I wept together,

And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine;

Against the red throb of its sunset-heart

I laid my own to beat,

And share commingling heat;

But not by that, by that, was eased my human smart.

In vain my tears were wet on Heaven’s gray cheek.

For ah! we know not what each other says,

These things and I; in sound I speak--

Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.

Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;

Let her, if she would owe me,

Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me

The breasts of her tenderness;

Never did any milk of hers once bless

My thirsting mouth.

Nigh and nigh draws the chase,

With unperturbèd pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy;

And past those noisèd Feet

A voice comes yet more fleet--

Lo, naught contents thee, who content’st not Me.

Naked I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke!

My harness piece by piece Thou hast hewn from me,

And smitten me to my knee;

I am defenseless utterly.

I slept, methinks, and woke,

And, slowly gazing, find me stripped in sleep.

In the rash lustihead of my young powers,

I shook the pillaring hours

And pulled my life upon me; grimed with smears,

I stand amid the dust o’ the mounded years—

My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap.

My days have crackled and gone up in smoke,

Have puffed and burst as sun-starts on a stream.

Yea, faileth now even dream

The dreamer, and the lute the lutanist;

Even the linked fantasies, in whose blossomy twist

I swung the earth a trinket at my wrist,

Are yielding; cords of all too weak account

For earth with heavy griefs so overplussed.

Ah! is Thy love indeed

A weed, albeit amaranthine weed,

Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?

Ah! Must—

Designer infinite!—

Ah! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?

My freshness spent its wavering shower i’ the dust;

And now my heart is a broken fount,

Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever

From the dank thoughts that shiver

Upon the sighful branches of my mind.

Such is; what is to be?

The pulp so bitter, how shall taste the rind?

I dimly guess what Time in mist confounds;

Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds

From the hid battlements of Eternity;

Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then

Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again.

But not ere him who summoneth

I first have seen, enwound

With blooming robes, purpureal, cypress-crowned;

His name I know, and what his trumpet saith.

Whether man’s heart or life it be which yields

Thee harvest, must Thy harvest fields

Be dunged with rotten death?

Now of that long pursuit

Comes on at hand the bruit;

That Voice is round me like a bursting sea:

"And is thy earth so marred,

Shattered in shard on shard?

Lo, all things fly thee, for thou fliest Me!

Strange, piteous, futile thing,

Wherefore should any set thee love apart?

Seeing none but I makes much of naught," He said,

"And human love needs human meriting,

How hast thou merited—

Of all man’s clotted clay the dingiest clot?

Alack, thou knowest not

How little worthy of any love thou art!

Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee

Save Me, save only Me?

All which I took from thee I did but take,

Not for thy harms.

But just that thou might’st seek it in my arms.

All which thy child’s mistake

Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home;

Rise, clasp My hand, and come!"

Halts by me that footfall;

Is my gloom, after all,

Shade of His hand, outstreched caressingly?

"Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,

I am He Whom thou seekest!

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me."

Francis is afraid of the Lord, filled with his religious attitudes that have come to him from religious traditions and from the presence of sin within. He attempts to evade the Lord’s presence and His love by going into all the various ways of man and assigning to all of these a degree of hope but only to experience failure in all of them. He says that he knows of God’s love, like many in a religious mode, but none of us can fall in love with this Lord, this Jesus, without having a real and deep experience of His love. Jesus’s gospel has been the only way for me and many others to experience His love because His gospel is not simply words on a page but rather the power of God set into the realm of man. One might say that this book called the Bible is not about God. It is God and His presence upon the earth. This New Testament, new covenant word, is the last will and testament of a perfect man who died and rose again. He did not simply rise from the dead, but he resurrected, a life-form that did not exist before Jesus resurrection. By it He is elevated to the position of Son of God who sits at the right hand of the throne of God, which is a position, not a piece of furniture. And we as His disciples, believing in Him and His resurrection, are filled with this resurrection power, and we may say that we are in Him: And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the first-born among many brethren (Rom. 8:28–29 NAS). I know this as I preach His gospel in the state prison system of New Mexico. The pure and true Gospel of Grace, not mixed with the law or any rule system, invades the hearts of people, and the Holy Spirit opens them to receive this Lord of Grace, and He leads them to becoming children, and then sons, of God. This poem for me so displays the many ways that I have tried to run from this loving God, denying Him His desire to be in a totally loving relationship with me. Having yielded at last to Him, I may even lay my head upon His breast as did John at the Last Supper. Now, following that surrender, did I find that His love is the kindest of all and the power of life that flows from Him can only be received and not earned by some performance?

It is my endeavor that as the Lord leads us we may encounter manna in the desert and be fed by Him, who said, Unless you eat of My Flesh and drink of My Blood, you will have no life within you. (John 6:53 NAS) Oh yes, for here is another door of the great mystery of God: that we discover the meanings of the eating and drinking of Jesus’s body and blood. And this we shall do, if God permits, so that we come to a consummated marriage relationship with our Jesus, our Husband and Kinsman Redeemer, on this earth while in this ignominious flesh. And some disciples seeking Him in this way actually wear a wedding band to signify their union with Him. For me, the ring is not visible any more than the circumcision of my heart is not immediately seen. But it is my heart that wears the wedding band to signify to Jesus that He is mine and that I am His. For me, this is not some religious jargon but the actual core of my salvation and life. When I got saved, I became married to the Holy Spirit until death do us part. "In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of Promise, who is given as the pledge (the earnest) of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption (buying back from Satanic powers) of God’s own possession, to the praise of His Glory" (Eph. 1: 13–14 NAS) What is in parentheses is mine.

In salvation, we are sealed in our spirit not with Liquid Nails or Elmer’s Glue but with the Creator God, and no evil may then touch our saved spirit through that Divine glue. I will explain more fully later.

The Holy Spirit gave to me this scripture which is the banner of the whole work of this book:

Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom, which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory; but just as it is written, Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love Him. For to us God revealed them through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches all things, even the depths of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man, which is in him? Even so the thoughts of God no one knows except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no man. For who has known the mind of the Lord that he should instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ. (1Cor. 2:6–16 NAS)

The wisdom that has been downloaded into me is not the wisdom of the world. Neither is it the knowledge of the natural order for the most part. That is why the knowledge and wisdom of God is called revelation. The word revelation is apokalupsis in the Greek or literally the uncovering. The book of Revelation is named the book of the Apocalypse in the Catholic Bible. The word apocalypse does not mean in any way something of the end times but means revelation and is much more than just the end times or the time of the end.

The contents of this document is centered around the Seven Days of Creation and the seventh feast of the Seven Feasts of Israel, the Feast of Tabernacles, which is the end-time feast of God’s glory to come upon the earth. The purpose of this book is to share what the Holy Spirit has been giving to me concerning His return for His people, known as the second coming of the Lord Jesus.

Some might not get the connection between the Seven Days of Creation and the revelation of how those days relate to the second coming of the Lord. I can only reply that I am simply being obedient to the Holy Spirit of God by presenting this revelation. It is not mine, and initially, I had difficulty understanding it due to the western mentality of my mind, which is centered around the mathematical and the pyramid hierarchy that has structured my mind from my upbringing in the legalistic aspect of the Roman Catholic Church and western civilization. But my God has taken all of my past and used it as a recipe of life. As