CHAPTER 17 SECOND STORM WARNING This chapter, “The Second Storm Warning,” is more clearly understood today than it was twenty years ago when the Lord first revealed it to me.  This is often true regarding prophetic messages or visions from God.  Often the words or images are not understood until the events actually take place or near the time that these events are about to take place.  It is a grievous error to interpret something that the Lord does not interpret for you.   Unfortunately, this practice is commonplace among people who attempt to prophesy for the Lord.  At that time, as I related the vision to a group of churches at a small denominational prayer meeting, there were parts of it that I did not understand.  Since then, as events have unfolded during the last twenty years, more has seeming- ly become clear.    In June of 1986 on a Friday morning, I was praying that God would move in a prayer meeting that we were to have with several other churches that night.  At this time the Lord showed me a vision of a storm that He would send to His Church.  Later that night at the meeting, the anointing of the Lord came upon me in a very sovereign and compelling way and I prophesied what the Lord had begun to reveal to me earlier.  He showed me an army camp with thousands of tents pitched.  It was night and most of the soldiers were asleep in their tents.  There were men and women soldiers fully armed with guns, grenades, rocket launchers etcetera and fully clothed to do battle.  They were sleeping very soundly and dreaming pleasant dreams.  I could see their dreams: they dreamed of good times at the beach, beautiful homes, and fine luxury cars.  They dreamed of getting money and spending money.  They even dreamed of bigger and more successful ministries.  In the far distance I could hear thunder rolling and see lightening flashing.  A storm was brewing off to what was the east in my vision and the storm was being blown toward the camp of the Lord slowly but steadily and became progressively brighter and louder.  Then with loud crashes of thunder and bright flashes of lightening the storm broke with full force over the camp of God.  But VERY FEW of the soldiers woke up.  The vast majority just kept on sleeping with satisfied smiles on their faces.  I saw some stir and almost wake up but they just changed positions and went back to their sweet dreams.  A few others woke up, grabbed their weapons and went to stand on the walls that surrounded the camp and look out on the horizon to see if any one was coming. The walls surrounding the camp were not fully intact and had many places where the enemy had broken through in previous encounters.   These places had never been repaired, but on top of the walls there were places to stand and watch for the enemy. The Lord said that this was the beginning of the second storm that He would bring to His Church but that the crashes of thunder and flashes of lightening would only wake a few of the fully equipped but peacefully slumbering soldiers. He said they were too busy dreaming about their churches, the success of their ministries and their material blessings.  Because of this they would not wake up. After the thunder and lightening passed over the camp of God, the Lord showed me many cannons that were similar in style to those used in the Civil War.  These cannons came from the left as I viewed this scene. The Lord made it CLEAR that the storm came from the EAST and the cannons came from the LEFT.  He did not refer to the East as the right and He did not refer to the left as the West.  They were slowly but steadily rolling up to within close range of the walled camp, many within ten yards of the walls. The soldiers who had awaken- ed earlier and were standing on the broken walls shouted a loud warning to the ones who were asleep, but few stirred and even fewer got up to see what was happening.  Then the cannons all rolled even closer and cut loose a terrible volley that brought down the wall that faced them.  The cannons were then aimed at the people who were beginning to wake up.  So devastating was their attack that the majority had time only to stand up and cry, "O My God," and then were quickly cut down by the barrage. I saw that many were hit in the chest. Most of the people were then completely awakened by the horrifying sound of the attack but were not ready and were cut down. A few woke up and had time to properly ready themselves to fight, but the majority of the people inside the sparsely-guarded, weak, and broken-walled camp were either killed or badly injured. As I finished delivering this vision/prophecy to the Church, the Los Angeles skies lit up with what was the most awesome spectacle of thunder and lightening that I had ever seen.  It was so unusual in our area that it made front-page headlines in the Los Angeles Times the next morning. An unusual thing about this particular word was that it was the second storm that God had shown us.  Earlier, in February of that year, God showed me a storm that was for the cleansing of His Church and the exposure of the sin of many men, particularly those in high places. When I received that message, I had asked that God would confirm the word with actual thunder and lightening.  But He didn't.  In just two or three weeks, however, we saw the spiritual storm that He brought to the Body of Christ with the revelation of the P.T.L. scandal.  This second storm prophecy WAS confirmed by a tremendous electrical storm.  I felt that God confirmed this vision and not the first, because the first storm happened very shortly after He told us about it.  This next storm however, was likely not to happen for a long time.   Shortly after I shared this vision, the people were exhorted about our ties with material wealth.  The Lord was showing us that we were far too involved with our toys, our comfort, and our ministry successes, and God was trying to shake us loose from this mentality.  He was showing us that our time spent, our attention given, our identification with the world's concept of what is important cripples us regarding the doing of His will.  Our desire to seek men's approval and our need to identify with success was especially dangerous to Christians.  If any of these attitudes are in our hearts, we will have to part with these attitudes in order to fully apprehend God and His will.   GOD RIPS OFF THE SKIN In October of 1987 my wife and I took a trip to New York to witness the opening of David Wilkerson’s new work in the city.  It was called the Times Square Church.  We had attended several meetings and were between meetings touring the city with our two sons:  Jedidiah who was 14 and John who was 13.  I distinctly remember that we were walking on the sidewalk just talking together.  All of a sudden I was almost thrown to the ground by the impact of what God was showing me.  I did not fall to the ground but my knees buckled and it was very hard to walk.  I had never had an experience like that before and have never had one since.  I saw a gigantic man standing before me that towered above the city.  The man had no clothes on.  All of a sudden a huge hand from the sky reached down and grabbed the scalp of the man and pulled straight up very quickly.  Then I saw that all the skin of the man had been pulled off by this powerful yank.  I saw sinews, muscles and nerve fibers.  It looked just like the pictures that are in medical books that show a human without skin.  The man yelled in pain as he stood completely vulnerable to all the elements around him.  In my mind I cried to the Lord, “What is this Lord?”   The Lord said quite clearly, “I am going to pull the skin off the city of New York.”   Immediately after this, He showed me a huge thumb that was pressing down on the City of New York.  He said, “This will put great pressure on the people of New York and what is inside each person will be forced out for all to see.  If love is in the heart of the person, love will be forced out.  If hate is inside the person, hate will be forced out.  If fear is inside the person, that will be forced out.  If faith is inside the person, that will be forced out.  What the person truly felt and believed would be exposed by this terrible event.”   After I recovered my senses and my composure (I was brought to tears by what I had seen), I haltingly tried to explain to my wife and sons what I had just seen.  I didn’t really know what it meant, but I had some ideas.  After contemplating what I had seen and after praying about it, it become clear that what God was going to do was remove His protection from the city of New York, and the people would be open to attacks of the enemy in a way that they had never been before.  He also made it quite clear that this dramatic experience of quickly removing His hand of protection would be duplicated throughout the whole country. I didn’t precisely know what New York or any other city, or the nation at large would experience.  At first I thought that there would be a great stock market crash that would trigger another Great Depression.  I thought that perhaps the skin was money.  In fact, several days later, we saw the stock market drop 700 points in one day.   This crash ultimately did NOT affect the city of New York or the country at large in any significant way.  But I knew that God would dramatically remove His hand of protection, and that New York City and our country would experience disasters and dealings like the heathen nations have experienced in other places.  God would leave us to fend for ourselves because we have rejected Him in so many ways.  Heathen countries on a regular basis have experienced disaster after disaster where thousands of people have been killed by earthquakes, flash floods and hurricanes.  They have suffered greatly from attacks of “nature” and attacks from armies.  They have experienced devastating financial collapses.  The United States compared to Russia, the European countries, China, Africa, India and the rest of the world has been relatively unscathed.  These days soon will be over for America.  These events will happen to America because the federal government, the judicial system and many state governments have done everything they could to reject God and His Word.  Most judges and many politicians seem to hate the Word of God and want nothing to do with God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ or His Holy Spirit.  It is obvious from their rulings regarding the Name of Jesus Christ, the Ten Command- ments and the freedom of Christians to express their views, that they either hate God or do not believe in His existence.  The greater tragedy is that a huge number of people in our country really don’t care.  If America will not listen to God and if its people choose to exclude Him from their lives, then God will no longer protect them as He has in the past. More importantly and more disturbingly is that our country is in great danger because of the void that the Church has left.  The Church fears and depends upon man more than the Church fears and depends upon God Himself.   As has been mentioned earlier, most churches have not taught the law of God.  They are all too aware that many would leave their churches if they did so.  They are afraid of offending people who have not left their sin and even in the midst of their churches, are comfortable with their sins and have no intention of leaving them and obeying God.  They know that if they preach the law and its consequences as Jesus, Paul, James and John did, they would be accused of being legalistic.  We have forgotten that trusting in, appreciation of and obedience to God and His law through faith in Jesus Christ protects us. In the year 2005 God made it abundantly real to me that there was something wrong in the way we Christians protest so strongly the removal of the images of the law and the Ten Commandments displayed in and around our court rooms.  As I was praying about the court decisions that were to be made concerning the removal of the Ten Commandments from government property, He spoke very clearly to my heart: He said, “How can you expect Me to keep the images of the Ten Commandments in a secular court room while many in My churches have kept the Ten Commandments out of their churches?”   The Church in America MUST bear the greatest responsibility for the lawlessness and people pleasing attitude in our country.  We have left a SPIRITUAL VOID in the land.  At one time, the Puritans held a high standard of the law in America.  In the last century or so the secular world has unmercifully mocked these holy men and women of the Reformation both in literature and movies.  Even many modern Christians consider Puritans to be stodgy, sour faced and legalistic.  This disrespectful and wrong headed notion must be dispelled by correct teaching of church history.  We seem to have become much too sophisticated.  In many churches it is common to see Christian parents turn a blind eye to the adulterous activities of children living in their home.  Because teaching the law as Jesus taught the law is discouraged from the pulpit, we have provided a HUGE spiritual void that has been filled by the cults, eastern religion and secular philosophy.  Even our Christian President who was anointed by God to be the President in a transparent effort to please everyone after the terrible attack on the Twin Towers on 911 said in his speech to the nation that Allah (the “god” of the Muslims) did not condone the attack on the Twin Towers.  This blind blasphemy came from a man that seems to be genuinely born again.   As a nation and as Christians we often give more respect to false religions and abominable sinners than we do to God’s law. I have a great concern that we will lose the protection of God from the domination of tyrannical leaders.  My concern is that if God no longer protects us from these men that we will see not just the blood of millions of aborted children, but also the blood of those who love the Lord Jesus Christ.  I am concerned that if the liberals in our country are able to convince the majority of the people, we will see our country succumb to the ravages of Communism or even a nuclear attack or attacks, from any number of our enemies.  Perhaps the worst judg- ment of all would be a take over of the country where we lost completely the wonderful freedom to worship God that we have experienced for more than two hundred years. The Church of Jesus Christ will most certainly suffer if and when the majority of the voters in our country choose to give the liberals and radicals control of the judicial, the executive and the legislative branches of government.   The Christians especially and others in our nation will most certainly be susceptible to attacks from both outside the country and inside the country from the media and the government itself. I don't know when this storm will occur, but the events that have occurred over the last decade have given great indication that things are much closer than they were twenty years ago. We certainly were jostled out of our sleep at least temporarily with the thunder claps of the September 11th attacks. These terrible attacks and murders of thousands of Americans were orchestrated and accomplished by men of the EAST.  The Muslim terrorists have merely been the ungloved hand of the demon powers that rule Mohammedism.  It is no coin- cidence that the greatest enemies of this false religion are Israel and the United States: Judaism and Christianity.   Some of God’s people awoke to help those that were devastated by the 911 attacks and even more woke up to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.  They became aware of what could happen as the result of the attacks of men and the ravages of extreme weather.  Many Christians were awakened to the needs of New York City and the Gulf Coast and gave generously, but the Church STILL must recognize its own measure of spiritual responsibility in these matters. The civil war cannons that lined up against the walls that protected the people of God were always a mystery to me.  At one time I suspected that these Civil War cannons might indicate a literal civil war that our country would need to experience once again.  I knew that they were an important part of the vision.  One of the reasons was that in 1987, when we were on a trip back east, and visiting the battlefields of Gettysburg, I felt a strong anointing of God come on me that brought me to tears.  This feeling stayed with me for some time and it made me think of the vision of the civil war cannons lining up against the walls that protected God’s people.  I wonder- ed if it meant that someday we might have another civil war in our country, but I dismissed it as being extremely unlikely.  I thought perhaps it might even refer to in-fighting in the Church, but thought that unlikely.  I never considered that the attack that came from the LEFT of my vision had any political implications. However over the last few years, the left wing of the American political system has become progressively more aggressive and progressively less principled.  The Democrat Party has been taken over by men and women who are sympathetic to Marxist ideology that wants a society without Jesus Christ or Biblical laws and principles.   The ultimate goal of ANY Marxist organization is anarchy (lawlessness).  It is no wonder that they mock the Lord, the Bible, the Ten Commandments and God’s people.  They have become increasingly violent and cruel in their attacks on all that is good.  The leaders and many of their followers have become completely blind to God and His purposes, and the political left, if given the opportunity could certainly cripple or destroy the Church of Jesus Christ in America.  Michael Moore’s so-called Documentary “Fahrenheit 911” was embraced by the media and received no criticism from liberal politicians.  I believe we are seeing political events that are dangerously similar to the same political events that occurred in Nazi Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s and in Russia in the early 20th century.   These leaders of the left will say or do anything to accomplish their goal of gaining more power in the American political system.    If they were able to do so, they would use that power against all that is good and anyone who interferes with them.  The same horrible demonic force that controlled both the Nazi Party and International Communism has inhabited them.  They may well be the ones that will attack the sleeping Church with the civil war cannons in the vision of the Second Storm.  Since Bill Clinton’s presidency we have seen no one in the Democrat Party subtle enough or skilled enough to successfully attack their enemies.  Michael Moore for example could convince no one who is not already with him of the rightness of his cause.  Both Al Gore and John Kerry were inept.  With the labor unions, the entertainment industry, the legal profession, academia, the newspaper media and most of television on their side, they still could not fool the majority of Americans.  Only God’s grace has kept us from the devastation of God’s people that happens when the walls will crash down, but if the Church in America does not wake up EVEN GOD will not spare us from this attack.        This attack will be a judgment against the people of God because of our lethargy regarding the truth of His Word and the power of His Holy Spirit, and our love of the world, the things of the world and more importantly, our love of the ways of the world.  We have embraced doctrines of demons.  We have become convinced of our need to balance the Scripture with secular psychology and devious ways of getting money to build the kingdom.   We have added to the Word like no other movement since the Roman Catholic Church.  We have softened the commandments of God and cheapened the grace of God.  We have been more concerned about unity than we have about truth.  We truly are rich and in need of nothing in our own eyes.  But God has judged us poor, blind and naked.  We MUST take the lion’s share of the responsibility concerning the judgment that is about to come to America.  We have not fought the war with the Word, the whole Word and nothing but the Word.  We have grown blind to the enemy that has weakened us in our own midst and caused us to be oblivious to our own failures and shortcomings.  The Nazi’s easily conquered a people that had been blinded by the false doctrines of Higher Criticism (a liberal theology of the 19th century that discounted the spiritual authority of the Scriptures).   The communists easily conquered Eastern Europe because the people had been blinded by the legalism and deadness of Eastern Orthodox churches.  If we don’t wake up, and it seems almost inevitable that we will not, we will most certainly be vigorously attacked and the Church will suffer GREAT loss!    Because the Church of Jesus Christ in America has become tolerant of evil, tolerant of evil doctrine and unable and unwilling to judge what is of God and what is not of God, it is no wonder that God has not sent a country changing revival even though we have prayed for decades and asked God a million times for that revival.  The revival will come but not until our hearts have been purified by judgment and persecution.  We will be judged by God because  we have failed to recognize that WE, not the unsaved liberals in our country, not the whores of Hollywood or the abortionists, murderers, and other sinners; WE are the ones that need to repent so that the Church can have the strength and be the leaven of righteousness to change this country and this world for Jesus Christ.   My greatest concern is that when judgment comes to God’s people, many will self-righteously proclaim that they are being persecuted for righteousness sake.  We MUST realize that we have been asleep to God’s will, asleep to God’s battle, and asleep to God’s call to speak out the truth of His Word.  We have embraced the very church that God Himself separated us from in the 16th century – the Roman Catholic Church.  We have been systematically dismantling the Protestant Reformation of 1517.  We no longer recognize the necessity of Sola Fida (Only Faith), Sola Scriptura (Only Scripture) and Sola Gratia (Only Grace).  Many Christians, especially Charismatics, comfortably co-exist with Rome.  We have made ourselves ripe for the judgment of both Christian and heathen alike in our country.  We are more concerned about creating a unity that is not of God than in believing and obeying the truth of God in the Scriptures. Referring back to the vision of the Second Storm, the storm that awakens some of God’s people WILL precede the terrible attack from the left.  These events have already begun to happen.  We have heard the thunder claps of God’s warning and been stirred to be aroused from our sleep for a few minutes.  We are even seeing the Muslims fill the spiritual void we have left because of our disobedience to God’s Word.  Throughout the world and even in our own country they are gaining sympathy.  The left wing media hates any person or party that keeps the “liberal progressives” from achieving their ends, but has become sympathetic to the terrorists.  Some day we may well see an alliance between the Left and the Muslims hell bent to destroy all that is good in America.   Generally speaking, our own personal protection and that of our families, even if all of these events occur, comes from stirring ourselves to be fully awake and running to the walls that surround God’s people and cry out warning of the attacks that are about to happen.  This major attack from the left could occur in forty weeks, forty months or forty years.  I don't know when, but I DO KNOW God is warning us to wake up and get ready NOW!   All of God’s people will not become more spiritual.  Great trials generally serve the purpose of exposing a man's true heart not creating a good heart.  What a man truly loves he will try to preserve.  The Word to us today is to get our hearts ready by letting God purge us of idols, seek Him diligently in the Scriptures, in the prayer closet, and in our loving obedience to Him as He directs us very specifically to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow Him.  We must desire to be like David, we must be a people that are after God's own heart and committed to speak and do all His will. The years that come will either give us more time to repent and embrace God or it will be the beginning of a great and terrible judgment.   The issue is not political.  It is not important that all evangelicals vote conservative so we can have a conserv- ative Supreme Court; the issue is NOT fundamentally political.  The issue is spiritual and we must recognize that the Church is in dire need of another Reformation.  We must pray that God would raise up men with prophetic insight concerning the Word of God and His will.  We must pray that God would raise up our own Martin Luthers, John Calvins, George Whitfields and John and Charles Wesleys.  We must pray that God would send us not merely a renewal or even a good revival, but that He would send us the Reformation that we so desperately need so we can turn from the world to the Word and establish His kingdom in our hearts and in our churches and have the power to effectively fight against the enemy of our souls.  But most important- ly, we must pray that WHATEVER IT TAKES, He raise up a people that have hearts like David and are willing to do ALL that He desires!

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