THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING THE TIME WE LIVE IN TO OBEY THE VOICE OF GOD TODAY
Rev. William Soto Santiago
Thursday, August 1st, 2013.Torreon, Mexico
Very good afternoon, beloved friends and brethren present. It is for me a great blessing and privilege to be with you on this occasion to share with you a time of fellowship around the Word of God and His Program for this end time.
To which also, in addition, I want to express my gratitude for the support you are giving to the project of the Great Tent-Cathedral. We hope that that Great Tent-Cathedral be raised soon for the blessing of all believers in Christ in all of Latin America and all the nations of the world.
I have also seen that many people have been working and continue to work to have higher incomes and to support more widely the project, and also to have a better financial situation for their family, and have already found a way to get these benefits, these blessings, so thus, according to how the Rev. Miguel Bermudez Marin, has said to you, do so, and you will succeed, for yourself, for your family and to support the work of God in this end time.
We read in two places of Scripture that says the same thing: Matthew, chapter 16, verses 1 to 3, and Luke, Chapter 12, verses 54 to 57. We start with Matthew 16, verses 1 to 4:
“The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven.
He answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red.
And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?
A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas. And he left them, and departed.”
And now we go to St. Luke, Chapter 12, verses 54 onwards … 54 to 57:
“And he said also to the people, When ye see a cloud rise out of the west (in other words, where the sun sets), straightway ye say, There cometh a shower; and so it is.
And when ye see the south wind blow, ye say, There will be heat; and it cometh to pass.
Ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?
Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?”
May God bless our souls with His Word and allow us to understand It.
“THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING THE TIME WE LIVE IN TO OBEY THE VOICE OF GOD TODAY.”
God, from age to age and from dispensation to dispensation, has been speaking to His people, and therefore to all mankind. God always has spoken through the Angel of the Covenant, which is Christ in His heavenly body, theophanic body in which God appeared from to the human beings from the time of Adam to the present, and when people saw the Angel, said they had seen God; and truly they were seeing God dressed in an angelic body. That Angel of the Covenant is Christ in His heavenly body, is the Holy Spirit, for a spirit is a body of another dimension, of the dimension of the spirits; God is the God of the spirits of the prophets, Paul says in Hebrews chapter 12, verse 21 onwards.
And now we find that some people who saw the Angel of the Covenant, consequently they were seeing God in His heavenly body … which is, they were seeing the heavenly body, but God was in that heavenly body.
For that reason, being that many saw God when they saw the Angel of the Covenant, and testified that they had seen God … like Jacob when he met the Angel and did not let Him go until He blessed him, he said, speaking about the place which he called Peniel, which means: the face of God, because he had seen God face to face and his soul was preserved. And that’s why in chapter 48 of Genesis Jacob speaking to Joseph and blessing the sons of Joseph, Ephraim and Manasseh, or Manasseh and Ephraim, but he placed the blessing of the Birthright upon Ephraim (the first blessing); he first blessed Ephraim and Ephraim represents the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ and Manasseh represents the Jews.
And now we find that when he is blessing these lads, He says as follows, and we are going to read it to have it clear within us. Chapter 48 of Genesis, verse 14 onwards, says:
“And Israel (that is, Jacob) stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim’s head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh’s head, guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the firstborn.
And he blessed Joseph, and said, God, before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which fed me all my life long unto this day,
The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.”
The God … says: “The God of my fathers (the God that keeps me since I was young), the God that keeps me from my birth unto this day, the Angel of the Covenant …” And now Jacob mentions the Angel of the Covenant also.
Notice, Jacob had seen God veiled in His angelic body called the Angel of the Covenant. Then Manoah, in chapter 13 of the book of Judges, met the Angel of God. At first he knew not it was the Angel of God, but when He ascended in the flame of fire or burnt offering that was offered to God, then he realized it was the Angel of the Covenant, which was the Angel of God.
And he says to his wife, Mrs. Manoah: “We shall die because we have seen God (they had seen God face to face).” His wife says to him: “We shall not die because otherwise he would not tell us that we are having a child.” Logically she knew they were not going to die.
And now we find different testimonies of the appearances of God to different people, and when they saw Him, it was the Angel of the Covenant, it was God dressed in a body called the Angel of the Covenant, the Angel of the Lord, who blessed the people. God was blessing the people through His Angel, the Angel of the Covenant, the heavenly body of God, the image of the living God.
And in Hebrews, Chapter 1, Paul says that Christ is the image of God, of the invisible God. And what is the likeness of God? The physical body of Jesus Christ.
We have God in His heavenly body, in His angelic image, and we have God in His physical body of flesh: the physical likeness of God. And Christ Himself said in John, chapter 10, verse 30, and John, chapter 14, verse 6 onwards: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father.” He also said: “The Father and I, are one.”
It’s like you and your spirit is one, and you and your physical body is one, therefore, God veiled in His heavenly body: the Angel of the Covenant, and God veiled in His physical body: Jesus Christ, in whom the fullness of God dwells.
In John, chapter 1, verse 18, says: “No one has ever seen God.” And what happened then with what Jacob and what Manoah said and others? That they had seen God in His angelical garment, and that they saw God in His garment of flesh called Jesus. We are people who can see God through the angelic veil and through the veil of flesh He uses at the relevant time.
There are times, seasons, different stages of the Divine Program. And God is always in His Program conducting what He intended to do for every age and dispensation. And we see Him manifested through the Angel of the Covenant, which is the Holy Spirit, and we saw Him manifested through the Holy Spirit in the veils of flesh that He used at different times, called prophets.
It is important to know the time the person is living in, to know also what God has to carry out at that time, and to see the Holy Spirit working through the veil of flesh that He has for that time, to be hearing the Voice of God through the Holy Spirit through human flesh.
We have the case of Zechariah, chapter 7, verse 11 onwards, where it says:
“But they refused to hearken, and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not hear.
Yea, they made their hearts as an adamant stone, lest they should hear the law, and the words which the LORD of hosts hath sent in his spirit by the former prophets: therefore came a great wrath from the LORD of hosts.”
How did the Voice of God come, the Word of God to the people? Through the Holy Spirit by means of the prophets.
At the time of John the Baptist, the people had to know the time: they had to know that that was the time when God would send the forerunner of the First Coming of Christ, and to know that at that time He would also send the Messiah Prince promised in Scripture.
Those who did not know the time in which they were living in the days of Jesus, they did not receive Christ, they were blind to what God was doing, because they did not recognize that for the time – or that time was the Messianic time for the appearance of the forerunner, forerunner of the First Coming of Christ, and of the One that was foreran: the Messiah, who was Jesus; that’s why He told them they did not know the time.
The seasons and times must be known, and one must know what God has promised for that time. If He promised the Messiah at that time, then a man had to appear fulfilling what the Messiah had to perform. This is why Jesus said: “If you do not believe me, believe the works, because they bear witness of me.” And He said: “Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal Life, and they are that testify of me.”
One had to have the testimony of Scripture to compare it with what Jesus was doing, and so they could see that the works that Jesus did, He did not do of Himself, He says: “the Father that dwelleth in me (said Christ), He doeth the works.” They were the works of God through Jesus Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah.
It is important to know the time and to know what God has promised to do for that time, and to know through whom He is doing it, because that is the one who would fulfill and through whom that which God promised for that time would be fulfilled.
That is why Christ said: “If you can not believe in me, believe the works, because they bear witness of me.” So, they showed who Jesus was.
Once Nicodemus, in chapter 3, verses 1 to 6 of John, comes to Jesus by night and said to him: “Master, we know that you are come from God as a Teacher, for no one can do the things that You do unless God is with him.” In other words, he recognized that the works that Jesus was doing were the works of God.
It was necessary to know which were the works that God would do through the Messiah the Prince in His Coming, and compare them to what Jesus was doing, and they would get a ‘positive’ answer, that Jesus Christ was the Messiah Prince.
Him and in Him was fulfilled everything relevant to the First Coming of the Messiah. So when He read Isaiah, chapter 61, and said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He has anointed me to preach the acceptable year of the Lord …” He closed the Book and gave it to the minister. He did not continue to read because then it said: “And to proclaim the day of vengeance of our God.” In other words, to preach all the divine judgment that God would pour out upon the human race, because that pertains to His Second Coming, so He could not read it, because He had to read up to where He read, and then He said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your ears.”
He had to read up to where He would fulfill, and the rest was for His Second Coming, where He will be speaking of the judgments of God that are to come on Earth, of the day of vengeance of our God.
It is important for everyone to know the time, every person to know the time that he is living in, to know it according to the Word of God, according to the Divine Program, according to the prophecies, and then to hear the Voice of God through the Holy Spirit working and speaking through the veil of flesh that He has for that time.
That’s the way to hear God and to obey the Voice of God in everything He will be speaking to us for the time in which each person lives. And therefore, people will be listening to God.
It will be the Voice of God through the Holy Spirit through the instrument, the prophet that He has for that time. “For surely the Lord God shall do nothing but He first reveals His secrets to His servants, His prophets.” Amos, Chapter 3, Verse 7.
Therefore, the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, from age to age, has been hearing the Voice of God through the Holy Spirit in the messenger for each time. For the person to recognize the time he lives in; to recognize what God has promised for the time in which the person is living, which is in the Word, and then the person has to search for the veil of flesh in which the Holy Spirit is God speaking to His people.
If you obtain those three things, you will be obedient to the time in which you live, obeying God, hearing God’s Voice.
If we were living in the time of Noah, we would have to recognize that that time was the end time for the people of the antediluvian world, which had come to an end, and that there was a prophet messenger named Noah, speaking, or God speaking through him things that would happen; and then Noah working in the construction of an ark for the salvation of believers in the message of Noah or God’s Message for that time. In other words, they would be seeing the construction of the ark, and all who were going to be saved would be working with him. They were few, one does not know if he paid construction workers on some occasion, but the thing is that he and his family were the main ones who worked on the construction of the ark. We do not know if other people worked, claiming their due salaries.
There was the time, there were the prophecies that marked the end of time, the message of Noah was there, God’s message, and then the flood came and took away all the unbelievers of that time, but those who were listening to Noah, they were hearing the Voice of God, and were working with him and were obeying the Voice of God for that time.
Christ said that the Coming of the Son of Man would be like the days of Noah, in other words, parallel to that time period, for which there will be in this end time a group of believers listening and obeying God’s Voice today, in this end time in which we are living.
If at the time of Noah people had asked Noah, Noah had asked: How many believers are hearing the Voice of God today? Few people: eight persons including Noah, because Noah heard It and transmitted It to the believers, who were very few. In other words, seven people had raised their hands, and with Noah eight people.
If we ask today: how many know the time in which we live and are hearing the Voice of God and obeying God’s Voice at this time? I see that there are more hands than in the time of Noah.
Eight speaks of eternity, and after the seven ages of the Church among the Gentiles, who have been listening to the Voice of God through the messenger of every age, we are now found in the Age of the Cornerstone, which corresponds to the number eight which speaks of eternity; so number eight is repeated again, the eight back there, is representing the eight age, the Eternal Age of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We are in a time parallel to the time of Noah, and also to the time of Lot, and therefore the time of Abraham, and we are in a time parallel to the time of Moses, and also a time parallel to the time of Jesus. In other words, if we understand this, we know the time in which we live in, the stage of the Divine Program in which we live, and we are at that stage listening to the Voice of God and obeying the Voice of God, and therefore working in the Divine Program at this time.
“THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING THE TIME WE LIVE IN TO OBEY THE VOICE OF GOD TODAY.”
May God speak directly to our souls, may He open the Scriptures to us to understand the time we live in, the age and dispensation, and may He speak continually, consecutively, in this Eternal Age of the Cornerstone, to be obeying the Voice of God always.
May the blessings of Christ the Angel of the Covenant, be upon you all and me too, and may He use us greatly in His Work in this end time, and may He open every day more and more our minds to understand all the Divine Program, and give us also the privilege of working in His Work in this end time.
May the blessings of Christ, the Angel of the Covenant, be upon you and me too.
I leave with you again the missionary, Dr. Miguel Bermudez Marin, to continue. Thank you very much.
“THE IMPORTANCE OF KNOWING THE TIME WE LIVE IN TO OBEY THE VOICE OF GOD TODAY.”