We are not the only ones who see in the Jericho episode of Israel's history a picture of spiritual warfare. Over the years I have met many who engage in 'Jericho walks' of various kinds, using its picture as a way to release their emunah (faith) into their prayer life. And that is perfectly OK provided it's what Yahweh wants.

However, we must not fall into the trap of believing that any and every intercession we engage in, simply because it either outwardly or inwardly (mentally) mimics a Yah-sanctioned event centuries ago, is going to give results. Like anything else in the spiritual, the Ruach (Spirit) must both empower and guide our prayer life. We cannot automatically assume that what applied in one historical incident can automatically be replied to another aeons later. Some kinds of miracles do, certainly, repeat (like healing) but bringing down city walls and parting seas tend only to be one-off affairs - unless Yahweh commands a repeat performance.

So your confidently marching around a building for seven days imitating the pattern shown to Joshua and expecting Yahweh to do your bidding will not automatically mean that the building will fall - if Yahweh didn't tell you to do it then it probably won't work. You can no more 'name and claim' miracles at your personal behest than you can health and wealth. So don't be presumptuous. The supernatural cannot be harnassed at man's whim...unless you go to the 'other side', of course, in which case you'll get more than you bargained for.

This year is not like last year even if the instructions received then are generally applicable at any time. Use them as the Ruach (Spirit) guides you. This year is...different because global and personal circumstances are different for everyone.

Yesterday Yahweh led me most emphatically to talk to you about the Midianites. It wasn't at all what I was expecting Him to give me for this year's Jericho March and I admit I was at first incredulous as I had been preparing myself up to go into major intercessory work. But, mild protests on my part notwithstanding, Midianites was the subject material.

Why? Because my generation - the penultimate one - has grown up and been raised on - too much Midianite thinking (of lack thereof) and emotionalism. And Midianites beget Midianites. The brides of Moses (which prophetically-speaking must be seen as a single echad bride), representing initial doubt followed by romantic idealism and optimism (on the one side) and wild, unrestrained carnal passion (on the other), are not suitable material for a Jordan crossing. They weren't allowed to cross in Joshua's day and they won't be allowed in the last generation's. We can't have fickle Aarons either, easily moved and persuaded by the impatient crowd. The Remnant Team is Joshua the Ephraimite and Caleb the Edomite who was adopted into Judah - that's a story in itself.

There is another aspect of the 'Midianite connection' that I need to talk to you about today. Why did Moses end up with such an unspiritual woman as Zipporah the Midianite? It is often forgotten that Moses' 40 years in the wilderness of Midian was a self-imposed exile brought about by Moses attempting to murderously take matters into his own hands. We read:

"One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labour. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, 'Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?' The man said, 'Who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?' Then Moses was afraid and thought, 'What I did must have become known.' When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian..." (Ex.2:11-15, NIV).

Moses must have been in his 20's when this happened. He acted impulsively, angered at the unrighteousness of his fellow Hebrews' situation. He wanted to correct an injustice and decided to right the world by acting as judge, jury and executioner of a representative of the system that he himself was himself was a part of. He was an Egyptian Hebrew with a Cushite wife. He was absent from her for forty years because of his impulsiveness and ended up in what is now north-west Saudi Arabia, and to the general area of where it is now believed the Israelites, under his leadership, would eventually cross the sea at the modern Gulf of Aqaba, not what is now called the 'Red Sea' [1].

We were most of us raised to believe that Moses' exile in Midian was to prepare him for his leadership rôle as Israel's navi (prophet) of the Exodus. And whilst this is undoubtedly true, there was much more going on than might at first meet the untrained eye. This was also a punishment for sin, the worst sin of all: murder. He was serving time in an 'open prison' of sorts.

On a third level, it was also to familiarise him with the territory he would eventually lead his fellow Isrtaelites through. Midian would not only be Moses' open prison but it would also be Israel's open prison for a second 40-year stretch for Moses - 80 years of imprisonment! Moses was going before his own nation in much the same way as Yah'shua (Jesus) incarnated and went before us as sin-bearer, only Moses was guilty of sin and Yah'shua (Jesus) was not!

This was Moses' prison but one which Yahweh used in order to spiritually refine him. From being married to African royalty, he then found himself wed to the daughter of a wild Midianite chieftain. We will never know to what extent Jethro's family were Yahweh-worshippers, and if they were, as we must assume, they may well have been in a minority relative to the Midianite collection of tribes generally.

The Midianites in general, and certainly by the time of the Exodus, are known to have worshipped a multitude of gods, including Baal-peor (whom we encountered at Shittim yesterday, on the other side of the Jordan from Jericho) and the pagan Queen of Heaven, Ashteroth (Jer.7:18; 44:17-19,25). It's possible that Yahweh was worshipped by the Midianites as one of many gods. Certainly we know that Yahweh-worship was found among them but to what extent, particularly in Jethro's family, we may never know [2]. Moses' encountering of Yahweh at the burning bush at the far end of Midian's wilderness may well have religiously impacted not only the navi (prophet) himself but also his second wife's family.

In any case, Jethro's impact on Israel was not in the religious or theological realm but the judiciary. Jethro's son Hobab, whom Moses asked to accompany the Israelites travelling towards the Promised Land because of his local knowledge, decided not to accompany Israel to the Promised Land but to return to his Midianite homeland. We need not assume, therefore, that there was some fantastic conversion or revival among the Midianite clan of Jethro.

Judging by Zipporah's behaviour towards Yahweh's mitzvot (commandments), she was not a full convert anyway. She in any case married Moses while he was still an Egyptian pagan, just as the Princess of Meroë had who was doubtless a pagan too. What is important to realise is that Moses' family life was either pagan or semi-pagan, at least as far as his two wives were concerned, just as the first generation of Israelites were. What initially held that first generation together was more in the way of blood than spirituality.

We have an unfortunate, though quite natural, way of reading into Scripture both our own expectations and cultural values. And I guarantee the reality was not the way it has been portrayed in the movies. Yet that's the myth we have for the most part bought into. Moses himself was on a steep learning curve just as we are. Recall that he was raised in the polytheism of Egypt. That was his background. That was his only reference point when trying to assess what had happened to him each time he encountered Yahweh:

"Who among the gods [of Egypt and Midian] is like You, O Yahweh? Who is like You -- majestic in holiness, awesome in glory, working wonders?" (Ex.15:11, NIV).

This is existential, experiential and comparitive language. Moses had been brought up in Egyptian occultism and witnessed the supernatural powers of the dark side, and it was these same powers he would himself confront armed with the Name of Yahweh when he returned from Midian as a navi (prophet) with Aaron. He interprets the amazing works of Yahweh in terms of his own worldview, just as we do ours. A few centuries down the road, in the Millennium, our descendants will will look back and smile at our simplistic, primitive world view (however sophisticated and 'scientific' we may think we are), for they will have the benefit of knowing more about the Cosmos - visible and invisible - than we currently do. And we must learn to read the Bible in terms of the worldview as it existed then and not now.

There are a few other points I want to draw out for you today. It should, I hope, be obvious to you by now that our world is descending into paganism and heathenism at a breathtaking rate. By the time the last generation is my age you will look back in astonishment at just how bad is has got. And like I said yesterday, the gulf between the righteous and the evil will be so great that the chasm will be as wide as the gap between heaven and hell itself. There will, to all intents and purposes, be two species of human: one imaged in Yahweh-Elohim's likeness, and one in Satan's. It will literally be as bad as it was in Noah's day, just as the Saviour prophesied (Mt.24:37; Lk.17:26).

My second point is that the Midian of Moses' day will come to resemble 'Christendom' in the last generation's day, so different will it be from the pure emunah (faith) of the Remnant. And those who still cling to this corpse will react to Yahweh's torot (laws) in exactly the same way as Zipporh reacted to Moses' insistence that their son be circumcised. None of the Remnant can be married to the likes of Zipporah and hope to make it safely through the tribulations so you have got to yield your marriage companion choices to Yahweh. You cannot afford to follow the flesh - there can be no worldly sophisticated Princesses of Meroë and there can be no wild rustic Zipporah's in the Camp of the Remnant of Messianic Israel. Impossible! They will not cross that last 'Jordan' with you but, like Hobab, return to Midian rather than follow you to the Good land.

My mission, and those who are my companions in this labour, is, to borrow the words of Michael Heiser, to "retool the template" of your theological thinking [3]. This means that you will, by the time Yahweh has finished with you, no longer be thinking like Protestants or Jews. The second generation, at least initially, stopped thinking as their parents had like Egyptians and Midianites. And until that pagan mental template was finally burned out of them and replaced by the divine tavnith or pattern of Yahweh's world at Shittim, they were unprepared and unqualified to cross the River Jordan into the Promised Land, let alone ready to confront the fortress of JERICHO.

My dear Remnaneers, at least those aspiring to be such, do not suppose for one moment that this retemplating of your thinking is going to occur in just a few years. I naïvely believed, when I was first called to this work, that it would not take so long, forgetting that I also had to be radically mentally reconstructed. You cannot change a worldview in a human mind overnight. It takes a long time! In fact, bringing humanity to where the Remnant currently is has already taken thousands of years!

Part of the problem (and that problem is enormous) is that Bible-believers of every stripe and colour have, by and large, either refused, or not understood the importance of, getting back to the very roots of our emunah (faith) which is to be found in Genesis. Most people are either glued to Torah (messianics) or Paul (evangelicals) as self-contained universes. These they have not only separated from each other but also from Genesis, and in particular, from the world of the ante-diluvian (pre-flood) patriarchs. Most think that that was not only so long ago as to be irrelevent but to have been even more primitive than the Mosaic era. They could not be more seriously wrong.

My passion has always been among the ancients who knew far more about the New Covenant than the Israelites ever did. The two are fare more alike than most Christians and Messianics could ever dream.

"God's (Elohim's) Edenic vision began with His announcement that humankind was His image. Yahweh had divine sons; He would also have a human family. Genesis tells told us that God (Elohim) had a Divine Council of imagers who represented His authority (toqef) in the unseen realm and participated in His rule. It also showed us that God (Elohim) planned a mirror-Council on earth, this time composed of human imagers. These two family-administrations were together in His presence. Heaven had come to earth at Eden. Humanity was charged with extending the earthly presence and rule of God (Elohim) throughout the whole earth. God (Elohim) wanted to live and rule with all His children in His new creation.

"Genesis 3-11 makes it clear that humanity failed miserably. Free will in the hands of imperfect beings comes with that risk. But the incident at Babel, foolish and self-willed as it was, shows that there is an Edenic yearning in the human heart, a desire for utopia and a sense of divine presence. But God (Elohim) would not trade His own version of Eden for humanity's. He punished the nations with disinheritance. He would create a new people as His own portion. That inheritance was begun in covenant with Abraham and passed on through his family.

"God (Elohim) delivered that family from bondage under Moses. Egypt and its gods were defeated. What was corrupted in Eden and counterfeited in the days of the flood and Babel was quickened to life on the other side of the waters of chaos (Yam Suf = 'Red Sea')" [4].

The Restoration of Messianic Israel is the restoration of this original Divine Family Government by and for Imagers of Yahweh. Imaging occurs through abandoning false worldly patterns and enthusisastically embracing divine tavnith. All the spiritual battles throughout history are about this. Either you get imaged in the way of the world - as represented by the rebellions at Sinai (worship of the Golden Calf, Egyptian Apis worship) and Shittim (worship of Baal-peor and Ashtoreth) or you worship Yahweh-Elohim the ancient way! And do not be deceived - just as the Midianites had assimilated Yahweh-worship into their paganism, so modern Christianity and Messianic Judaism have assimilated these very same gods into their religions too. All of that has to die and it has to die before any Jordan crossing, before any encounters with the Jericho Strongman.

There are no messianics, protestants, pentecostals, charismatics, methodists, adventists, mormons, witnesses, lutherans, independents, catholics, copts, marionites, eastern orthodox, calvinists, reformed, or any other man-made hybrid on the West Bank of the spiritual Jordan and they will be wholly incapable of exercising the kind of emunah (faith) in purity required of a Jericho conquest. Impossible! They cannot possibly take this land but must remain on the East Bank! And any attempt to cross the Jordan without the Ark of the Covenant before him will either cause him to drown or be turned back. There is no back door into the Remnant - you either overcome or you perish. And until the 'hot potatoes' of the Divine Council become, first, comfortable, and them consumed with simcha (joy), they will by no means come up to the Remnant. I guarantee it. And this is just the beginning.

Up until now we have been playing with the matchbox version of the true faith. All the pompous noise of groups arising here and there and making bold claims will be silenced because unless they repent they will perish in a modern Shittim. Last year, which we called 'The Great 2016 Reset' (because of the Yovel or Jubilee Year), which followed on from 'The Great 2015 Dedication', is but a preface to the Great 2017 Collapse - and I am not necessarily talking about economic collapse ow world war. The collapse I am talking about is all Egyptian- and Midianite-tainted Christianity and Messianism. I hope to talk more about that with you tomorrow.

Endnotes

[1] See Dr.Lennart Möller, The Exodus Case: New Discoveries of the Historical Exodus, 4th Extended Edition, (Scandinavia Publishing House, Copenhagen, Denmark: 2012)
[2] Karel van der Toorn, Family Religion in Babylonia, Ugarit, and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life (E.J.Brill, Leiden, Netherlands: 1996), p.283. This book deals with the religious practices of the family in the ancient Babylonian, Syrian, and Israelite civilisations. On the basis of a wealth of documents from both the private and the literary realm, the book gives an exhaustive description and analysis of the rites of the ancestor cult and the devotion to local gods. The author demonstrates the rôle of these two aspects of family religion in the identity construction of its followers. The section dealing with Israel pays particular attention to the relationship between family religion and state religion. The emergence of the state religion under King Saul marked the beginning of a competition between civil and private religion. Though the two had great influence upon each other, the tension between them was never resolved. A study of their interaction proves to be a key for the understanding of the development of Israelite religion during the monarchic period. The book is of particular importance to biblical scholars, Assyriologists, and all those interested in the history of ancient Near Eastern religion.
[3] Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press, Bellingham, WA: 2015), p.155
[4] Michael S. Heiser, Ibid, p.155 - author's comments in parentheses

Comments From Readers

[1] "I thought it was good you pointed out again that you can't just mimmic things from Scripture and expect Yahweh to do your will. It'is important to remember that (and many need to hear it). Otherwise I was thinking about Moses (and Israel's) open prison - how Elohim uses that and Midian influences possibly still in us - the need for cleaning and how big the rift will become. It's a sobering picture - how the Midianites (though Jethro's influence) played a part in influencing or helping Israel, yet how they also went so far and the judgment that came on them" (DP, South Africa, 28 April 2017)