As I sought the Lord and tried to understand what is happening at this moment in history, I came away with two words – preparation and graduation. 

All will be offered preparation, but not all will graduate. One aspect of this time of preparation will be our willingness to lay aside the over-confident attitudes we have adopted regarding our understanding of how God has laid out the fulfillment of His will in the future.  The Lord is adjusting the two bookends of our understanding of what will take place at the end of time.

For example, some have been led to believe that just when life on Earth becomes unbearable and a time of great tribulation begins, the Church will be ejected from that turmoil just when we are needed the most. That understanding was nowhere in Church history until it appeared in the 1800s, yet in some camps, it has become part of the Gospel message. 

Others have been led to believe the full measure of the end times happened in 70 AD at the fall of Jerusalem. While we can learn valuable points of the history of what took place at that time, not all God has ordained for future judgment took place at that time. A misdirected understanding of that event has become so absolute in the minds of some that it has altered even their understanding of the future judgments of God and what will happen in the cosmos. Those who hold an extreme version of what happened in 70 AD have been used to present a misguided image of God’s grace thinking that all judgment is behind us, not before us. That has created confusion in the Church and led some to believe all will be saved without the engagement of their will since everything has been decided for us in the past. 

The time of preparation will dismantle misunderstandings that have been wrapped in deceptions that tell us there exists some secret revelation about God and His Kingdom. We are told these secrets have remained hidden for thousands of years outside the Scriptural record and the history of the Church – something that previous generations of faith somehow missed until now. The preparation will appear to many to be a backward step, not a move into the future. Instead of a backward step, our preparation will return us to the earliest interpretations of spiritual reality – a reality that will be in direct conflict with current misunderstandings not fully vetted by Scripture and Church history.

The graduation that takes place for those who have been prepared will not be like the graduation ceremonies we see in the world when promotion to the next level of education happens or when someone is promoted to a new position at work. It will a graduation in the opposite direction. This graduation will be a promotion that moves a person in a different direction – to a deeper place outside the spotlight of human applause and congratulations. It will be a graduation that takes a person into the depths of the Lord’s mind. This is where He will be able to entrust His graduated ones with a deeper understanding of what is happening in the world and how the calling of the Church is to function expanding the influence of the Lord among the nations of the world as a fulfillment of the Great Commission.

To be in attendance at God’s graduation ceremony will require that we lay down what we have determined as an absolute about how this life will unfold. It will also require that we allow the Spirit to help us reexamine our current level of understanding. The Lord will begin to remove some things from our plate of understanding in preparation to serve us a meal of a graduated understanding that may jolt our current comprehension and shake our existing relationships.