The Purge Must Come

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AUDIO VERSION of The Purge Must Come

Last week in my nation of South Africa, there were three days of prayer and fasting, as a number of prophets in the nation had received warnings and dreams about further unrest breaking out. So, I was walking around my neighborhood, praying a lot in tongues and with my understanding, and then suddenly in the middle of praying in tongues, I burst out in a statement, “The purge must come, the purge must come, the purge must come!” And as I said it, I realized it was the Holy Spirit speaking. And I was given a picture of somebody vomiting and dispelling substance from the stomach. And I was reminded of the message to the church of Laodicea in Revelation 3. There it speaks about the church being lukewarm; not hot nor cold, and because of the lukewarmness (which denotes mixture), the Lord says He will spew them out of His mouth. Spew is a very polite translation, the actual original Greek says ‘vomit, violently project and expel from the mouth’. The Holy Spirit pointed out to me that not only was the message about South Africa, but for the whole Church of Jesus Christ, and that the seven letters to the seven churches were written to all churches existing at the same time; in the same dispensation (in the central Middle East). So, seven churches represent the whole church, and in one part of the church, there is something present that is poisoning the rest of the Body and it must be purged.

So, the Lord was saying to me that the purge in South Africa must come. But He was also saying to me that the judgment begins first in the Body of Christ – and in the Body of Christ, the purge must come. And He referred me to Malachi 3. It says, the Lord, whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple, but He will come as a Refiner’s Fire and Fuller’s Soap, and He will purify the sons of Levi. And, you know, we as the Church of Jesus Christ call for the Lord to come and pour out His glory; to come and manifest Himself in the midst of us, but the Word of God warns us that when His messenger comes, it will be as refining fire. And further down in Malachi 3, it says, ‘I will be a swift witness against the adulterer, the sorcerer…’ and it lists a whole lot of different people. That term ‘witness against’ is a legal term. This takes place in a court of law, so we know that there is a court case going on over the Body. We are in the dock and the purge must come. He says that He will purge them.

I looked up the etymology of the word ‘purge’ in English; it comes from the old word purgen, which means ‘to clear of charge or suspicion’ and the root of that is the word purger, meaning ‘to wash, to clean, to refine, to purify, especially in reference to the body’! To purge is ‘to free from what is unnecessary, to remove, to clear away’. By the 14th century, the word ‘purge’ meant ‘to cleanse from sin and moral defilement, to purify’ and medicinally, ‘purge’ means ‘to cleanse the body by laxative, diuretic or emetic (which is something that makes you vomit), to be rid of objectionable elements or members’. When the word purge is used as a noun, which is the way the Holy Spirit used it when He said “the purge must come”, a purge is ‘the act of purging, the removal of persons deemed undesirable’. And the earliest sense of the word in English was ‘interrogation in a legal court’.

Remember in Malachi 3, Jesus Himself said He will be a swift witness AGAINST – in other words, He will be a witness for the prosecution. We are used to Jesus being our Advocate and acting on our behalf in legal cases, and there’s a whole movement at the moment who take matters to the Courts of Heaven for intervention. But in Malachi 3, it speaks about Jesus being a witness against, a witness for the prosecution. This is a sobering thought.

Now, the word spew also means ‘vomit’ and vomit means to spew forth. In Revelation 3:14, this is a message to the church, to the ecclesia, the called out ones, but it seems that although they’ve been called out, they are straddling the fence, they are lukewarm. They’ve got one foot on the hot side and one foot on the cold side. And it’s very interesting to look at the letters to the seven churches, and see who is described is giving the message. We find in the case of the Church of Laodicea, it is ‘the True Witness’ who speaks to them. Once again, the atmosphere of a legal proceeding is alluded to.

So, let’s go back to Malachi 3, ‘The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple’ and then it says He is ‘the Messenger of the Covenant. God has a covenant with his people. And of course, we are part of the New Covenant. And yet He’s coming to purge the church. In Malachi, 3:3, it says He will PURGE them as gold and silver. This word translated ‘purge’ in the Hebrew means ‘to clarify, to extract or to purify’. Think of purifying gold or silver, the extraction or the purging is of the dross, not of the gold. I know a jeweller and she showed me how she purifies gold or silver. She used a laser torch (in the olden days they would use a fire from underneath). The impure alloy melts in the crucible and the dross is bound to the gold or the silver ions. Beacause of the heat, the bond breaks and the dross is thrust away by the gold or silver particle. The dross, which is positively charged, has to attach to something, so it moves and attaches to the side of the crucible. So, you end up with all the dross exposed and attached to the vessel that is being used to refine the impure lump. And the pure metal is in the middle and that can be poured out. So, the act of purging expels dross – it expels that which is undesirable. In a sense, there is a filtering out of that which is harmful or impure or objectionable.

So, the Court of Heaven is in session and is issuing a judgment on the state of the Body. And it lists the things that ought to be judged against: sorcery (or in Greek, it’s pharmakeia), adultery (which is also idolatry, spiritual idolatry), liars, wrong treatment of workers, widows and the fatherless. And it sums it up by saying they have a lack of the fear of the Lord. So the first 15 verses of Malachi 3 describe how the Messenger of the covenant is going to deal with the wicked in the Body. And then finally, in verses 16 and 17, it starts to describe those who are faithful and fear the Lord. And it says a Book of Remembrance is written to record these faithful saints. So, by verse 18, there is a clear distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not. And remember that when the Bible was written, it wasn’t written in chapters, so where Malachi 4 begins, that was just a continuation of the text that is recorded as Malachi 3. Chapter 4:1 says that there is a day that comes that burns like an oven… now, we know that a refining fire is like an oven, in this case the oven is a crucible to remove the dross or the undesirable object from the whole. The proud and the wicked will be like stubble but for those who fear God, the Son of righteousness arises with healing in His wings.

So we see that when the Messenger of the Covenant comes, there is a sifting, a separation. There is an exposure. And the marking of the objectionable and disposal of it. And those who fear God are appointed healing and release. In a crucible, once the dross has been made manifest and separated and purged out of the midst of the metal, the molten metal moves on and leaves the crucible and the dross is cast away.

You can see the purge in action by Josiah, the Righteous King, in 2 Chronicles 54:3,4,5; he dealt with all idolatrous priests and idolatry. And it says that he purged the city – in this case the word translated ‘purged’ is tohel, which means ‘to cleanse or to purge’.

In Psalm 65, it says, ‘as for our transgressions, You will purge them away’. The Spirit of holiness purges; brings to the surface and removes that which is undesirable and the word for ‘purge’ in Psalm 65 is kafar, which means to ‘cancel, to cleanse or to cover. When I was walking around the block praying for the nation, I had been praying for the Lord to cover the nation under his wings, I did not realize that what I was praying for, in a sense, was for the purging to take place. And that is exactly when the Holy Spirit spoke and said ‘The purge must come’, because that which is harmful, impure, objectionable must be expelled. Purging exposes and removes the wicked and the impure. In Isaiah 1:21, the word says, ‘The faithful city has become a harlot, silver has become dross’. When I looked up the word translated ‘dross’, it comes from a root word, which means ‘backslider’. So, we see that when we who are the city of the Lord are put before the Courts of Heaven, we appear as a harlot because fot he impurity in our midst – because of the cross that is present. That which is harmful, impure or objectionable in the city are those who are backslidden. The Lord says He will purge the dross and remove the tin – tin is an alloy; it’s a pure metal bonded to something else. In other words, mixture… In other words, Laodeceia.

Isaiah 1:28 decrees that the destruction of transgressors and sinners shall be together, and those who forsake the Lord shall be ‘consumed’, which is the Hebrew word ‘kalah’, meaning ‘to perish, to make clean, to exterminate’. I did a whole study on where this word ‘purge’ appears in the Word because I wanted to get a full understanding of what God was saying when He said, “The purge must come”. In Ezekiel 20:38, it says, ‘I will purge from among you the rebels and those who transgress against Me’. To transgress is to cross the line, when God sets up a standard or boundary line within which His people must live and behave. If you transgress, you step over the line and you start functioning outside the boundaries of what God has said. And we know from Malachi 3, adultery and sorcery and lying are all transgressions, because they are outside the boundary line of pure living that God has set for His holy people who must live in holiness. In Ezek 20:39, He says a very interesting thing, the reason He’s purging and expelling the rebels and the transgressors is so that they will no more pollute and prostitute His holy name. You remember, Jesus said, “Not all who say to Me, Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven”. And then there’s actually an instance recorded where Jesus tells of those who say, “Lord, Lord, we’ve cast out demons in Your Name, and You taught in our streets”. And He says, “Get away from Me, I never knew you”. That is a description of purging, that is a description of expelling the rebels and the transgressors and the backsliders.

In Daniel, where it is describing the state of affairs when the Antichrist is doing his thing, it speaks about the wise who will shine like stars and lead many to righteousness. And then in verse 35, it says, ‘and some of those with understanding shall fall, to try and to purge and to make them white’, so we see that the purging is part of God’s dealing with the Body of Christ. Bring them to a place of purity. You know, God doesn’t measure numbers as success. We, as the modern church are always counting numbers, how many members, how many subscribers? But God would rather have a smaller number and a greater purity, and when the purge comes, that’s exactly what He ends up with. He ends up with a pure remnant, having expelled and purged the backsliders, the lukewarm, the rebels and the transgressors.

When John the Baptist was doing his preparatory ministry, preparing the way for the coming of Jesus, he said to them that there was coming One after him (we find this in Matthew 3:12) whose winnowing fan is in His hand and He will thoroughly PURGE his threshing floor. What happens at the threshing floor? There is a separation of grain from chaff. I’ve shared before, how all the chaff is of the same DNA as the grain having come from the same plant. They share the same parentage, but by the time of harvest, there’s no spiritual weight left in the chaff; it’s dried up, it’s light, and the act of winnowing separates the chaff. The grain, which has the fullness of nourishment, is heavier and it falls to the ground in the winnowing and the wind separates the lightweight chaff from the grain. Grain is stored in the storehouse and the chaff is destroyed because the Husbandman has no more use for it. So, the winnowing with the winnowing fan and the purging of the threshing floor is first and foremost to produce a tithe company of grain which is stored in the storehouse. And the chaff having been separated away through the purging at the threshing floor is cast into the fire.

The Holy Spirit led me into more detail on the subject of the purge, and He showed me that there are two waves of purging. First, there is the purging at the time of harvest of the tares out of the wheat fields. We find this in Matthew 3:13. At harvest time, He says to the reapers, ‘Gather first the tares, bind them in bundles to burn them, and then gather the wheat into My barn’.

So first of all, the whole harvest field is purged of the tares. The tares are the counterfeit wheat. And the interesting thing about wheat and tares is that time of harvest, when the grain is ripe, it’s very easy to distinguish the tares from the wheat because when wheat grains are mature, the heavy head of the wheat hangs down, depicting humility. In contrast, when tare heads are mature, they stand stiff and upright, carrying lightweight black seeds. So, if you cast your eye over a harvest field, the tares would stick out like sore thumbs and it would be easy for the reapers to gather the tares into bundles, bind them and cast them into the fire.

The tare is a completely different DNA from the wheat and in the story in Matthew 13 that Jesus tells, He explains that the tares are sons of the evil one. So, they are the counterfeit wheat. Now, further down in Matthew 13, the disciples asked Jesus to explain to them about the tares because they didn’t really get the whole picture. And Jesus said. In Matthew, 13:41, ‘the Son of Man will send for His angels and they will gather out of His kingdom, all things that offend and them that do iniquity and cast them into a furnace of fire, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth’. Now, this very parable very clearly nullifies the concept that Jesus is coming to whisk His bride out of here and leave the lukewarm and the not ready ones behind, because we find that in Matthew 13:14, He clearly says:.

‘As therefore the tares are gathered and burned in the fire; so shall it be in the end of this world. Mat 13:41  The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; Mat 13:42  And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Mat 13:43  Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Who hath ears to hear, let him hear. ‘

First the stumbling blocks are removed or purged! Now, that word ‘offend’ means ‘a snare, a trap, a stumbling block’. So the angels are gathering out of the kingdom, out of the harvest field, all those that are stumbling blocks; every cause of offence which have been planted in among the believers as a trap; to cause a snare, to cause the saints to stumble. So we see here an exact description of a purge that must come; exactly what happens in a crucible containing impure gold or silver. When the dross is exposed, it is like the tare heads sticking up. When you can discern the dross as being separate from the gold or silver, you know that the pure metal is ready for the next step of the process. Dross comes from another source as another DNA, another father. And it is purged, it is removed because it is undesirable, objectionable and harmful! It is those who are stumbling blocks, those who are undesirable who are removed FIRST out of the kingdom and then what is left in the harvest field (in the kingdom) is a field of wheat, the righteous. Then it is time for the next step of the process, the true wheat are moved on to the threshing floor for the next purging.

Remember, the tares are removed while they are still planted in the fields. So what is left behind where they stood is stubble – Malachi 4:1 says the wicked shall be as stubble. That is describing the tares; the counterfeit. Satan masquerades as an angel of righteousness. How much more will his workers masquerade as messengers of righteousness? And the first purge must come to expose, to bundle together and to remove them from the kingdom. So, when the Holy Spirit said the purge must come, He’s really talking about the removal of the wicked, the removal of those who are sons of another father.

So there are two waves of purging:

1. the tares which are the counterfeit
2. the purging of the chaff, which is what is described in Laodicea concerning the lukewarm. One foot in the kingdom of darkness, one foot in the kingdom of light.

In Luke, 1:51. Mary sings and she quotes from the song of Hannah, and she says ‘He has shown the strength of His arm. He has scattered or winnowed the proud in the imagination of their hearts’. And this song in 1 Samuel 2 is really a prophetic song about the bringing forth of the manchild. Samuel, the bondslave manchild worshiped in the temple, and was lent to the Lord as long as he lived – that is a bondslave. When the manchild co0mpany take sits place in the temple, there was a purging in the house of God. In 1 Samuel, the sons of Eli were purged from the priesthood because they were wicked. And 1 Samuel 2:12 says that the sons of Eli did not know the Lord, yet they were functioning in the priesthood for years. They did not know the Lord. It actually says that they were sons of Belial. Belial is a nickname for the devil. So, they were wicked, they were part of the tare that had been sown in among the wheat. And they were functioning fully in the priesthood and recognized by the people as priests for a good long season. But once the manchild had become a bondslave and had been lent to the Lord as long as he lived (once Samuel was installed as a little boy – a manchild, in the temple) the purging of the tares takes place. Hophni and Phineas went out into battle against the Philistines bearing the ark of God and they were slaughtered. When the news got to their father, Eli and he heard that the ark had been captured, he fell over, dead. So there we have the purging of the tares, the sons of the wicked one, and then we have the purging of the chaff; Eli, who was lukewarm & allowed his sons to transgress and didn’t discipline them.

Within 1 Samuel1,2 & 3, there is both the purging of the tares and of the chaff – and what was left? …the precious grain, the manchild priesthood was in the storehouse. Samuel the manchild was the only priest left in the temple. Lent to the Lord as long as he lives, he is the manchild bond-slave company depicted, and he can shine in the kingdom of his Father. It says of Samuel that none of his words ever fell to the ground, in other words, the words that Samuel spoke were words given by God and they came to pass. He was God’s mouthpiece.

We also see a purging in the house of Nabal and Abigail. In 1 Samuel 25, Nabal is described as a son of Belial. So, in that house, after the purging took place, Abigail, the faithful intercessor, was left. Nabal, the tare, the son of Belial, was purged and removed and Abigail inherited the wealth of the wicked! The wealth of the wicked was stored up for the righteous.

Now, there’s one verse in the New Testament that mentions Belial, but it is only in the King James version that it is translated such. In 2 Corinthians 6. it’s speaking about being unequally yoked. In verse 15, it says, ‘What agreement has Christ with Belial?’ Belial is a nickname for the devil. That word agreement is the Greek word sumphonesus, which means ‘harmony’, and it comes from a root word, meaning ‘sound, as sounding together’, from the root meaning ‘union of tone’. In other words, it’s the same frequency, the same musical sound. And Paul is saying, you cannot be yoked together; gold and dross, silver and dross, you have no sumphonesus; you have no harmony, you have no agreement, you have no similar tone coming from your life.

What God does when He sends his angels into the harvest field to remove the tares; those who are masquerading as messengers of righteousness, is that He is purifying the sound that comes out of the kingdom. God is purifying the sound and the tone so that only that which is in harmony with Heaven will be heard in the next season. There has been such a cacophony of sound released out of prophetic circles in the church. And at the time of harvest, when it’s time for the precious grain, the precious manchild company to be placed in the storehouse, there has to be a removal of that which is releasing an impure sound. And yes, the sifting and the separation is a time of upheaval in the Kingdom because many have been following those ministries and not realizing that they are masquerading as messengers of righteousness. And God is sending out His angels, His reapers, to cut off the sound of the tares, to cut off the sound of the wicked, to cut off the sound of that which is releasing a counterfeit sound in the earth and claiming it comes from Heaven.

If the trumpet does not release a clear sound, the people of God will not know what to do. So the purge that must come. It’s going to be an uncomfortable time, it’s going to be a time of removal; a time of silencing. Remember when Elijah confronted the prophets of Baal, he was very much in the minority. But the sound which the minority, the pure remnant released had such a purity, that God answered with fire from heaven. Then the sound of the prophets of Baal who ate at jezebel’s table was completely cut off and only the voice of Elijah could be heard after that.

I want to just speak about Psalm 91 as I close; it is a description of the purge taking place. Ten thousand falling at your right hand, but it shall not come near you, only a spectator shall you be as you witness the reward, the wicked. The shadow of His wing, His kanaph, is the safe shadow of His marriage covenant. Hide there, remnant of God. Worship there, as Samuel did. God has decreed by his Spirit that the purge must come. He desires a pure remnant. He is sending out His angels into His harvest field and they are gathering the stumbling blocks, tying them in bundles, cutting them off and assigning them to the fire. May God give you depth of understanding and insight, confirm things He’s spoken to you before, and draw you closer and closer under the shadow of His wing.

Selah

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