The End-Times Church & Jesus in the Flesh

The Always-Present One will wash away the filth from the women of Jerusalem. He will wash the bloodstains out of Jerusalem. He will cleanse Jerusalem with the spirit of fairness and the spirit of fire. As the Always-Present One did when Israel left Egypt, He will cover them with a cloud of smoke during the day. And, He will cover them with a bright flaming fire at night. These proofs will be over Mount Zion. They will be over every meeting of the people there. There will be a covering over every person. This covering will be a place of safety. It will protect the people from the heat of the sun. It will be a safe place to hide from the storm and rain (Isaiah 4:4-6).

The heat of the day and the storm and rain of the night are coming upon the earth, but God has made a provision for His people that will take them through the times of tribulation that lie ahead.

It is not merely coincidental that Isaiah prophesied that a future people would be led by a pillar of fire by night as the Israelites were. Like the Israelites of old, they will also be protected by a canopy of smoke by day.

The canopy and the pillar actually refer to the Manifest Presence of God. This is His prophetic word for the last-day Church; it is the promise of His Manifest Presence going with us. There can be no doubt that it is God’s intention and desire to find the remnant of people who will carry His Manifest Presence throughout the earth.

God’s Presence

Long ago, God used the prophets to speak to our ancestors many times and in many ways; but, during these last times, God used His Son to speak to us. God appointed him to inherit everything. Through him God made the universe. The Son is the shining brightness of God’s glory and the exact picture of God’s real being. The Son holds up the universe with his powerful word. After he had provided a cleansing from sin, he sat down at God’s right side in heaven (Hebrews 1:1-3).

The Lord is about to visit His temple. Malachi 3:1 says, “Suddenly, the Lord whom you people are looking for will come to His temple.” The Lord is about to come to His temple. He will come suddenly to us. He will walk among us in a real way. When these things take place, we will be able to understand and perceive clearly that God is among us.

There are basically two ways to look at the Presence of God. There is first of all His omnipresence—God is everywhere. We know that God is everywhere, whether we can sense Him or not. God fills the earth. Wherever you go, God will hear your prayer, because His omnipresence covers the earth.

But there is a more specific type of His Presence—His Manifest Presence. God’s Manifest Presence is revealed whenever He makes Himself real to you, personally. This takes place when He makes Himself real to you in your spirit and you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God has spoken to your heart. You know He has manifested Himself to you; you are experiencing His Manifest Presence.

God will so fill the Church with His Manifest Presence that He will become perceptible (i.e. tangible) to any or all of our five senses. God manifests Himself in healing. God manifests Himself in change. God manifests Himself in restoration. God manifests Himself in prophecy. Whenever God manifests Himself through any of our natural senses, there is always a visible demonstration that He is literally in the midst of His people.

We walk by faith, not by sight (see 2 Cor. 5:7), but it is not for our faith that God chooses to reveal Himself to us. It is rather in response to our faith that God manifests Himself. Our faith moves Him to transcend time and space and respond in the natural realm to our faith.

God has always delighted in manifesting Himself in a physical, tangible way to His people. His purpose from the very beginning has been to be a manifest God to His people. The entire purpose of redemption was to cleanse for Himself a people to whom He could reveal Himself and with whom He could live in a manifested way. God delights in flowing with and moving with His people.

The dictionary defines manifest as: “readily perceived by the senses; easily understood or recognized by the mind; obvious.” This is how God wants to make Himself known to us in these last days.

On the Day of Pentecost, God’s Presence was manifested with cloven tongues of fire and a rushing, mighty wind sweeping through the place in which the disciples were gathered. God’s Presence was so evident that they were able to get in touch with Him through their five senses. What exhilaration and what power energized them from within as they experienced the Manifest Presence of God! (See Acts 2:1-4; 14-38.) Their confidence and assurance in His Presence gave them the ability to preach with great boldness as the Holy Spirit moved upon them with power.

We find Peter and John and the rest of the disciples praying to the Lord for strength and ability in Acts 4:31: “And when they had prayed, the place where they had gathered was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak the word of God with boldness.” His Manifest Presence transforms mere mortal men, cowering before fleshly strongholds and threats, into mighty men of anointing and power.

We are moving into times when the Manifest Presence of God will be so needed and so great that it will overshadow any of the experiences of the early Church. In fact, the day is coming that we will not even look back at the early Church as a standard for the miraculous because the things that the Lord will be doing in the last-day Church will far exceed what happened in the early Church. Men and women of God will rise up with unprecedented boldness and declare God’s Word with great compassion and authority. His Manifest Presence will give them ability and confidence to declare sin to be sin as they witness the Lord Himself confirming their words to the world.

When Stephen was stoned, the Scriptures say that his face shone like that of an angel (see Acts 6:15-7:55). What was that shining but the Manifest Presence of God? Stephen gave over his spirit to the Lord for the sake of the Gospel with victory as God’s Presence ushered him into eternity. When Paul was thrown from his horse on the way to Damascus, the Scriptures say that the Word of the Lord came to him. To others it sounded like thunder, but to Paul it was the Manifest Presence of God as he fell before the Lord, repented of his sin, and became a life-long, sold-out disciple for the Lord Jesus Christ (see Acts 9:1-31).

In Acts 12:6, we see the account of Peter sleeping in chains between two guards. When the earth shook, the chains fell from him, and an angel of the Lord appeared to him and directed him out of the prison. (See Acts 12:7-11.)

In our day, we are beginning to see a continual fulfilling of Emmanuel—God with us. God has always desired to live and dwell and manifest Himself in the midst of His people. As He walked with Adam in the cool of the evening (see Gen. 3:8), God also wants to walk with us, so that we will become a people who will experience His Presence, His power, and His glory in a tangible way. The days directly ahead of us will require this. Periods of tribulation and hardship have always driven the people of God into His Presence, thus experiencing His power in mighty ways. Difficult times press God’s people into Him so that they, too, will experience His Manifest Presence.