KEYWORDS: lord, god, saul, david, kingdom, revolution

Problems

David Berg

—MOOctober 15, 1971NO.118—LTA

OUR SEPARATION FROM KING SAUL

Dear Children: Greetings in Jesus' Precious Name!

1. Please forgive the delay in answering some of your letters, but as you know, WE HAVE BEEN GOING THROUGH SOME MAJOR CHANGES RECENTLY WITH SOME MAJOR PUSHES ON GREAT NEW FRONTS such as Europe, New York, Canada, and the Northwest, and with the loss of some other old worn-out and very trying fronts, such as TSC, LA, etc., which has necessitated some major moves and shifts in personnel, and a general shakeup in leadership.

2. SO IF SOME OF YOU OTHER COLONIES HAVE FELT A LITTLE NEGLECTED, PLEASE FORGIVE US, but we have been deeply involved in advising and counselling with the parties and Colonies most affected by these major changes, with many lengthy conferences‚ discussions‚ etc. so we've gotten considerably behind on our mail. It's a good thing the Lord is taking care of you, because we certainly can't do a very good job of it. Thank the Lord for His ever faithful tender loving care!

3. BESIDES, I REALLY SHOULDN'T GET TOO INVOLVED IN TENDING TABLES, so that I can keep my hotline to Heaven open for your sake, with more time and prayer and seeking His Word for you. However, as the Lord showed me some time ago when I felt I was becoming too involved in such table-tending of your individual problems. He reminded me that King David had to be not only a prophet, but also an administrator of the affairs of state of God's Kingdom. So here I am at your service!

4. I hope we will be able to enclose with this Letter, or perhaps it's already been sent to you, a copy of some remarkable prophecies regarding the present break with King Saul and other recent events which were actually received from the Lord over two years ago while on the Mount in Laurentide. I hope these prophecies will thrill and encourage you with the Lord's faithfulness in forewarning us of coming events‚ as they have us. Isn't He wonderful and good to us!

5. WE HAVE ALL KNOWN THIS WAS COMING FOR A LONG TIME AND THE LORD HAS BEEN TRYING TO PREPARE US FOR IT‚ even to the point of practical instructions in training, equipping and assigning teams, and their destinations when the time came. Even though we did not heed this instruction too well and were not as prepared as we should have been, thank the Lord that we were as ready as we were. We had already moved most of our major operations from TSC to Dallas and were evacuating personnel there as fast as possible, when our ex-King's angry eviction notice arrived! LA had also done the same, although Saul's treatment was so harsh and abrupt they almost didn't get their personal belongings! But praise the Lord, God is faithful, and they finally did, with Deb's intercession!

6. THE LORD CERTAINLY KNEW WHAT WAS COMING‚ and I felt that this was probably going to be it when we heard about all the new big places He had opened up for us in the Northwest, including a new campground with many more buildings and facilities than the old one we have just forsaken. The Lord seldom ever takes anything from you, but what He gives you something better in its place! He had these new places all ready for us just in time and we were already moving busloads of disciples to them when Saul tossed his three javelins, all of which missed! Praise the Lord!

7. HE WAS UNABLE TO KILL US OR STOP US, or hardly even slow us down! God's work is gonna keep right on rolling, and now it's gonna roll right on over him and leave him flat behind. In fact‚ his first TV show without us after our departure from his Kingdom was so flat it was absolutely dead. All the life and light had gone out of it and it sounded like a sepulchral voice from an empty tomb! In fact, between him and the Witch‚ they sounded like they were trying to resurrect Samuel without enough power to kill a flea like me, as David observed in 1Samuel 24:14!

8. ALL THEY MANAGED TO CONJURE UP was a few old former choir members, a little kids' choir from a so-called Christian school, some of his own conniving Benjamites, and a few pictures of ghosts of by-gone ministries of by-gone days, so long gone that they actually stank by comparison with the suddenly vanished‚ vibrant, joyful, exuberant, inspiring power-packed, lively, exploding Children of God! Even the excitement was gone out of his own voice and he sounded like a voice from the grave! Even the Witch's usually lively hawking of her wares had turned into a dead lifeless barking about products so stale they turned your stomach! The whole thing was such an obvious farce, empty, dead, and downright distasteful compared to the glowing, living, reality of the Children of God of the week before that it must surely have been a shock to his audience, particularly those of them who loved us!—And without a word of explanation of why we were gone!

HOW TO ANSWER THE ACCUSATION, "YOU DON'T PREACH REPENTANCE OR THE CROSS."

9. After all these dead as a doornail preliminaries, Saul finally did make a short talk in which you could begin to hear a little inspiration, like the voice of Satan and the weaving of the Serpent, as he made a few indirect allusions to the Jesus Revolution and how he was going to worm his way out of it‚ and why he was going to get off the bandwagon, by the following statement. "I've noticed one outstanding lack in the message of the so-called Jesus Revolution that is sweeping the country. THEY DON'T PREACH THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: REPENTANCE AND THE CROSS of Christ! So I've begun to change my mind about them. It's not the revival we were all hoping for!"

10. This is one of the most ridiculous sour grapes excuses I ever heard of! If there's anything we preach, it's repentance, only, since that's a worn-out, old–fashioned, churchy, theological word which would turn most people off today, and certainly the youth of today, we use a word which means exactly the same thing from the original Greek meaning. "Revolution!" As we explained to some of you not long ago, the Biblical word "repeat" comes from the Greek word "metanoia" which means a complete change of mind, or a total turning around and going in the opposite direction, or to "revolute"—so REPENTANCE IS A REVOLUTION!

REVOLUTION IS REPENTANCE!

11. THIS MEANING IS EVEN MORE CLEARLY BROUGHT OUT IN MECHANICS, where they talk about RPM's or so many revolutions per minute, the number of times your motor turns around every minute of various speeds, on an average from the three to four thousand while driving! It's funny, isn't it, that the SYSTEM DOESN'T MIND HAVING THOUSANDS OF REVOLUTIONS EVERY MINUTE IN ITS MOTORS, BUT IT DOESN'T EVEN WANT ONE IN ITS SOCIETY. It doesn't want its System to move, turn around, change its direction, or revolute even once in a century!

12. REVOLUTIONS IN AN ENGINE MEAN TREMENDOUS POWER, BUT SOCIETY ITSELF RESISTS REVOLUTIONS of the Spirit, much less political, social‚ or economic revolutions. The rulers of the System just don't want change. They like the status quo, which means they like a dead engine which isn't moving, isn't changing, has no power, and therefore, goes nowhere and makes no progress! Therefore, every wordly System of man's making finally comes to a standstill!

13. BECAUSE IF YOU DON'T REPENT, OR TURN AROUND, OR REVOLUTE, OR REVOLT, OR HAVE A REVOLUTION, A society eventually becomes stationary, static, stagnant, and stinks, because it's dead! The body politic dies, corrupts, decays until God has to send a young, livelier‚ more moving society along to bury it because it encumbereth the ground and endangers the health of the world! It stinks so bad even God can't stand it anymore, so He sends along a revolution to bury it!

14. SO GOD'S LAST MESSAGE TO EVERY DYING CIVILISATION, EVERY DRYING NATION, every diseased culture every sick society, is REPENT OR PERISH! (Lk.13:5) Change or Die! Turn Around and go the other direction and start moving out of the hellhole of a pit you're in, or you're going to be buried in the mire! Revolute and start going toward Heaven, or you're going to land in Hell! Have a REVOLUTION, OR I'M GOING TO HAVE TO BURY YOU so you won't contaminate the rest of the world!

15. THIS IS WHY EVERY PROPHET OF GOD FROM THE BEGINNING UNTIL NOW, including Jesus Himself, were always revolutionaries of the Spirit and PREACHED, FIRST, LAST‚ AND ALWAYS TO THEIR DYING SYSTEM "REPENT!" (Mk.1:15) or Turn Around and go the other direction! Revolute! or Revolt!—Or in other words‚ HAVE A REVOLUTION, OR DIE!—Like your engine does when it stops revoluting and won't go anymore. When people stop going, they die! Slow motion, or no motion‚ brings on death!

16. SO WHEN JESUS PREACHED REPENTANCE‚ HE WAS LITERALLY PREACHING SPIRITUAL REVOLUTION, which is why they killed Him. The System doesn't want to change. It likes things the way they are—their way, not God's way. So that every System of man which refuses to go God's way, God eventually has to junk, just like you did that old junker of yours when it gasped its last gasp and refused to turn over anymore. It would no longer revolute—no more revolutions, no more RPMs, dead!

17. SO, TO SAY WE DON'T PREACH REPENTANCE, JUST BECAUSE WE PREFER TO USE THE WORD REVOLUTION, which is far more picturesque popular, and understandable is to split theological hairs over semantics!—And if you don't like the word REVOLUTION INSTEAD OF REPENTANCE, it's probably because you yourself don't want to repent or change, or revolute, or revolt, from the dying System of worldly man. And you're looking fro an excuse based on a flimsy technically of definitions!

THE CROSS WE PREACH!

18. AND TO SAY WE DON'T PREACH THE CROSS IS THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR! WE PREACH THE CROSS MORE THAN ANYBODY! Jesus said, "If any man would come after Me‚ let him deny himself and take up his cross, and follow Me; for he that saveth his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for My sake and the Gospel's the same shall save it!" Or, if you want to follow Jesus one hundred percent, you've got to forsake all and preach the Gospel, or you can't be His Disciple! That's preaching more Cross, Brother, than most Christians or churches! That's doing it!

SAUL'S FUTILE ATTACK ON DAVID AND HIS MEN—OUR SCRIPTURAL PATTERN!

19. SO SPEAKING OF PROBLEMS, THAT'S SAUL'S WHOLE PROBLEM RIGHT THERE! He didn't mind us doing it‚ but he didn't want to have to do it himself?—And when we asked him simply, why not, his hypocrisy was exposed, and he got mad and threw us out, and has apparently sicced the parents and other enemies on us to try to get himself off the hook and finish us off! The Scribes and Pharisees always have to try to do you in to save themselves, and the JUDASES ALWAYS HAVE TO SELL YOU OUT TO TRY TO SAVE THEIR OWN NECKS when things get too hot for them. The Systemites always have to kill its free and easy riders because they expose their own lack of freedom!

20. So if you think you have problems, pity poor Saul! He's dead, and only remains to be buried! He now has a kingdom with no people!—And who wants to be a king of an empty kingdom! He has rejected the word of the Lord, so the Lord has rejected him from being King over Israel—God's Children! But now his kingdom shall not continue, for the Lord hath sought Him a man after His own heart, and the Lord hath commanded him to be captain over His people (1Sam.13:14; 15:26)

21. So Saul is very wroth because they have ascribed unto David tens of thousands, and to him only thousands—so what can we move have but the Kingdom? Therefore is the Spirit of the Lord departed from him and an evil spirit from God come upon him, and he is undoubtedly doomed to a disastrous fate—for the Lord is now with David and his men and departed from Saul (1Sam.18:8-12). Therefore in his jealous rage he is determined to slay David and his men if he can. Therefore David and his men fled from both Jerusalem and the Cave of Adullam in the wilderness (1Sam.21:10)

22. His accusations were that you had all conspired against him and made a league with the son of Jesse, and nobody was sorry for poor Saul! (1Sam.22:8). So therefore, he is probably endeavouring at this moment to slay the 85 or 90 priests of the Lord he ordained‚ because their hand also is with David‚ by withdrawing their licenses and notifying their draft boards (1Sam.22:17). He had left off from pursuing after David and his men for awhile, because the Philistines were putting the pressure on him (1Sam.23:27,28), but he finally decided to solve his own problem by listening to the words of those that conspire against David (1Sam.24:9), and letting them stir him up against us to drive us out of the inheritance of the Lord which he has now done. (1Sam.26:19)

23. Therefore, we have speedily escaped into the land of the Philistines (1Sam.27:1), where we shall no doubt remain until the Lord destroys him by the hand of the Philistine System itself, or his own hand, as he laments that he has played the fool and erred exceedingly (1Sam.26:21-24; 31:1-4). And I wouldn't be surprised but what the Philistines may strip him of everything that he has and even take vengeance on some of his own (31:7–10) and possibly some day even return the kingdom to us (2Sam.2). Meanwhile they will probably be hosting us in their cities (1Sam.27:2-7). And Saul will have no one left to consult but his Witch and hired hands, as God predicts his doom! (Ch.28)

24. The story of our relationship with Saul has remarkably paralleled the scripture and God's prediction in 1957, that it would be "As David with Saul"! and I wouldn't be surprised if the rest comes to pass, too, from all the Lord has told us. According to the Scriptural parallel‚ even the System of the enemy eventually befriended David and his men more than Saul, and finally took Saul's kingdom away from him, and let David have it.

25. But even then, there was still long war between the remaining house of Saul and the house of David: but David waxed stronger and stronger, and the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker‚ until David's kingdom was finally fully established (2Sam.3:1). In fact‚ he had to reign in Hebron only over Southern Judah for seven-and-a-half years before Saul's followers finally invited him to take over the whole kingdom and move to Jerusalem (2Sam.5:1-5). It was then that he brought back the Ark of the Lord, dancing before it, and God promised a day when they would move no move! (Ch.6 & 7:10.)

26. When Saul turned you out of his gates, he turned Jesus out of his kingdom!—Because the Lord Himself says that, "In as much as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto Me"! (Mt.25:40) So he didn't just kick us out: He threw Jesus out, too! So I don't doubt that it won't be long before Jesus throws him out, for "with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again" (Lk.6:38), and "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap"! (Gal.6:7) It was only a little over a year after Saul drove David and his men out of the kingdom, that Saul himself was dead (1Sam.27:7)

27. Therefore, "Fret not thyself because of evil-doers...the meek shall inherit the earth!" (Ps.37:1; Mt.5:5) Read the whole Psalm 37, one of our favourites. It will encourage you. Every man shall be rewarded accordingly to his works! GOD GETS HIS GREATEST VICTORIES OUT OF SEEMING DEFEAT! It surely must have looked like a defeat when David and his men were driven totally out of the kingdom by their arch enemy Saul, but actually it was the beginning of the victory which would give David the kingdom. As long as David and his men were in the kingdom. God had to bless Saul for their sakes. He had to get them out of the kingdom in order that He could destroy Saul and give it back to David!

ATTACKS OTHER ENEMIES "THEY CAN'T STOP OUR RAIN!"

28. IN OTHER RECENT ATTACKS OF THE ENEMY‚ WE HAVE SEEN HOW THAT GOD CAN EVEN CAUSE THE WRATH OF MAN TO PRAISE HIM! (Ps.76:10) These ridiculous parents who have been attacking us of late have even been stupid enough to call themselves "The Parents Committee to Free Our Children From the Children of God", making it obvious that they have chosen is libelous, insinuating that we are holding you prisoners. Even our lawyers had to laugh when they saw the slanderous statements which these foolish parents were making to the Press‚ it was such a clearcut case of libel. So, since they are obviously not brethren, but anti-Christ‚ and not under the protection of I Corinthians 6, we are suing them for a million dollars in damages for the vicious lies they've been spreading about us! So please pray for our lawyers that the Lord will have His Way. Just think of how many of you that could send around the world with the Gospel!

29. SO, INSTEAD OF STOPPING US WITH THEIR FOOLISHNESS, THEY MAY EVEN BE HELPING US‚ and have already brought more publicity to God's Children and their ministry! In fact, while praying about their attacks the other morning, the Lord gave us one of the most supernatural, miraculous and glorious prophecies about our future that we have ever received! It will absolutely thrill you, as well as shock you beyond measure and almost send you into orbit!

30. We asked the Lord for a name for it, and because of the concluding, simple but powerful little illustration which the Lord uses, we have called it "THEY CAN'T STOP OUR RAIN"!—PROPHECY. As the hour–and-a-half prophecy concluded, the Lord sent a gentle rain—and suddenly in vision I saw a handful of little angry people holding up their hands against Heaven trying to stop it! And the words came to me, "They can no more stop us than they can stop the rain"!—God's Latter Rain!

31. Hallelujah? So don't worry about these little nothings that move at His behest! God is in control and they can do nothing without His permission‚ and all things that He lets them do will work together eventually for our good, so they are only hurting themselves and helping us! Give the Devil enough rope and he'll hang himself! It's like that story about Pat treeing the skunk: "Leave him alone and he'll sink himself to death!" The Devil is a real stinker! And which stinks worse—the skunk or his enemies? He himself always gets the worst end of the deal! He always stinks!

32. So "Stand back and see Me fight‚ saith the Lord; for this is not thy battle‚ but MineĀ…. Vengeance is Mine, I will repay!" The Lord can do a better job of it than anybody. Just put your enemies in the hands of God and see what happens. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes! The last man who tried to organise parents against us lost his wife and children and landed in an insane asylum! "Touch not the Lord's anointed, and do His prophets no harm; for he that toucheth you, toucheth the apple of Mine eye!" (Ps.105:15; Deut.32:10) They're sticking their finger in God's eye, so they better look out! Just wait and see what happens, and you'll see what He means! Woe to this nation!

33. And as for Governor Reagan allowing his office to fight us, just "wait'll he shakes his head!" It'll probably fall off, and he'll lose the next election, and maybe worse. "Beware lest thou be found to fight against God!" God will reprove kings for our sakes! (Acts 5:39) "THEY CAN'T STOP OUR RAIN!"