THE DIVINE OIL AND ITS COMING OUTPOUR
By D. M. PANTON, B.A.
Our
Church Age, now rapidly closing, is separated from the Age of Antichrist by
three and a half years - the first three and a half years of the final seven;
an intervening, indeterminate epoch - a ‘no man's land’
- neither pure grace nor pure judgment, which is dominated by the two mightiest
Prophets the world has ever known. The
Church Age had its Pentecost. "And suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing
of a mighty wind, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to
speak with other tongues" (Acts 2: 2).
So the intervening epoch, after the
Church Age but before the Reign of Antichrist, has an identical descent of the Spirit. "I will pour out
my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy"
(Joel 2: 28). Linking the two together, Peter says - "This is that" (Acts 2: 16):
that is, they are identical in nature, but differ only in date. And it is exceedingly thrilling that one chapter in Zechariah
presents the whole drama, probably only a few years ahead, which will leave us
- whatever people of God are on earth -
no longer void of miracle and power.
THE LAMPSTAND
In
the background rises, massive and alone, one divine object:-
"A LAMPSTAND ALL OF GOLD" (Zech. 4: 2). It is the one object that fills the Day of
Grace, the catholic Church of Christ: not, as when
judgment dawns in the Apocalypse, seven isolated lampstands, individual churches
being judged for their works; but one massive golden Lampstand - the universal
Church in its indivisible unity. A "bowl upon the top of it" feeds the seven lamps
through seven pipes: that is, the Holy Spirit of God, having descended upon the
Church at Pentecost, remains upon it as a bowl of sacred oil, feeding all the
flames throughout the earth, which, together, are "the light of the world". "For in one
Spirit were we all baptized into one body, and were all
made to drink of one Spirit" (1 Cor.
12: 12).
A GOLDEN LAMPSTAND
The
one solid golden Lampstand here stands on the brink of the world’s chaos. The words of The Evangelical Christian, of
TWO OLIVE TREES
But
now in the immediate foreground rises a completely new object; the equally
God-endowed embodiment of the Holy Spirit, but in a new age:-
"Two OLIVE TREES", on either
side of the bowl. The New Testament
leaves us in no doubt at all who and what these are. "My two
witnesses," God says in the Revelation, "shall prophesy" three and a half years: "these are the, two olive trees standing before the Lord
of the earth" (Rev. 11: 4). That they are standing before the Lord of the
whole earth when Zechariah wrote, long after the rapture of Elijah, is alone
sufficient to reveal who the two Witnesses are - namely, the only two men thus
standing, then or now, before God, Enoch and Elijah, both rapt into the
presence of God in Heaven. These are the
second reservoir of oil. One olive tree
can contain not less than a thousand pounds of oil: so Oil-filled are these two
Sons of Oil that "they have the power to shut the
heaven, and power over the waters to turn them into blood, and to smite the
earth with every plague" (Rev. 11: 6)
- incomparably mightier miracles than any ever shown by any Prophets in the
world’s history.
THE HOLY SPIRIT
The
perplexed Prophet then challenges the Angel:- "What are these?" And the Angel reveals what we might have
guessed:- "This is the
word of the Lord" - what you have seen embodies, in pictorial
vision, what God is teaching; namely,- "Not by
might, nor by power, BUT BY MY SPIRIT saith the Lord of hosts."
The Bowl of Oil, which did not appear on
the Lampstand in the Temple, and which here both lights the Lamps and feeds the
flame, is the Holy Spirit as God’s omnipotence, working everything in and
through the Church in the Day of Grace; and, across the frontier in the new
age, the two mightiest Prophets in the history of the world contain and outpour
the power of God - again the Holy Spirit - no longer in grace, but in judgment.*
So the whole drama, the Angel says, is
to reveal the Holy Ghost as the dynamic of all good. An infidel, a Communist marked down by the
police, entered a Salvation Army meeting in
[*
The idea that the Olive Trees pour their oil into the Lampstand has no foundation in the passage, and would mean
that the whole Church is on earth with Enoch and Elijah throughout their three
and a half years - when as a matter of fact, church-standing will be gone. All that the passage states (see R.V.) is that
the Olive Trees pour forth oil
spontaneously.]
THE KINGDOM
So
therefore we are now shown the ultimate destruction of colossal difficulties. "Who art thou, 0
great mountain? before Zerubbabel" - a
type of Christ - "thou shalt become a plain"
: literally, "into a plain!" be wiped
out! A mountain, in Scripture symbolism,
is a kingdom or world-dominion; and so mighty is the
"And he [God] shall bring forth
the head stone" - the finishing or gable stone: the head stone of
the corner (Mark 12: 10) - "with shoutings of grace, grace unto it". No universal cry will go up in eternity to any
but the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, who sums up in Himself
that foreign word in all languages, for its source is Heaven-GRACE.
SMALL THINGS
One
immensely practical consequence of the vision is slipped in before its final
phases. Jehovah says, almost in
contempt: "For who hath despised the day of small
things?" It is Jehovah’s
word, not the Angel’s: who - He implies - can be so foolish as to despise
things only because they are small? It
is immensely practical for us, as it is meant to be. What the Church must experience before the
Sons of Oil appear are ‘small things’:- falling membership, freezing love,
dwindling funds, dying faith: therefore the temptation to depression and
despair will be overwhelming. But God’s
dynamic can be stored in pebbles. If
Angels in heaven, remotely distant, rejoice over a single sinner saved - even a
dying tramp - ‘small
things’ need never discourage us: all the enormous future lies, in germ,
in what we are witnessing and what we are doing. Our brief moment gives birth to an eternity:
our dwarf is the parent of a giant: our every acorn holds an oak. If twelve men, so endued with the first
outpour, turned the world upside down, what may not another handful of men do,
again so endued?
THE SEVEN EYES
For
the vision now shows how a triumphant future is assured. For they shall rejoice, even these seven,
which are the eyes of the Lord; they run to and fro through the whole earth as
Jehovah had already said (3: 9) :- "Upon one stone" - the Head Stone of the Corner - "are seven eyes". The Apocalypse gives the clue. "I saw a Lamb
standing, having seven eyes, WHICH ARE THE SEVEN SPIRITS OF GOD, SENT
FORTH INTO ALL THE EARTH" (Rev. 5:
6). The Plummet in Zerubbabel's
hand is watched by the Seven Eyes: the Kingdom is prepared in the years
immediately preceding the Advent, and the work is watched with joy by the Holy
Ghost sent forth into the whole earth. "I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, before
the great and terrible day of the Lord come" (Joel 2: 28, Acts 2: 17).* So
the whole drama is solved. The Oil in the Bowl flanked on either side
by the Oil in the Olives is the Divine Spirit, the sole Operator in both
dispensations.
[*
Since the Spirit is now on earth, He cannot be poured out again from Heaven,
and "sent into all the earth", until
He has first re-ascended; so therefore the second ‘pentecost’
can occur only after "One that restraineth now"
(2 Thess. 2: 7), has, with the watchful,
disappeared. Therefore all alleged
outpourings in between - Montanism, Irvingism, Pentecostalism - are not
outpourings of the Holy Ghost; and all ‘apostles’,
uncreated by either divine effusion, are ‘false
apostles’.]
"There are diversities
of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are diversities of ministrations,
but the same Lord; and there are diversities of working, but the
same God, who worketh all things in all" (1
Cor. 12: 4).
THE OUT-POUR
And
now comes the crowning revelation. When and how will
this second divine flood come? Zechariah’s bewilderment had prompted him to ask
for light four times (vers. 4, 5, 11, 12):
the way he puts his fifth and last question reveals our answer. "What be these two other branches, THAT EMPTY THE GOLDEN
OIL OUT OF TREMSELVES? "These
are the two sons of oil", the Angel replies: that is, these are the
two fountains which in that day will supply oil from God himself: in other
words, Enoch and Elijah will restore the miraculous gifts. It was said of Elijah - "He shall restore all things" (Matt. 17: 11); and since only that can be ‘restored’ which has been ‘lost’, and the principal
loss the earth has suffered in our Age is the loss of miraculous orders and gifts,
Elijah must restore them; he who alone of mankind has brought down fire from
heaven, and has prayed down floods after prolonged drought, on his second
appearance on earth brings down the second Pentecost. They "empty the
golden oil out of themselves".* This accounts for the millions of the redeemed
on the right hand of the judge: this accounts for the martyr throng rapt into
heaven just before Satan descends (Rev. 12: 11):
this accounts (in a sense) for a Lake of Fire a thousand years earlier than for
the rest of the lost, for it reveals God on the earth, and therefore humanity knowingly
hurling itself at Him.
[*
The Oil pours from their hands. After
the downpour at Pentecost, it was by the laying on of an Apostle’s hands that
the Holy Ghost was given (Acts 8: 18), with
consequent miraculous gifts. Since ‘apostles’ (in the plural) are to be ‘crucified’ (Matt. 23: 34
compared with Luke 11, and only Peter
suffered crucifixion among the early Apostles, it would seem that Apostles -
who were an order, not a select number (1 Cor. 12:
28) - will reappear at the end. Crucifixion
has occurred in the Spanish War.]
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