If you are an experienced Christian you may have noticed that the Spirit of God is dealing with you concerning your sins—something you may never have thought you would experience at this stage of your discipleship. The Day of Atonement comes at the climax of our redemption, not at the beginning.

At the beginning of our discipleship we would not have been able to pass joyfully and victoriously through the judgment of our sins, just as the Israelites were not strong enough to engage the Canaanites in war immediately upon making their departure from Egypt. God led them south by the way of Mount Sinai, not by the much shorter trade route bordering the Mediterranean Sea, because the Hebrews were not experienced in war.

Judgment is here. It has commenced in the house of God. Christ is ready to judge the living and the dead (I Peter 4:5). We, the living, must be ready to submit ourselves under the mighty hand of God, to confess our sins and repent of them, and to work diligently and willingly with the Holy Spirit in putting to death the deeds of our body (Romans 8:13).

We understand, therefore, that God is not saving our first personality. He is crucifying it so He may raise it again in newness of life in Christ.

The Christian Church will pass through intense fires in the days ahead of us. A baptism of fire will fall upon us, the purpose of which is to purify the Church on the earth, preparing it to meet the Lord at His appearing.

Those who are to participate in the parousia, the appearing of Christ, must be judged beforehand. The deceased saints are being judged now, for Christ judges the dead as well as the living.

If those who are living on the earth are to be ready to be changed and caught up to the Lord when He appears, they must be judged while yet alive on the earth. The Scriptures teach that this will take place:

And it shall come to pass, that he that is left in Zion, and he that remaineth in Jerusalem, shall be called holy, even every one that is written among the living in Jerusalem: When the Lord shall have washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and shall have purged the blood of Jerusalem from the midst thereof by the spirit of judgment, and by the spirit of burning. (Isaiah 4:3,4)

Every person who is to be saved, whose personality is to be preserved in the Presence of God, must die and then be judged. His first personality, his adamic nature, must be judged, and all that is not of Christ must be destroyed out of him.

He must be changed into a second kind of person—a life-giving spirit. He must find his place in the new heaven and earth reign of Christ as a creature who reveals in himself the Life of Christ.

To be continued.