The End-Time War Prophesied: The Return of the King and the War the Overcomer Wages

I was among those at Melodyland School of Theology in the 1970s who raised their hands when asked if the Great Tribulation and the Rapture of the Church would happen in their lifetimes. All the signs of the impending rapture were there, even as they are now in the 2010s--with even more. I am still a staunch believer in the imminent return of Jesus Christ, but my focus has changed.

Like the Apostle Paul, I initially expected the return of Jesus Christ to be external and physical, but eventually came to see that it is internal and spiritual. Inside--that is where the war for Christ's Second Advent rages.

And it is a war. The war is against our own ignorance and doubt. I see now the artificiality of division between ourselves and God, an artifact of our death of memory. Wage war against it. There is no separation between God's and our locations--we are he as he is us, and we are all together. As God's consciousness we knew this, but we became stupid. We were "up and running" as Jesus Christ and voluntarily took upon ourselves complete amnesia in order to become what we are. It is hard to think of this as success, but it is. We became what we wanted to become: experience.

Our conscious awareness is like a rheostat, the electrical device used in dimmer switches. We dimmed down to just a trickle in dreaming that we are us. I do not think that we have joined onto or into human beings as much as we have just created ourselves, and they are our facilitation. We are, in reality, much more wonderful than we can imagine or explain. But that is the point--we have to rediscover how great we were and are as God. The war we wage is effort to rediscover and become the Jesus Christ who is within us, as us. We want to "pot" him up--to crank up the juice of who we really are to full ON. THAT is the return of the King.

Fortunately, we haven't made this all that hard for ourselves. It is as easy as dying of who we seem to be, if we can do that. The trick is that it is done in spirit, in the inner man, for no one will ever be able to do it in the flesh. That is why Jacob, the consciousness, got the blessing of the Merciful Father, and Esau, the outer man, couldn't get blessed though he wept for it with tears. Jacob went to war and became Israel: God ruling as man, the King in the Kingdom.

The Book of Revelation has but one point: Worthy is the Lamb, the King we were and shall become again. That Lamb is the consciousness within us. We have to get our confused, ignorant conceptions of ourselves out of the way and let the King create us anew. Some people want to learn the "science" of this just to get everything they want--anything and everything. "I'm going to win the lottery!" Oh boy, oh boy! Fine. Do it if you can and enjoy all the junk you get, but remember that there is but one thing really worthy of your pursuit: the King, the consciousness which did it.

Just as I had misread the Bible for many years, I misread Neville Goddard's books and lectures. The King--Jesus Christ and the Ineffable Lord God--was the core and essence of his theology and teaching. He called it the unconditioned awareness of being, the unformed source of all. If ever one could consider God to be "wholly other," this is the register of God which would fit the bill. Except that the unconditioned awareness of being CONDITIONED itself by imagining itself to be something, and then BECAME that which it imagined itself to be. This was Neville's essential key: Change is made from this point of consciousness--the unconditioned awareness of being within us which becomes what it imagines itself to be. 

The effort in our war is to rest in the Lord. The word 'Lord' in Hebrew is YHWH: His Becoming. We need to rest in the unconditioned awareness of being's imagining. The Ineffable, life, wants us to get involved. It says, "Come unto Me . . . and I will give you peace. Join my labor and learn from Me, and you will find serenity" (Matthew 11: 28-29, Victor Alexander translation, adapted).

No, I am not going to let you misread this like we have misread the Bible's message all these years. To pray, we cannot be humans praying to a separate God. We have to recognize that we are God, the unconditioned awareness. We have to get back to zero--push the reset button, as it were, and become unaware of even being human. Attain the state of being aware of being, but not of being anything at all. As Neville said, simply "float" as unconditioned consciousness and rise above all the "facts" in the world. Let them drown.

Now you can make your petitions known to the Lord. What would it be like if you had, or were, what you wanted? Make an imaginary scene which would imply that you have what you wanted, and imagine it "concretely"--as a real experience--over and over. Rest in the Lord as that. You are what you rest in, and it will manifest in due time. Imagine well.