Over ten years ago there was an advertisement for laundry detergent that The Holy Spirit used to show me Prophetic Imagery.

A little girl in a white dress is in a field, then walks towards the camera while dirt flies at her, through the air.  The slogan was “for whatever life throws”

I am including a link to the advert because both it, and the music are significant to this word….  Other brands of detergent are available.

The LORD used it to reveal to me something I needed to know but at the time I didn’t understand.

You might think the Prophetic Message is obvious, that Christians must be prepared for all seasons, spiritually scotch-guarded against worldly filth and washed clean by the Word and the Blood of The Lamb.

Obvious, yes — but not what I saw in The Spirit!

The Imagery that God gave me was of my walking through an absolutely immense, damp, green, green forest.

I sense crunching underfoot, but not all is the snap of twigs.

On the forest floor, as I walk, I find man-made items that don’t belong, tattered leftovers of a bygone age.

Shards from engraved crystal vessels; broken gold and silver cutlery; remnants of stone walls and brickwork; a rusting spade; a pillar and half an arch from a once magnificent gateway; fragments of gilding; part of a metal skillet; scraps of wallpaper; a stairway that leads nowhere; snapped chess pieces; rotten carved wood; pieces of pottery and discarded keys.

I am able to envisage the rooms they came from, the interior decorating, the tapestries, furnishings and paintings from grander surroundings, the ordinary everyday things of humbler homes.

The Hustle and Bustle of a Past Life

I somehow “know” these pieces came from a palace, from cities and smaller towns and villages, farms and fields that once thrived here for hundreds of years, but which have passed, in less than a century, into almost complete oblivion.

A civilisation abandoned and left to fall into obscurity, because they built weaponry of terrifying destruction, misused it on another nation and were horrified by the devastation and death they had unleashed.

In their guilt and shame they believed their own nation did not deserve to exist at all, and rather than turn to The LORD for healing and solutions, they decided to let it all crumble away into nothing.

Though a Council of the former kingdom still exists and discreetly monitors the situation, it does no more than that and so, in less than a hundred years the land has been almost entirely reclaimed by nature, and the population mostly moved away.

Occasionally I come out into a clearing with a small cottage, or a few fields surrounding a tiny village, but they are simple folk, living off-grid, without cars or modern conveniences.

I see rivers, mountains and hills beyond, and then the forest swallows me up again!

The music rises and swells.  As the drums kick in, I start to envisage buildings rising out of the ground with a deep rumbling sound.

I am silent throughout, but I see them in my mind and it’s like they are really there… then I gesture them into being with my outstretched hand.

I look around me in wonder and awe at what The LORD is using me to raise up, but even as I worship Him, I don’t stop working.

Churches; buildings for government; a baroque yet not overly ostentatious palace for a head of state, with formal gardens and fountains and pools; Courts of justice; hospitals; schools, a university and a stadium; a theater and a concert hall; homes of every size and description; parks and botanical gardens; sports grounds; libraries; shops, businesses;  roads and railways and bridges and tunnels and canals.

I am making it all future proof — down to details such as choosing the colour for signs for accessibility and building sewers like underground Cathedrals that will cope with the expansion of the population in the coming centuries.

I do much less typical things too, like record programmes on national style, cookery and dance, and documentaries of less practical information.

A Kingdom Comes Into Being

But it isn’t just something of the past revived, like the long lost palaces of Nonsuch, Honselaarsdijk or Krzyżtopór being recreated as they once were, but in modern times.

The palace at Herrenhausen has been rebuilt like that.

No, it is a whole civilisation that I am creating.  A living, vibrant community.

I am building it all from the ground upwards, from the physical building work to the intangible culture.

I am shaping the heart of a nation, its very identity and values, even as I am building where it will be.

Integrity, resilience, compassion, wisdom, fidelity, fairness, tenacity, kindness, holiness, it is all rising up in people, just as the infrastructure of the country is rising.

I am shaping its future for centuries to come, right here in the present, and I really did get all this from the music in less than a minute of an advert on television!

At the time, I just thought it was my overactive imagination.  I found it poignant; too sad, to be honest.

After all, like most of us I’m an ordinary modern human.  These days, unless we’re megalomaniacal, we don’t usually forge a nation from scratch as though we’re some sort of cross between a medieval prince and a modern bureaucrat who sorts out fatbergs.

A few years later, the song was used as the theme music of a television series about a king and life at his palace, though I didn’t watch it.

It still didn’t occur to me that it was more than coincidence that to this same music I had been seeing the decaying remnants of a former kingdom in a huge forest and then a new nation rising from it.

Now here was a series based around a palace built in wooded wetlands, its court and the fate of the kingdom it rose from.

In the last four weeks or so, The LORD reminded me of the advertisement and the music from it.

God used a second secular song to reveal more, and once this was unlocked for me, God had me look again at the Prophetic Imagery of the Nation, rising out of the forest that had grown over it.

A Nation Rising … out of the Ashes

The Nation that effectively kills itself out of guilt and falls into obscurity is a Prophetic Image that applies to so much now, from families and organisations, to whole Nations, who have given up their spiritual inheritance of centuries, including The Church itself, which seems often to be powerless.

We have all sinned and fallen short of glory.  Some of our actions can and should be held to account.

But we have also been indulging in histrionical hand-wringing, excessive introspection, gnashing of teeth and wailing in misery.

In English we call this “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”.  We throw away what is bad — but also throw away what is noble.

In order to avoid doing evil, we avoid doing what is good too.

It is less about the conviction of The Holy Spirit, which leads to repentance and renewal.

It is more about guilt, shame, blame, retribution and virtue-signalling, that leads only to stagnation, avoidance and apathy, and in one way or another, eventually leads to decay.

We have allowed our heritage of the deep things of God, the spiritual treasures that through revelation we painstakingly amassed over generations, to slip through our fingers in less than a century.  Frankly, in less than a decade, in some instances!

What needed careful pruning to keep it healthy and holy, instead has been hacked away almost completely.

But the roots are still there and new growth can be nurtured as we call it into being.

The Garden of Eden is long gone and we can never return there, but what it represents, lives on.

God’s commission, to bring His Kingdom and His Will to earth still stands.  It is what He wants us to fully participate in doing with Him.

The lost kingdom being filled with new life isn’t meant to be sad.  It’s actually an opportunity.  The adventure of a lifetime.

Open your eyes to see as He sees.

This is why The LORD previously told me to remind you the imagination must consecrated to Him.

But don’t do what so many people do.  Don’t just complain about the darkness of the present and hanker wistfully after the glories of a past age.

Don’t just think, “Oh it was so much more innocent in the 1930s,” or “I pray we return to the fire we had for The LORD when Jan Hus was alive.”

Some of us have such a heart for what has been wasted or thrown away that we have a real sense of grief and loss.

We carry a genuine, God-given burden to reclaim the fire and purity of the past so that it blazes a trail Heavenwards for the future.

But we cannot allow the enemy to hijack this towards an inferior passion.

Don’t try to replicate what has died.

That day is gone.  It isn’t coming back.

Build Afresh.  Build New.  Build to Last.

Those cities, those palaces that have disappeared, they were lost through conquest and destruction, through shoddy workmanship, or through poor maintenance, where one generation built well but a later generation could not afford the upkeep to hold them in good repair.

They were also lost because they fell out of fashion and their owners no longer valued them and gave them away, or left them to decay, or sold them for demolition.

People moved away because those places were spiritually dead and no longer held any attraction.

David had a dream to build God a temple and he prepared everything he could for it.

His son Solomon built The Temple and it was glorious — but very little of it remains.

God appeared to Solomon twice — but Solomon seems to have taken for granted this incredible privilege and he did not steward it well.

He never had the heart for The LORD that his father David did, and the kingdom of Israel was split after his death

So we need to “future proof” what we build in this generation so that it lasts.

The foundations we lay must be secure, rooted in The Word.

The materials we use and the workers who build must be the best available, high quality that is paid for, not with earthly coin, but with the currency of Heaven : deep faith and close fellowship with God.

And we need to set up spiritual routines and spiritual funds for ongoing maintenance right now, as we are building, so that in future neither conquest, nor changing fashions nor lack of funds for repairs, will cause decay or destruction.

This requires changed hearts, where we set up stones of remembrance, as the ancient Israelites did, such as in Joshua 4.

We need to be more diligent about the things of God and more proactive about increasing this heritage and passing it on for generations.

The glass ceilings of our generation must be smashed through and become the foundations of the next generation.

But even in The Bible, those stones of remembrance became empty monuments to past movements; lifeless memorials that held no meaning. …. and every time the Israelites kept turning away from The LORD.

Instead we need to build up ourselves and future generations in our most holy faith.

Our lives must become living memorials to the greatness of God.

Testimony should not be a one-off event that rests on past glories or the prayers of grandparents and godparents.

Testimony should be active and ongoing, a continuous filling of the Holy Spirit that flows from within to the world, with individual, personal encounters with The LORD in every generation.

Reclaim your heritage!  Clear the ancient paths!  Uncap the ancient wells!  Restore the ancient ruins!

But give The LORD space to work more freely too, and make all things new.

He is able to do things in our day that astound us — and He surely will.

The Great Commission
“Then the eleven disciples went away into Galilee, to the mountain which Jesus had appointed for them. When they saw Him, they worshiped Him; but some doubted.
And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.  Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I AM with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.”    Matthew 28:16-20.

 

~ Iris Maud, UK.

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Iris Maud, UK.

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