The Species from Two Realms: Heaven, Earth, and the New Creation (Chicago – 1989)

One young man was standing there. He was a very sad young man because his hero had just died. And he was rather disappointed about all that; he certainly didn’t expect the lot to fall to him, but it did. And so, this young man, just hardly old enough to be a priest, was going to be the one to go into the Holy of Holies. They tied a rope around his foot, his leg, so that if he saw God and dropped dead, they’d be able to pull him out of there.

And so with great fear, he took the light, he would prepare show bread and light some candles and go past a curtain and do some simple rituals and come out, and so he walked through the court of the Gentiles and to the outer court and to the inner and the holy place, and then he pulled open that magnificent curtain, and he stepped in and he closed the curtain and he turned around to perform one of his rituals and he had the strangest sensation that he had better be really careful when he turned around. And he slowly turned around, and he couldn’t see the bottom of what he was seeing. And he couldn’t see the sides of what he was seeing. He had walked through the door. Not through a curtain, but through the door. And he was not standing in a replica of it; he was standing in the Holy of Holies. And he saw cherubim and seraphim circling in the skies of this great, eternal place. And he looked up above, up and beyond, beyond.

And he saw the throne of God. And he saw the train of God coming down and even filling the very room in which he stood. And there the creatures of the invisible realms were crying, Holy, Holy, Holy. And all Isaiah could do was cry, I’m unclean, I’m unclean. and he had seen the unseen. Praise the Lord.

Hallelujah. Well, you want to hear another story? This one’s new. This one’s brand new. It had been a long, long time since the wind of God had blown upon the face of the earth, and it had been centuries since man had heard the voice of God. Nothing had happened, one of those times when you didn’t expect anything to take place, things were bad all over, and God said, ‘Michael, come here,’ and the great archangel Michael with his great sword stepped up to the living God and He said, ‘It is the time of all times; it is the fullness of time.’ Gabriel thought this was just a dull period, and God said to him, ‘The enemy has been in control there so long that he has turned the very skies to brass, and there can be no prayers coming up because of the darkness of the enemy.’

He said, ‘Michael, there’s a prayer that’s being prayed on the earth that must come to the heavens. Go and rip a hole through the brass that covers the skies. And as you go, the door will go with you.’ Gabriel reached down, and he takes his mighty sword and unsheathes it. And standing in the portal of the door, the door moves forward until finally, yes, he comes to the skies above the earth, and there is brass. And Gabriel takes his sword in hand, turns it around, and plunges it into the brass, and then he whittles and he rakes and he thrusts and he tears and rips until there’s a hole, and he hears the screams of demons, and he plunges into the darkness, but as he does the light from the door and the door itself follow close behind him and the demons see him and they come to make warfare, but when they see his glowing glistening sword, they fall back in horror and terror, and on he goes cutting through the darkness, making a way for the door to come to earth.

And finally, there appears one before him who is screaming at the demons, ‘What’s going on here?’, and then he sees the face of Gabriel and says, ‘How dare you come to my domain?’, and Gabriel says, ‘Step back, for I’m on a mission for my God’, and Lucifer draws his sword and they go at it, clash upon clash, little by little, Michael drives Lucifer back to the darkness to the very edge of earth itself. Lucifer lifts his sword and says, ‘Beyond this point, you may not come. For this is my domain. And you have not the power to move me from this place.’ And Gabriel says, ‘You are correct. I cannot go any further. And I cannot command you. But in the name of the living God, the living God rebuke you.

And with that, amen. A scream, and Lucifer disappears, and Michael breaks loose into, of all places, a small, simple room. And the door is there. And all heaven is listening. And a little old lady is kneeling there. But not knowing, she kneels before the door, and she says, ‘Lord, my name is Elizabeth. And I’m old and I have no child. Take the reproach from me, Lord. And Lord, if you will give me a child, I will never own him as my own. But he will be yours.’ And Michael said, ‘Little lady,’ and she looked up. And he says, ‘Little lady.’ She says, ‘Oh.’ He says, ‘Little lady, don’t be afraid.’ She looks up at him. He says, ‘Your prayers have just gone through the door. God has heard your prayer and answered it.’

Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord. Well, it so happens that just about the same time, her husband happens to be a priest, and they’re once more casting lots to see who will go into the Holy of Holies. and it turns out that it falls to Zachariah. They put a rope around his leg. Zachariah walks into the Holy of Holies. Everything looks normal to him. The story about Isaiah must not have been true. Standing just outside the temple and its replica once more is Michael. No, it’s Gabriel this time. It’s Gabriel.

Oh, by the way, it was Gabriel who cut the hole for Michael to come through to hear Elizabeth, too. Gabriel steps through the door into the place where Zachariah is and says, ‘Zachariah?’ And Zachariah looks up. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m Gabriel.’ ‘What do you want?’ I’ve come to tell you that your wife is going to bear a child.’ Zachariah laughs. Well, Gabriel says, ‘For that, you’re not going to talk anymore, not until your child is born. And his name will be John. And her cousin, Mary, is also with child, is going to bear a child.’

And at the time of the taxation, she and her husband Joseph are taken to Bethlehem. And this child has been conceived within the depths of her being by the Holy Spirit Himself, and brothers and sisters, in what is without question the most incredible time that door ever opened. It opened in a stable, and it had come in many ways in many places, but never before had that door been a woman’s womb. This time it was the womb of a young girl from Galilee, and the midwife said, ‘I don’t care what you say, I am telling you I have delivered over 3000 babies, and this woman who is about to give birth is a virgin.’ And she reached down and pulled the child forth. He had come out of the Eternals into this realm. And there beating within that little baby was the winds of heaven.

And within the winds of heaven, deep down within his inmost being, there was the very life of the living God. This baby had come from the other realm. But this baby was also like his forefather Adam, made from clay, and this baby now lived in space and time in the realm physical, in the realm visible. This little baby was like nothing that had ever been, not even Adam, for Adam had a spirit from the other realm within him. This child had a spirit within him from the other realm, but he also had the living God in him. He was God and man inside a physical body. He was from two realms.

And he grew. And he learned to speak. Learned to write. Went to school. Heard his mother, stepdaddy, listened to them, obeyed them, began to realize that there was another voice, and another father, and a door, and the door was inside him, and he could hear from the other round he began to realize that he was one with this one who was within him, and as he got older and older he began to realize that he could remember the past. Far, far beyond that time when he was born. And he also began to realize he could remember the future. Far beyond anything anybody could see. And then, praise the Lord, he began to realize that he could not only remember earth’s past and earth’s future, but he could remember eternity’s past and eternity’s present and eternity’s future.