MAN'S
LAST REVIVAL
PART 2 of 2
By
Jon Christian Ryter
May 2, 2012
NewsWithViews.com
On his return, after hearing about a miraculous revival in Wales in which thousands of people were being healed of all manner of illnesses, Smale stopped in Keswick as Evan Roberts preached his salvation and healing message. Smale was so overwhelmed, he brought Roberts Pentecostalism to his home church, admonishing his congregation to seek God in a new way and experience a revival that only the Holy Spirit can bring.
As Smales' revival caught fire, hundreds came to the First Baptist Church—and hundreds fell to their knees, sobbing, and repented. While the Glendale Pentecostal experience was the same as the Keswick Experience, the Baptist deacons who insisted that the Gifts of the Spirit died when the beloved Apostle, John, died, rejected what they witnessed with their own eyes as a form of blasphemy. The only "gift of the Spirit," that now exists they insisted, is imparted on every person when they are baptized—it's called salvation. Rejected and ultimately released by the hierarchy of the Baptist Church, Rev. Smale moved downtown to Burbank Hall and started the "First New Testament Church." The most famous member of Smale's staff was William J. Seymour, a Black Holiness evangelist from Houston, Texas who studied under Evangelist Charles Fox Parham, a Holiness evangelist, in 1901 in Topeka, Kansas.
While Parham did not attract the media attention that struck Europe like a Welsh lightning bolt, word spread after the first Pentecostal experience in America happened at the Bethel Bible College in Topeka. Parham was preaching on Acts 2 when a student, Agnes Ozman asked Parham to lay lands on her so she could receive the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. She experienced glossolalia—the phenomenon of suddenly speaking in another and sometimes unknown language during a worship service, or during prayers, that is regarded as a sign of a special baptism by the Holy Spirit. Classes were suspended and the entire student body prayed for hours that day. Parham and some of his students embarked on a series of one-night revivals throughout Kansas and Texas at any church that welcomed them over the next couple of years. The media treated them with ridicule until a confirmed divine healing happened at their revival in Galena, Kansas.
In 1904, William Seymour, who was blind in one eye, left Parham and formed his own church in the home of Richard and Ruth Asberry on Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles. Believers continued to find the home church, and within months people were coming from all over LA County to the small home on Bonnie Brae Street. The crowds became so great that what was inevitable happened when too many people crowd into a house—the Asberry's home quite literally collapsed from too much weight. Seymour moved his church to a vacant Methodist Church in 1906 in the heart of the industrial section of Los Angeles at 312 Azusa Street, and Evan John Roberts' Pentecostal Experience officially reached the United States. The Bonnie Brae home was eventually rebuild and became a shrine as the precursor of the Azusa Street Pentecostal movement that brought forward Godly preachers who would later head most of the major Christian denominations—like AJ Tomlinson who would later head the Church of God of Cleveland (Tennessee), William H. Durham, North Avenue Mission in Chicago became the leading center of the Pentecostal movement worldwide in the early part of the 20th century. He moved his ministry from Chicago to Los Angeles because he wanted his ministry located in the birthplace of American Pentecostalism. Other prominent Pentecostal ministers were A. H. Argue (from Winnipeg who started the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada), and E. N. Bell, who became the first superintendent of the Assemblies of God in the United States.
And, of course, there was Aimee Simpson McPherson who became the fictional character, Sister Sharon Falconer, in the movie adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' best selling book, Elmer Gantry. Most Christians associate Aimee Simpson McPherson, who was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy in Salford, Ontario on Oct. 9, 1890, with the Azusa Street Pentecostal awakening in the United States. But, when the Pentecostal movement began, Aimee was working with her mother in a Salvation Army soup kitchen in Canada. Sinclair Lewis fashioned his somewhat tarnished heroine after the attractive Aimee McPherson because of the never-ending rumors of infidelities. Lewis fashioned Elmer Gantry from her second and third husband, Harold Stewart McPherson and an actor and cabarets singer, David Hutton. It was McPherson who worked in his wife's revivals and made a failed attempt at preaching the gospel.
In 1918 he threw in the towel and filed for divorce. It was granted in 1921. That same year Aimee Simpson McPherson founded a permanent church called the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel—once again, in Los Angeles because the American people wrongly associated it the birthplace of the US Pentecostal movement. Aimee McPherson married Hutton in 1931. They were divorced in 1934.
A failure at marriage, McPherson was the perfect religious huckster. She was as successful a merchant evangelist as she was a political advocate for women's issues. She sold God like a fishmonger sells "the catch of today." There is no doubt that God called her into the ministry just as He called people like Dwight L. Moody, GB Cashwell, Reuben Torrey, Kathryn Kuhlman, Billy Sunday, Harry A. Ironside, Smith Wigglesworth, and other men of God as "fishers of men." But McPherson, who had a dark side, like other early 20th century evangelists such as AA Allen, Jack Coe, Charlie Price, and several others, who were in "the business" for the offerings, saw nothing wrong with giving God a helping hand by manufactured miracles to "build the faith" of their followers if not enough happened spiritually.
As peace settled over the world and prosperity reigned in America for about a decade between the world wars—from 1921 to 1931—church attendance plummeted. The New Yorker magazine reported in its Oct. 13, 1934 issue that "...with millions of people out of work and millions others having lost their life savings, one might have predicted (as many did at the time) that there would have been a strong resurgence of the church during the period of the Great Depression...[with] declining church membership and what many perceived to be a general decline in religious piety throughout the country, many clergymen saw the Depression as partly a heavenly response to these developments. Moreover, many believed that the suffering masses would quickly rush back into the church, swelling membership rolls, and seeking forgiveness for their folly. Yet while most major denominations did see an average membership gain of about 5%, this fell far short of the clergy's collective hopes..."
The princes of industry and the barons of banking and business struggled at the end of the "war to end all wars," to create a fantasy global economy tethered with steel shackles by the purveyors of world government through the failed League of Nations in 1920. Isolationist America refused to join the League of Nations because Article Ten of the Treaty of Versailles (where it was buried), required all member nations to surrender their external sovereignty to the League of Nations.
On Sunday morning, Aug. 12, 1941, almost four months before Pearl Harbor, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland amid a virtual armada to protect the USS Augusta and the HMS Prince of Wales. They met in secrecy to divide the post-World War II world. Their objective that day? Remodel the failed League of Nations into a global governing body that the American people would accept. The agreement, called the Atlantic Charter, detailed the mutual goals of both nations in the post-World War II world—even though America would not be at war with the Axis nations for another 107 days. The declaration they signed would become the United Nations Charter on Jan. 1, 1942
On Dec. 7, 1941 World War II began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. FDR asked Congress for a declarations of war against Japan on Dec. 8. Three days later, on Dec. 11, Congress issued a similar declaration of war against Germany. On Dec. 14, 1941 the pews in America's churches once again filled as revival returned to America. And a new wave of patriotism swamped the hearts of the American people like a tsunami, as fearful Christians prayed for their nation and for a safe return of loved ones who were already joining up, or were being called up in the draft.
America had just experienced its first "9/11"—on Dec. 7, 1941. Evan John Roberts' revival was born again. America suffered 2,454 military dead and 961 wounded on the Japanese attack that began at 7:55 a.m., Sunday, Dec. 7 (1:55 p.m. in Washington, DC). The Japanese ambassador had asked for a meeting with US Secretary of State Cordell Hull at 1:00 p.m. to announce that Japan had officially broken off negotiations to avoid a war with the United States that the ambassador was to warn the Americans, was now inevitable. They were late for their meeting. Hull did not get to meet with them until 2:30 p.m.—thirty-five minutes after the first bombs dropped on Battleship Row on Ford Island's eastern side.
Sadly, it is always fear and trepidation and not the love of Jesus Christ that fill the pews of the nation's churches and bring calls for revival. For that reason, if for none other, based on that reality, the question that should be in the minds of Christians everywhere in the world today should be: "Are we about to experience mankind's last Christian revival?"
We have arrived at the end of the Book. The key players of the Endtime Drama that leads to the final act of the "play"—Armageddon—are all on the main stage: The Israelis. The Muslims. The Soviets. (Yes, I said "Soviets," not "Russians.") And, the Chinese. And even the bit players—the United States and its political allies—referred to not by name in Scripture, but simply as the "islands of the sea." (Keep in mind, in Bible prophecy, when a specific prophesy refers to "the land," it is talking about Israel. When the prophesy speaks of "the sea" it is referring to the Gentile nations.")
Before we move on to the last revival of man before the end, let me point out that the Book did not have to end this way. If you're a student of Bible scripture (and not even a really good one), you have to remember God's command to Saul to slay all of the Amalakites (1 Sam. 15:1-11) and especially, Amalek, their king. What is the significance of that passage? Amalek descended from Esau through his wife, Adah (Gen. 36:12). Through Amalek's seed the prophet of Islam, Mohammad, was born in 570 AD. Had all of the Amalakites died to the last man, woman and child as God ordered Saul, Mohammad would never have been born and Islam would not exist. As it is, Muhammad can trace his ancestry from Abraham to Esau and through Amalek to the Syrian Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who is the direct ancestor of Antichrist. From Antiochus IV we can trace Mohammad to King Abdullah II the Hashemite king of Jordan.
Here we are, today. Makes you realize we are a lot closer to the end of the Book than you thought, huh? Think it might be time for a revival? There are a lot of your friends and family who are still lost. That's what Evan Roberts felt in 1904 when he called out to God for revival. "Lord," he cried, "Let me see 30 thousand saved." Here we are, now, in 2012. The fields of the Church of Philadelphia were sown by the revivals of the 20th century. And, while there may still be time for one more planting in what has become the Church of Laodicea, the winnowers are already threshing the wheat from the chaff. Soon they will clear the threshing floor and the winnowers will gather what's left of the good grain to store in the barn. The chaff will then be burned.
Remember how Evan Roberts' "revival" started? We've come full circle. It started when Sir Henry McMahon and Sir Arthur James Balfour cut separate deals with the Hashemite King, Hussein and Lord Walter Rothschuld on behalf of Europe's Jews, promising both a homeland in Palestine if they helped the British crush the Ottoman Empire.
As America comes fully to grip with what is really happening in the Mideast, they will finally realize how it's all going to end. They will realize that the "freedom movement" of the moderate Muslim seeking a parliamentarian democracy in the moderate Islamic states which tolerated other religions in the past, will quickly become Shariah compliant theocracies which Allah rules through the Brotherhood. The revolutions will overthrow moderate governments that coexisted with the West which will then be termed, in the media and on the evening news, as "despotic dictatorships" Eventually, all of them will be replaced with Shariah compliant governments largely controlled, or greatly influenced by, the Muslim Brotherhood that is now shaping the new Muslim world.
As the fear of Islam grows worldwide, you will see, and most likely partake in, the last revival of the pre-rapture Christian world. Knees chaffed from prayer in that last revival will determine whether or not God will grant man what Smith Wigglesworth saw in a vision of an end-time revival shortly before his death. He called it the greatest revival in the history of mankind. "I will not see it," he said, "but you shall see it...you will see the mighty works that He will do on Earth in the last days." Shutting his eyes as he spoke, Wigglesworth said, "I see the greatest revival in the history of mankind.. [God] said that there would be untold numbers of uncountable multitudes that would be saved. No man will say 'so many, so many,' because nobody will be able to count those who come to Jesus...It will be a worldwide situation, not local. A worldwide thrust of God's power and God's anointing on mankind."
Today, the Muslim Brotherhood, with the efforts of optimistic Muslims who think they can actually win their independence from despotic secular Muslim dictators through popular protest when what they are doing is being sacrificed by the Muslim Brotherhood to pressure the United States and its NATO allies to send fighter-bombers and armored vehicles to Damascus to crush the secular government of Bashir Assad. As Americans watch the slaughter of innocent protesters in Syria on the evening news, we are witnessing the reincarnation of the Ottoman Empire on the ashes of Muslim freedom ignited by a match struck by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood will achieve its goal—reuniting the independent Muslim states into an Empire. will be From that moment, the new Muslim Empire will begin the task of conquering the world. Through peaceful subterfuge at first, they will offer the olive branch—a peace treaty with Israel to disarm the world.
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One Muslim leader, a man of intellect with meek, polite manners [Isa. 14:16] will pledge to negotiate peace between the Arabs and the Jews. He will craft the accord and 54 Muslim-dominated nations will sign it. It will appear this political messiah will have done the impossible. The world will praise him and seat him on the throne of power as the head of the world government. The pseudo-peace will last three and one half years. Then, Hell will erupt on Earth and the Israeli Jews will flee, once again, to Egypt. And, for the second time in history, the Egyptians will enslave them. The lost souls who reject Islam, and the left-behind fallen Christians will again cry out to God for revival. Revival, first century-style will come to those seeking the face of God. But, Tribulation salvation will clash with Shariah in a Muslim-dominated world. And, Tribulation Christians, like their first century AD counterparts, will find the pathway to salvation comes with a high price—martyrdom [Rev. 20:4]. For part one click below.
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