June 1998

The 144,000, or the Virgin Army Part 1

The seventh chapter of The Revelation (about the army of 144,000 people) has, like so much of The Revelation, been ignored by most Christians on the basis that it could be misinterpreted by fanatics to make them think that they are the army and others are not. But at the very least, I think we need to take more seriously the lessons which are implied in the overall passage, since they PROBABLY will relate to ourselves at some point in the future. We shouldn't just tear that chapter out of the Bible because it may be misunderstood.

What lessons am I talking about? There are a number of different points I would like to make, but for starters, I'm talking about the fact that the 144,000 are "virgins" who have "kept themselves from women". We have discussed this passage in the past, and I have offered a very liberal, highly spiritualised interpretation of it. I have also done the same with the other passages in the NT about celibacy, suggesting that people could be married without it affecting their ability to work for God, so long as they didn't have children. I personally still believe both of these more spiritualised teachings, and I will elaborate on them a bit more later in this study. However, it is interesting to note in the history of our own movement that, despite my teaching on this subject, every couple in the community, except one, ended up having children (or trying to have children) in the end, despite professed belief in what I had said? In other words, my interpretation was a good excuse to ignore biblical advice against getting MARRIED, and once married, it was considered nobody's business but theirs whether or not they had CHILDREN. And then every couple that did have children (apart from one) eventually left the community. In more than one instance it was specifically over their freedom to have total control of their children that they left too!

So now what we have left are mostly single men. I do not see any point in forbidding marriage (as the Catholics do for their leaders), since the Bible teaches that such a doctrine is wrong. But I think we need to do like the Bible does, and be fairly certain about where marriage is likely to lead people. Chances are that, if any of these singles get married, we are going to lose a couple more radical 100% sold-out red-hot warriors for Christ. It doesn't HAVE to be that way, but, based on past experience, it PROBABLY will be.

So I am now starting to believe that the army of 144,000 may in fact be exactly what the passage says, i.e. virgins who have kept themselves from women. I would still question the "virginity" thing a bit as a literal condition that excludes for life anyone who has ever had sex. I think that it probably means something more along the lines of "holy" people who have been set aside for the Master's use, and who stubbornly refuse to let sex distract them from God's will. It may even be that a married person could become part of that army... but the conditions would be pretty strict. Paul says to the Corinthians, "The time remains that those who have wives should be as though they had none." In other words, there may be an option for those of us who are married to still make it into the army, but the only way we can do it is by very seriously and perhaps very literally forsaking our wives. The Catholic Church has something along those lines, where a married man can become a priest by literally leaving his wife. The system in general is shocked by it, but they still do it. And I think that is just a small sample of what God is wanting us to do. What Paul said is echoed by Christ when he says that no man can come after him unless he is willing to "hate" his wife.

I have, for too long, been afraid of people calling us a cult that breaks up marriages. So I have bent over backwards to accommodate rebellious wives. I have two rebellious sons who clenched their fists every time I even hinted at husbands taking a strong stand against their wives. I thank God that we are finally free of that rebellious spirit, and I pray that we will never tolerate it again... not from anyone! Everyone knows that I have had many stormy disagreements with my wife, but the end of the story is that I have not let her stop me from following God, and she is now behind me more than she has ever been in her life, even to the point of standing straight and true when her oldest son and daughter left in anger without even saying goodbye to her. We are not going to let our children hold us back ever again. We are going to move on for God.

Now that leads us to the concept of us being a cult. I don't know exactly what form it will take, but I am very relieved at this fresh new, radical approach to where we are going, that does not require us to justify ourselves to any of our friends, ex members, relatives, or other system "authorities". All of these people unanimously "despise authority"... ours, God's, or anyone's except their own. They are not convinced, as we are, that we have found the answer in the teachings of Christ. They do not regard his teachings as the pearl of great price for which they would sell all that they own. Some of our ex members and many of our friends and relatives do not even regard themselves as Christians... not because Christ has let them down, but because they have let Christ down. I'm not saying that we don't try to be friendly with them, but that we recognise that fence-sitters are never neutral, although they always pretend they are. In fact, they are usually the most dangerous of "friends". All of these people are governed by a social conscience, i.e. a need to be accepted in the eyes of others. They do not act out of obedience to God. Instead all of their "niceness" is done to prove something to us, to each other, and/or to the system.

So what I am suggesting now is that we must at least be willing to cut our ties with all of these vestiges of respectability that each of our system and family friendships represents, and to just disappear into the great unknown in the way of all so-called "cults". It is the willingness of any group to cut all ties with their families and with the system that gets them labelled a cult in the first place; but it is this same willingness that makes them so effective. It may be time for us to discover the same effectiveness.

If the 144,000 only include those who have kept themselves from women (i.e. bachelors to the rapture) then all of these guys who are being led around by their wives are out before they even start. It may even mean that the three remaining married couples in our community are, at best, only going to be part of some kind of an army auxiliary, shouting encouragement for the rest of you guys from the sidelines. I expect that if the single guys are cut down to just the virgins, then we may be very close to finding ourselves with no disciples at all. Nevertheless, if that is the standard, then that is what we much preach, and toward which we should aspire. It is only the grace of God that might allow some of us to be part of the "virgin army"; but I believe that his grace will only be made available to those of us who are prepared to acknowledge what the standards at least SHOULD be.

It's like what we have experienced with remarried divorcees. We have, at times, said that we would accept couples that had been remarried for many years, as long as they would teach that IN PRINCIPLE, what they did was wrong, i.e. that they should not have remarried after being divorced. But no, they wanted to make the standard fit their conduct rather than make their conduct (or at least the conduct of those whom they might influence) come closer to the standard, and so they have, ALL of them, flatly refused to teach such a principle. We must not let ourselves do this with regard to the virgin army.

The Strathfield community talked about teaching another generation somewhere out there in the future to be virgins; but why not start now? And if we understand that this concept of being "virgins" and being "separate from women" is part of a DIRECTION on a continuum, and something that spiritually reflects every area of our life, then we should be teaching it and doing all that we can to start practicing it now. Whether or not we ever qualify for membership in the army ourselves, we men need to be totally sold out to God, so that no woman can come between us and him. We that are married should be as though we were not in this regard.

I think that we can only teach such a doctrine by recognising the legitimacy of masturbation. That's a vital key that has been left out by everyone from the Strathfield community to the Catholic Church, and because it has been left out, sexual hypocrisy and perversion has resulted. (Note: Even the anti-masturbation teaching is a product of the Jezebel influence in the churches, where mothers dictated what was right and wrong, rather than real men.) By accepting masturbation, I can even accept being separated from my wife for Christ. Being a virgin does not mean that I am asexual. But by practicing masturbation, I do not have to let my sexual needs dictate my lifestyle. My sexual needs are like my other biological needs... i.e. just biological. I can't stop going to the toilet for God, but I can agree not to do so in public (for example) without feeling that it is an impossible ethic to follow. And the same is true of sex. I can't stop ejaculation, but I can agree that it will not compromise my role as spiritual leader in my family.

So what about singles who might want to marry? We cannot FORBID any of them to marry, but I can pretty well promise them that if they do, they will end up feeling more comfortable working with ex members than they will be working with us. And that is because we intend to grow quite literally toward the vision of being part of the 144,000, while all of the others are so afraid of appearing to be cultish that their hands are tied spiritually. They are being controlled by the spirit of Jezebel, usually in the form of their own wives. We have watched wives take the spirit of their husbands and slowly strangle it, as they themselves grew more and more toward becoming spiritual nonentities.

I might add that the same situation exists throughout all the churches, where there is hardly a leader anywhere who has control over his own family. The sin isn't that they are married, but that in the important spiritual decisions that these husbands must make, they are "given to women" (i.e. to their wives). Because they feel that they cannot live without their wives, they become wimps for God. Under such conditions, they cannot do anything BUT teach that rebellious wives must be tolerated by the rest of the community, in the same way that I tolerated my sons for so many years despite their rebelliousness. And the real reason that I tolerated them was because I was afraid of what my WIFE would think of me!

I don't hate women. God knows, I love my wife dearly. But the devil is always going to take the one you love most and use that person to pull you away from God; and we just cannot tolerate that any more. If any of our men get married and problems arise, we are going to insist that they bring their wives into line. You married men are going to be faced with the possibility that your wives will refuse to have sex with you or leave you if you try to take a hard line with them, and that is when you will find out both what your wives are made of and what you are made of. While you are operating under some perverted doctrine of grace, where you make no demands on your wives, you will never know what they are capable of spiritually. But when you lay down the law of God, they are either going to submit and become true followers of Christ, or they are going to rebel and show themselves to be agents of the devil. Certainly if any men in our community are considering marriage, it would be a lot easier to lay the law down now, when rebellion from the potential wife will leave you open to marry someone else some day, or better still, to be part of the virgin army.

Just ruling marriage out as a recommended option does not rule it out as a possibility. We will go ahead and perform marriage ceremonies for any consenting adults who have not been married before. But I am saying, as St. Paul said, that people who get married are going to be faced with incredible temptations that will very likely make them pretty much ineffectual for God. It may be that, in some hypothetical situation, God himself could actually ENCOURAGE a person to get married. But if that is true, then it is up to God to make it clear. The instructions we have from scripture are that it's better to stay single, and we should DISCOURAGE marriage as a general principle. If you can't handle being single, then go ahead, but, as Paul said, there are going to be problems (and one of them is that your wife is probably going to start nagging you for kids). In the meantime, let's start encouraging our little army of bachelors NOT to go looking for potential wives, but to go looking for more bachelors to add to the army. For you are the guys who are going to make our little cult most effective.

Virgin Army Part 2...

Back to End Time Prophecies...

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