The Shekinah Construction Company and the Cave - A Church Parable of the last 50 years to the Present Day

My friend Dan (or maybe another Dan) watched from his window as a helicopter descended upon a rough craggy hill a long way in the distance. He could vaguely make out three pallet loads being lowered onto the ground in front of a cave which was hidden in the rocks somewhere near the hilltop. Some people on the ground were then attending to the items and wheeling them into the cave for storage.This all happened in the evening and by morning there seemed to be no trace of anyone working around the outside of the cave.

Then Billy Graham made his way up the hill, peered inside the cave, saw one of the pallets, and made his way down the hill with a pallet truck carrying what he thought was all that was needed for the job in hand. On the first pallet was stacks and stacks of thousands and thousands of invitations, freshly printed.

The Invitation read:

"You are requested to be present at a Shekinah Glory event that will last forever and ever."
The slightly annoying thing about the invitation was the vagueness in time details. The invitation seemed to point mostly to a future date, but did  include some contemporary details, however nobody could agree firmly on them.

Some time later, waves of other Shekinah construction workers came. 
There was Morris Cerullo. Winkie Pratney of Youth With a Mission. There was Benny Hinn. Rheinhardt Bonnke, many others. 

These all peered further into the cave and noticed two pallet loads. The first one as mentioned…but also a second one with perhaps the most important load in terms of content: It turned out to be the Ark of the Covenant with the very Glory of God actually above it. 

This proved very popular because people liked the fact that now the invitations pointed to something that appeared to start now, and went on for ever. The Shekinah celebrations were fantastic and even larger quantities of people were affected as these men all went on the road with their teams. By now also it was easier to teach other workers because the process was made easier by having more than just invitations to study and hand out. There was the real Ark to gaze  and be amazed at, and participate in. 

They discovered the fastest way to carry the Shekinah glory was on a brand new cart pulled by oxen.This had the convenience that the work was done for you, but it also maintained a nice link with the traditions of the past, that everyone admired.
Oxen,you see, added the needed gravitas to the whole affair. 

 Terry Virgo and Rob Rufus would simply pitch up in a new city, bring a crowd of people with them,skilled in the contents of the two pallets, wheel out the Shekinah and within a few weeks or a couple of years at most they had built "warehouses of the grace of God ", like PCWorld scattered all over the globe. Che Ahn was brilliant at this, so was Yonghi Cho. It was so impressive.

Just one thing though. One thing nobody seemed to notice. Dan had seen three pallet loads being put into the cave. A young man called Todd Bentley became aware that there were in fact three pallet loads in the cave and began wheeling the 3^rd one out of the back of the cave for inspection. It was the Florida Revival. Something new was happening!

Todd became increasingly irritated with the other men who had gone before, but he found it difficult to put his finger on why. Because, as they all assured him, they had the invitations, and the most important thing of all, the very Shekinah of God. Joseph Prince was really adamant about this. So Todd , although aware of the third pallet, never actually got to unload it properly and just buckled down, as instructed by Wagner, Che Ahn and others who were on TV, to a daily maintenance check of the new cart.

Todd had more and more trouble with his personal problems. Somehow the grace that Rob Rufus and Joseph Prince were talking about was not helping him as he was driving the cart forward. Rob Rufus, Joseph Prince and many others made encouraging noises to do with Romans Chapters 3,4,5 and 8. Dan wondered to himself, if Todd Bentley had been instructed properly about the contents and usage of the third pallet by his mentors from the beginning, whether he would have had so much trouble.He also noticed that New Cart preachers never went through Romans 6 and 7 properly.

Instead,every time Todd Bentley had personal problems, all would ask about his Cart maintenance schedule.( In fact all the previous apostles of the Shekinah Glory (ON THE CART INC), gathered round Todd at one point, to officially recognise him as a full OX CART evangelist as if he had been an OXCART Fellow Seminarian.) Todd pointed out that his Cart schedule was already pretty hefty, working out at 5 hours. The others reminded him that Benny Hinn thought 6 hours was necessary and carried on driving their own carts forward.

Pretty soon , as with all previous revivals, sooner or later the cart hit a severe bump and Todd was reprimanded very firmly by some and beaten into the ground by others. But the one thing that Dan noticed was that nobody had even mentioned that the third pallet had made a brief if somewhat unexplored appearance in front of the cave.

Dan went out of his house to take a closer look. When he arrived at the cave, in the darkness he could see that the Zerubbabel group (http://www.zpress.org/newsletter/) had already taken the cover off the pallet and were already working with the content quietly and unnoticed. What on earth was it? It appeared to be two long wooden poles or something. He asked them what they were going to do with the two poles? Were they going to carry the Ark of the Testimony with it? They said they didn’t believe in the experience of the second pallet. But they were gilding the poles quietly and that they would be happy with that and handing out invitations from the first pallet. (Rob Rufus had told Dan not to have anything to do with the poles. That’s New Age he said. I used to see fakirs sitting on top of them before I was converted. Have nothing to do with the third pallet Dan. It’s all grace and oxcarts now.)

Dan asked Zerubbabel,” But what about Che Ahn? Rob Rufus, Joseph Prince? Morris Cerullo, Benny Hinn? Youth With A Mission? “ “Never heard of them”, they replied. “Are they people on TV? We don’t do TV. And we believe the gold on the poles is everywhere, and that is enough for us.”

Dan was a bit shocked. Also he could see a long and protracted debate going on between them and people like Madame Guyon, and Mother Basilea Schlink, R.Edward Miller , Ruth Heflin, and Gene Edwards. They were all saying the poles should be called brokenness, like the pole that Jacob leaned on, and the staff that Moses had which budded. But Zerubbabel were adamant that these poles of the Christ Life within had now superceded everything else, because they reversed the original root problem in Genesis 3:5. So Dan went away totally bemused.

He thought to himself: "Rob Rufus , Terry Virgo ,Joseph Prince, Morris Cerullo, Che Ahn all had the second pallet, but hadn’t much clue about how the third pallet contents worked, or weren’t entirely sure of the pallet's existence. Because after all, it was grace, and the New Covenant! All you needed to do was drive a new cart around with the songs ,message and contents of the first and second pallet.  

Zerubbabel were familiar with the third pallet as were many others from the past, but didn’t feel it had any connection with the 2^nd pallet. Which was a bit odd...since the poles were only made to operate with the other pallets. They just liked the poles as they were, now gilded. And Todd Bentley was sitting in the corner of the cave confused, somewhat battered, and believing that somehow there was a way that all three pallets could be used together, so they could do away with the rather rubbish new cart way of pushing the glory of God around."

I SUBMIT THIS FOR DISCUSSION

The Basis of the Florida references comes from a report that was sent me surrounding the last weeks, that I have also sent Dan Bowen. Both Christine and I have been puzzling over the different strands of things that were taking place in Florida.