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The Two Witnesses – Elijah

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The Two Witnesses – Elijah The Two Witnesses – Elijah Open your bible to the Old Testament. This is another message concerning the two witnesses and not the two witnesses as defined by Christian science fiction preachers. I’ve been preaching using Enoch as the first example, and now Elijah, demonstrating they aren’t the two witnesses. Christian science fiction prophesy preachers, and pastors who don’t focus on prophesy, have been brainwashed to believe that the two witnesses will either be Enoch or Elijah, Enoch and Moses, Elijah and Moses, or some combination of those three. It’s not going to be anyone of the three. I’ve already preached that to be the case. Now we are going to look at Elijah in the Old Testament. Anyone who preaches on the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation, for the most part, will say it is Enoch and Elijah because they believe they didn’t die. I think I have already proven that Enoch did die. Once you act as a biblical detective and dig through God’s Word to find out the truth, it never says that he didn’t die. God’s Word doesn’t say that. And if he didn’t die and ascended into the heaven, then it goes against everything that Jesus said. And of course, they said the same thing about Elijah: he didn’t die and went up in a whirlwind up to heaven. There is only one problem with that. About 850-900 years after Elijah was taken up in that whirlwind, Jesus came along and said in John 3:13, “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, the Son of man which is in heaven.” Is the Bible contradicting itself? Did Elijah really ascend up to heaven, up to God’s throne? Jesus said no one did. Is Jesus a liar? So if Elijah didn’t go up to heaven, then where did he go? Where did that whirlwind take him? Good question! But I’m more concerned that if Jesus said no one ever ascended up to heaven up to that point in time, almost 900 years after Elijah went up in that whirlwind, and the church world is preaching that he went up to heaven, then something is wrong because either you are calling Jesus a liar, or you are preaching something that you should know better but don’t, because the two don’t add up. Something is going to have to give somewhere. The only thing that is going to give is eventually knowing the truth, not fable, not seminary fable, not lazy preachers that just take what has been preached for the last couple hundred years and make that a gospel in itself. Where did Elijah go then? I will take Jesus’ word every day that no one ascended up to heaven up to that point. That means Enoch and it also means Elijah. If I’m not going to take Jesus’ words for it, then why even do this? Close up shop. Close my Bible, put it all away, or get rid of it completely because it is all one big fantasy, fable, or lie, or it just has never been understood by people that are responsible to make it understandable if they are truly called to preach and truly called to teach. I tell people, “You want to be a preacher? You don’t even know what you want.” If you think you can preach everything that you’ve been taught or heard, and all of a sudden you become a preacher because you learned how to memorize all that stuff you’ve heard over the years, then I have news for you: Unless you are willing to take a second look and be your own biblical detective letting the Holy Spirit guide you and not twist or drift far from God’s Word at all, don’t even think about it. All you become is another voice in the wilderness that keeps people in the wilderness. Good intentions, but not truly called to do it. That is harsh but it is the truth. More true now than ever. If Elijah isn’t in heaven, the question then is where did he go? The first thing you need to understand is in Scripture we can find three heavens or what are described as heavens. Not just one, three. So which one of those three was Elijah taken to? That is a better question. We know the third heaven is where God exists. I know He is everywhere, but His throne is the third heaven where Jesus, our High Priest, is today at the right hand of the Father. The second heaven represents the expanse of the universe. Every week that goes by, it seems like it is expanding at a greater rate than we even imagined. It seems to be almost incomprehensible, when they put the figure behind it, how vast this universe is. The second heaven is where we find the sun, stars, comets, planets, and the moon. That would be considered the second heaven in Scripture. But besides the heaven of stars, we find that there is an atmosphere. The air surrounding the atmosphere of this world, planet earth, is also called a heaven in Genesis 1:20, “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.” So, even the fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. When God blessed Isaac through Jacob, he also mentions a blessing that dew would come from the first heaven. Moses also rejoiced about the dew that would fall from the first heaven. It’s also in the Genesis record. The first heaven which this dew comes from that you see several different characters mention in the Old Testament, especially the early days of the Old Testament period, means the atmosphere where the wind is blowing around, where we see clouds, it is the first heaven. Everyone is breathing air from the first heaven. So the third heaven is the throne of God; the second heaven is the vast expanse of the universe; and then the atmosphere in the inner part of that as the first heaven. Three heavens. We say we want to be in heaven. Well, you better be more specific. Do you want to be in the first heaven, the second heaven, or the third heaven? We just take things for granted with our speech. “Oh I can’t wait for this to be all over and I get to heaven.” Do you plan to go to outer space, because that is the second heaven? Think about it. Now according to John 3 and according to Jesus’ own words, there is no way Elijah could have gone to that third heaven, to God’s throne, or else Jesus is made to be a liar. I’m sorry if that upsets your thinking of what you thought to be the truth, but then if it does and you want to believe it, then you are calling Jesus a liar. Not me, you! But there is no doubt about it in II Kings 2:1, “And it came to pass, when the LORD would take up Elijah into heaven by a whirlwind, that Elijah went with Elisha from Gilgal.” And in verse 11 it says, “And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” If you really think about it, the answer isn’t like it’s hidden and we can’t figure this out. It’s quite obvious. Scripture says, “Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.” It doesn’t say Elijah went up by a whirlwind into the third heaven, does it? No. All it says is that he went up by a whirlwind into heaven. It could easily mean that he went up into the earth’s atmosphere as he was taken away, which means the first heaven. Even though we don’t want to limit God and what He can do, and I’m not trying to do that, but having the basic information that we do know—(Let’s just call it whirlwinds even though there is other scientific climate titles to them)—you really don’t find anyone in the science world that studies the climates, or even the vast expanse in the universe referring to a whirlwind outside of inner space and located in outer space somewhere. The conclusion then could only mean that the whirlwind Elijah experienced is in the atmosphere surrounding this planet earth, surrounding the first heaven where the birds fly, being there could be no whirlwind in any other place. The amazing part is that he was kept alive in the great lifting up of this whirlwind. I think he was still alive after wherever this whirlwind took him, wherever he landed, and he was not dead even though that could be a possibility too, but I don’t think so. So why did God do this? Why did such an unusual different kind of act from God take place? Why did He take Elijah up into the atmosphere? I don’t think He took him up into the atmosphere to make him immortal, which doesn’t really make sense because, how did that happen? Then anybody that ever gets in a rocket and takes off into space would be immortal.
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