Editor's Note: We are sharing this dream once again with you and have added this new drawing from our friend Scott Harshbarger on this dream. Thank you, Scott! You can view more of Scott's artwork here, check out his website here, and follow him on Facebook here.
Upon seeing this artwork, David Odegard's response was, "That is uncanny. Wow. Amazing."
I don’t claim that this a prophetic dream or anything, but several months ago, I fell asleep reading as I often do. I dreamed of a large hill with no real vegetation on it. As I looked closer I realized that it was a giant mudslide that was being held back by an incredible retaining wall made of cedar planks and pylons.
The pylons looked like sequoias. The planks were thick and roughhewn. It looked as though they could hold the mudslide for a thousand generations. Below the pylon and plank wall a fat little village sat filled with old houses. People were nonchalantly going about their business as though there wasn’t a deadly mudslide looming. I understood in my dream that it had been many generations since the pylon wall was built and everyone took for granted that it would always provide its benefits. It had been so long that most people were completely uninvolved with the pylon wall; it was just something that was always there from the time they were born till the time they died.
All fine. The villagers don’t have to understand the physics of pylon and plank walls to be secure. But as I looked, a few miles of the pylon wall had been completely washed out and mud covered a section of the village. People were dead under that mud, but none of the others noticed or cared. I thought, “How could those pylons have been broken?”
I set about examining the other pylons and what I found was shocking. Many of the pylons were rotted hollow, or were rotting underground. Many of them only looked strong, but they were weak. Much of the structure was about to be washed away by the mudslide. Some of the planks, too, were already broken, but they hadn’t given way because of the support of the other planks. Too many were broken, though, and it couldn’t last very many more years. How long until another complete section gave way? Why didn’t anyone care?
Now, whether this dream was sent to me from God or just the product of my own subconscious doesn’t really obscure the point. The mudslide is the inevitable disaster of judgment. It is restrained by the remains of a Christian culture which the villagers do not remember or understand. Christians of the past built a culture based in their belief in the New Testament. The intercessory prayers of God’s people may delay judgment, but the judgment of God is as inevitable as gravity (Nahum 1:3; Matthew 5:13). The timing may be flexible, but it is assuredly coming. Be warned.
God would simply not be just if he allowed bad people to “get away with it.” God will always do the right thing. If someone steals the money from an old lady’s bank account then finally gets caught, we rejoice when he goes to prison because justice has been done. Well, God is absolute in his sense of justice. He makes all things right. This is something he has revealed about himself.
Getting back to the dream, the pylons are the pastors and elders of the church. It is their job to intercede for everyone and preach the gospel (Acts 6:4). Most of the weight and responsibility is upon the pylons in the same way that the bulk of weight of the ministry is carried by pastors and elders. The planks do the actual work though. The pylons alone could not restrain the mud; the planks do that. But the pylons hold the planks in place. Together, each doing its part, it functions beautifully.
The bishops (regional directors or district superintendents whatever you want to call them—the pastor to the pastors, whatever) are supposed to pray and support the pastors. These guys are like pylon inspectors. If the pylons begin to rot, it is the inspectors’ job to pull them and replace them so that tragedy doesn’t ensue. Herein lies the rub: many church denominations just aren’t fulfilling this duty.
I think of the liberal denominations that are almost completely secular – those who believe that politics is the important arena, or who are willing to ordain actively homosexual ministers, or who water down the word of God through higher criticism or other means of dilution. These denominations were certainly ignoring the spiritual state of their pastors long before the denomination slid so far away from biblical Christianity.
We cannot settle for superficiality. Probe beneath the surface and you may find that there is a hollow corruption in great looking ministries. If you want to restrain the “flood of dissipation” in modern society, which is definitely one of the roles of the church (again, Matthew 5:13), then you must be strong in a real way. The inside must match the outside. And for goodness sake, leaders, if you see some weakness, address it. Pretending that the issues are not serious will not help anyone, especially the non-Christian world.
Whole denominations have been falling into apostasy. Every time the enemy is able to bring one of them under his control, it puts that much more pressure on the rest of the retaining wall to remain strong. Faithful Christians are under more strain than ever before in the West due to the failings of the liberal denominations. The world mocks Christianity and the apostates cheer them on. As Thousand Foot Krutch said, “Gimme one if you can feel it, two if its real and gimme three signs that your awake.”
Wake up! The world is burning. Will you laugh and play the violin like Nero? Or will you preach and pray like a Christian? “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration… in hope that the creation itself would be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the plains of child-birth up to the present time” (Romans 8:18-22).
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