isaiah

An Urgent Appeal to the Stubborn

/ JSB / 4 Comments

5 years ago, the American church rebelled against the judgments of the Lord in our land. In 2025, the Lord is shouting Isaiah 1 to us, telling us that our stubbornness is making us increasingly hostile towards Him and His end-times purposes on the earth.

“Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity… they have forsaken the Lord, they have turned away backward. Why should you be stricken again? You are blatant in your rebellion.” (Isaiah 1:4-5)

ROUND 1
In 2020, (through COVID, race-riots, and election controversy) the Lord brought numerous judgments to our American way of life. And although the purpose for His judgments was to reward, as well as refine, the American church’s response to these pressure-points was mostly “revolt” and “insurrection”. We did not learn to humble ourselves. We did not come to Him in need, in brokenness and repentance, and “learn righteousness” (which is what Isaiah 26:9 tells us the Lord’s judgments are meant to afford us). Instead we clothed ourselves in layers of conspiracy, concocting self-saving narratives that desensitized our hearts from righteousness, and caused us to “go backwards” (Isaiah 1:4) from the ways of the Lord.

ROUND 2
Two years ago, the Lord exposed hundreds of cases of spiritual and sexual abuse within the western church, bringing His purging fire upon an epidemic of corrupt leadership within His House. This judgment contained a corporate call to Joel 2 repentance unlike anything ever seen in American Christianity. And although Joel 1:2 exhorts “the elders” to lead the people to the place of honest humility, the majority-response of the fathers in the house was to point fingers, write reports, write self-saving rebuttals, hide, wrap ourselves in social media litigation, redact our histories, and rebrand. There was no trumpet set to the mouth. (Joel 2:1) and no concerted thrust to bring our family to the threshing floor of the Lord. It was a massive, and obstinate failure of leadership.

Throughout these many episodes, our family has resoundingly chosen pretense, over being purified. And the pretense we’ve allowed to germinate in our soul has become a petrie-dish of the devil.

ROUND 3
Consequently, in the fall of 2025, the Body of Christ in America finds herself proudly clothed in fig-leaves, instead of adorned with the sure mercies of the Lord – brandishing the counterfeit gospel of “hostile selfism”, that waves sin away without repentance, despises Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and refuses to bear a cross for His preeminent glory.

Our stiff-necked refusal to let the Lord deal with the reality of our perversion and unrighteousness, has left us tremendously defenseless to a delusional spirit. Without coming into the light of His holy gaze, our household has no way of discerning the beguiling trickery of the flesh, and she is left hostage to a ravenous lust for power, and supremacy within our society – spirits that always spell “insurrection” against the ways of Christ.

In the place where true prophets would pierce the spirits of the age, and call the church to surrender to the fear of the Lord, false prophets titillate the people of God with gilded promises designed to entrench them deeper and deeper in self-determined fantasy, and falsehood.

Last November, (2024) the Lord supernaturally visited our house of prayer with the message of Isaiah 1, and told us of a holy fire that was about to visit our land; a judgment from the Lord that would strike the people of God with even more intensity than those in 2020.

Contained within this Word of warning, the also Lord issued a gracious invitation from Isaiah 1:18-19, “Come now, and let us debate your case,” says the Lord, “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall become as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool.”

Over this past year, our house of prayer has taken the Lord up on His invitation, prayerfully allowing the Spirit to show us where and how His Words in this chapter apply to the sticky issues in our heart, and our family’s current relationship to the Lord.

In Isaiah 1, the Lord identifies the root essence of the people’s unbending refusal to come to Him in five ways…

1. He calls our stubbornness, a “BETRAYAL and REBELLION” (Isaiah 1:2-4) of the ways of the Lord. And to betray God, is always to fall in league with the enemy of our souls. Under the sway of a spirit of “betrayal”, we increasingly see the “commands of the Lord” (Matthew 28:20 essentials for all authentic disciples) as “optional”. And what becomes “optional” to us, ultimately gets twisted into being perceived as “inconvenient”, and “non-expedient”, until we are found in full disagreement with our King, and the ways of His Kingdom.

2. The Lord calls our stubbornness, a “CORRUPTION” (Isaiah 1:4) of our heart that keeps us from a tender, humble, and nimble responsiveness to the Word of the Lord. Being corrupted from His intimate counsel perverts and distorts our thinking and reasoning about any number of important Kingdom issues in our world. Not only are our views about righteousness corrupted, our relationship to others, and our witness to a curse-riddled world is corrupted, deficient, and lacking both transparent truth-telling, and vulnerable grace-giving.

3. The Lord calls our stubbornness, “SICKNESS” (Isaiah 1:5-6). This is a two-fold condition whereby being racked with a feverish, delusional disease, we don’t come to the Lord to let Him treat the wounds of our relational iniquities, or the sores that are eating away at our flesh. Consequently, our ways, that were meant to be healthy, warm, compassionate, and meek, become deformed, putrid, rigid and cold.

4. The Lord calls our stubbornness, “EVIL” (Isaiah 1:16). What began with “tolerance for the lesser of two evils”, has caused us to become blind and deaf to the evil of our own ways, to the point that, just like the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, we manifest a brooding defensiveness of the evil that we’ve allowed to grow up within ourselves.

5. The Lord calls our stubbornness to come to Him, “PROSTITUTION” (Isaiah 1:21). We refuse to come into the tent of the Father, precisely because we are still too busy entertaining other lovers who promise us security, adulation, comfort, and pleasure. We play “fast and loose” with our covenant to God, and His Son, assuming we can remain “married” to Him, while also joining ourselves to other men, movements, parties and ideologies…

Days ago, New Yorkers elected a virulent, antiZionist, Muslim man to become the mayor of America’s largest city. In Mamdani’s rise to power over a true “nerve-center” of our society – the home to our nation’s financial structure, I believe we’re witnessing the fulfillment of another portion of the Isaiah 1 prophecy. Unfortunately, even as many evangelical, orthodox, and Messianic leaders have rightly sounded the alarm about Zohran Mamdani (see *footnote quotes below), the accompanying “call to action” has (once again) been to fester in our hatred, and become more strident in our political opposition.

The Word of God clearly tells us that a big reason cities (ie. New York city) are DEVOURED and OVERTHROWN by STRANGERS (ie. Mr. Mamdani) is because the covenant people of God (ie. evangelical followers of Christ) resist God’s call to repentance, defend their EVIL ways, and refuse to let the Lord purge them of their rebellion, corruption, sickness, and evil prostitution.

“Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord… and their wounds have not been closed or bound up, or soothed with ointment…Therefore, your CITIES are DEVOURED BY STRANGERS in your presence; and they are DESOLATE, as OVERTHROWN BY STRANGERS.” (Isaiah 1:4, 6-7)

Stated clearly: the solution to the threat of radical Islam (as well as other dangers contained in Isaiah 1) isn’t so much dependent upon how the pagans vote in the election booth, as it is upon how the household of God does (or does not do) business with the Father on His threshing-floor.

Beloved. The Lord is saying: “If you will not allow me to break this stubbornness off of you, I promise, this stubbornness WILL break you.”

Throughout 1980, in defiance of all the seismologists warnings about the impending eruption of Mount St. Helens in southern Washington, one intransigent man named Harry R. Truman mulishly chose to remain in the life that he’d known on the side of the mountain, rather than be evacuated to safety. Inevitably, on the fateful day of May 8, the volcano exploded with the force of 1600 atomic bombs, forever burying Mr. Truman in ash.

This is a parable for the message of Joel, and Isaiah. Unless we push pause on our status quo, humble ourselves, and seek shelter within the mercy and ways of the Lord, our stubbornness will cause us to be swallowed up in the current fire that’s now upon us.

“Those who forsake the Lord shall be consumed… The strong shall be as tinder, and the work of it as a spark; both will burn together, and no one shall quench them.” (Isaiah 1:28, 31)

Is there hope? Absolutely. This short message is a call to true hope in the Word of the Lord. But our delusion has grown deep, pervasive and supernaturally headstrong. We will only live into that Spirit-borne hope as we embrace the place of abasement in the courts of the Holy One.

But we need to come. He will not tolerate a Bride who is filled with rebellion, corruption, sickness, evil and prostitution when He returns.

“Come now, and let us debate your case,” says the Lord, “Though your sins are as scarlet, they shall become as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool. 19 If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best of the land; 20 but if you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.” For the mouth of the Lord has spoken. (Isaiah 1:18-20)

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JSB • November (Edited), 2025

*FOUR NOTES RE: MAMDANI
ONE
Zhran Mamdani is a long-time member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which has openly, and often-stated its intent to enact the following extreme anti-Israel policies for the governing of New York City:
• Divest City pension funds from Israeli bonds and securities
• Withdraw City funds from banks that lend money to Israel or do business in Israel
• End City contracts with companies that do business with Israel
• Operate City-run grocery stores free from Israeli products
• Investigate real estate agents hosting illegal sales of stolen lands in the West Bank
• Evict weapons manufacturers and transporters from the NYC Metro Area
• Remove non-profit status from charities that raise funds for IDF
• Divest CUNY endowment and reinstate wrongly fired professors
• Dismantle Eric Adam’s NYC-Israel economic council
• End NYPD training with IOF End repression of demonstrators and the SRG
• Arrest Netanyahu and active IDF soldiers for war crimes

TWO
On October 8, 2023 (one day after the horrific October 7 attacks) Mamdani tweeted the following: “Statement on ongoing violence in Israel and Palestine: I mourn the hundreds of people killed across Israel and Palestine in the last 36 hours. Netanyahu’s declaration of war, the Israeli government’s decision to cut electricity to Gaza, and Knesset members calling for another Nakba will undoubtedly lead to more violence and suffering in the days and weeks to come. The path toward a just and lasting peace can only begin by ending the occupation and dismantling apartheid.”

THREE
Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove is the highly respected leader of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City’s Upper East Side. On Shabbat October 18, 2025 he gave what might be the most important sermon in his life. Here are some brief excerpts:
“To be clear, unequivocal, and on the record: I believe Zohran Mamdani poses a danger to the security of New York Jewish community. Mamdani’s refusal to condemn inciteful slogans like “globalize the intifada,” his denial of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, and his many long-standing calls to support BDS, make him a danger to the Jewish body politic of New York.
Zionism, Israel, Jewish self-determination – these are not political preferences or partisan talking points. They are constituent building blocks and inseparable strands of my Jewish identity. To accept me as a Jew but to ask me to check my concern for the people and State of Israel at the door is as nonsensical a proposition as it is offensive – no different than asking me to reject God, Torah, mitzvot, or any other pillar of my faith.
Mamdani’s distinction between accepting Jews and denying a Jewish state is not merely rhetorical sleight of hand or political naivete, though it is, to be clear, both of those things. His doing so is to traffic in the most dangerous of tropes, an anti-Zionist rhetoric that, as we have seen time and again – in Washington, in Colorado, in ways both small and large, online and in person – has given rise to deadly antisemitic violence. This past summer, you may recall, at the Glastonbury Music Festival in England, the crowd erupted into chants of “Death to the IDF.” Where exactly would a Mamdani administration stand should that happen next summer in a concert on Governors Island, or in Central Park? Today, as I have before, I am throwing a flag on the field and calling out a threat to the Jewish people five minutes early rather than risk being five minutes too late.”

FOUR
Mamdani is a “stranger” to the covenant promises of the God of the Bible. AND, he is a danger to the Jewish people, New York’s support of the Jewish state, and by extension, the purposes of the Christian’s “King”, Y’shua of Nazareth, as He marshals His return to the earth. The salient question for us is this: “WHY is this man now where he is?” More pointedly, “WHAT IS THERE IN US, that has put him in a place where he may “OVERTHROW” God’s purposes for the city of New York, the Jewish people, and Zion, the throne of Y’shua’s ultimate reign?“

The Vital Need for the House of Prayer in the Hour of the Judgments of the Lord

/ JSB / 1 Comment

Beloved. The only way the household of God will stand through this hour of judgment from the Lord re: idolatrous, political nationalism is NOT by becoming people who broadcast endless proof of the evil that fills our hallways of power – an evil our family is readily ingesting, and promoting. We will ONLY OVERCOME the strategies of hell’s stronghold being erected against His Kingdom as we, the church, become a people who are more enthralled with the God of Joshua, Isaiah, John the Baptist and Revelation, Who they meet in the tent of meeting, than the cadaverous god that is being conjured as a mascot by the court prophets, and the false shepherds.

We will neither perceive the nature of the delusion, nor overcome the various issues that are confronting our hearts, our relationships, and our fidelity to Christ, without becoming people of ardent prayer, who see what the angels see, and bow low to the eternal God of 300 trillion galaxies.

If prayer isn’t an integral pattern of your daily life right now, you already are being spun by the god of this age, and will not traverse the fearful way of the Lord through this hour of monumental tribulation.

Hear the Word of the Lord through Isaiah 28
“Therefore, listen to the Lord’s message, you who scorn and boast – For you say, ‘We have made a treaty with death, with Sheol we have made an agreement. When the overwhelming judgment sweeps by it will not reach us. For we have made a lie our refuge, we have hidden ourselves in a deceitful word’.” (Isaiah 28:14-15)

The rest of Isaiah’s message can only be heard and appropriated in our lives, families, churches, and culture by giving ourselves to being the people of the tabernacle of God.

“16 Therefore, this is what the Sovereign Lord, says: ‘Look, I am laying a stone in Zion, an approved stone, set in place as a precious cornerstone for the foundation. The one who maintains his faith will not panic.” (Isaiah 28:16) 

The judgments of the Lord isn’t merely about Him rebuking a wayward people, He’s setting the order of His Son in place upon the earth so that the peoples of the earth can either agree with this administrative order, or faithlessly disagree with this administrative order. When we agree with this heavenly order – the order of the King – our hearts can be set at peace – though they be greatly constrained by the demands of faithfully heralding the true prophetic Word of the Lord to a deaf, and deluded people. When we surrender to the One Who is bringing His order of stability to our world, we can be filled with the peaceable fruits of righteousness – which is the administrative order of King, Jesus – even though we know that the setting in place of this eternal Kingdom will cause great great disruption on the earth.

“17 I will make justice the measuring line, fairness the plumb line; hail will sweep away the unreliable refuge, the floodwaters will overwhelm the hiding place. 18 Your treaty with death will be dissolved; your agreement with Sheol will not last. When the overwhelming judgment sweeps by, you will be overrun by it. 19 Whenever it sweeps by, it will overtake you; indeed, every morning it will sweep by, it will come through during the day and the night.” (Isaiah 28:17-19)

Again. The Lord’s promise to establish His Son’s order upon the earth, will greatly disrupt the paradigms of men and demons. When God arises, His enemies are about to be scattered – often with alarming tumult, and typhoons of chaos. It’s pure foolishness to think that when the Lord’s storm comes to the earth, (and we are already being tossed by the early winds) we will automatically stand securely, because we have a “theology of security”, though we have never parsed the ways and means, and details of the beautiful roots of that security in the place of much prayer, and dialogue with the Spirit over scripture.

“When this announcement is understood, it will cause nothing but terror. 20 For the bed is too short to stretch out on, and the blanket is too narrow to wrap around oneself. 21 For the Lord will rise up, as He did at Mount Perazim; He will rouse himself, as He did in the Valley of Gibeon, to accomplish His work, His peculiar work, to perform His task, His strange task.” (Isaiah 28:19-21) 

Who is able to say, “Lord, bring the fulness of Your Presence, even though it comes with great terror…”??? Only the one who has been terrified by the Lord in the secret place; in the crevice of the Lord, as His glory has passed by, and then discovered that he/she has not been destroyed in the process. This is the necessary strength that can only be cultivated and accumulated in the place of face to Face encounter with the Living God of Mount Sinai, and the transfiguration.

“22 So now, do not mock, or your chains will become heavier! For I have heard a message about decreed destruction, from the Sovereign Lord of Heaven’s Armies against the entire land. 23 Pay attention and listen to my message. Be attentive and listen to what I have to say!” (Isaiah 28:22-23) 

There is no place for mockery in the household of God. In the Presence of the Lord, all forms of ridicule and scorn is irreverent “racca”… making one guilty of hell-fire itself. (See Matthew 5:22) The work being done within ourselves in the tabernacle of the Lord will produce a holy sobriety of the spirit, that knows full well the disastrous consequences that will come to those who do not avail themselves of the Lord’s summons to His threshing floor.

“24 Does a farmer just keep on plowing at planting time? Does he keep breaking up and harrowing his ground? 25 Once he has leveled its surface, does he not scatter the seed of the caraway plant, sow the seed of the cumin plant, and plant the wheat, barley, and grain in their designated places? 26 His God instructs him; He teaches him the principles of agriculture. 27 Certainly caraway seed is not threshed with a sledge, nor is the wheel of a cart rolled over cumin seed. Certainly caraway seed is beaten with a stick, and cumin seed with a flail. 28 Grain is crushed, though one certainly does not thresh it forever. The wheel of one’s wagon rolls over it, but his horses do not crush it.” (Isaiah 28:24-28) 

The one who goes into the tabernacle of the Lord will soon learn there is nothing more necessary, needful, efficacious and life-giving than for the human spirit to seek out, receive, and perceive encounter with the Holy One. This is where the wisdom that is necessary to navigate the hour of tribulation is given. Nowhere else.

“29 This also comes from the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, Who gives supernatural guidance and imparts great wisdom.” (Isaiah 28:29)

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JSB • September, 2025