“After these things Jesus went over the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias. Then a great multitude followed Him, because they saw His signs which He performed on those who were diseased. And Jesus went up on the mountain, and there He sat with His disciples.” (John 6: 1-3)

When Jesus saw the multitude coming, what did He do? He went up the mountain and sat there with His disciples. If there is one theme that has common to what the Holy Spirit is saying to the churches through His prophets today, it is that the multitudes are coming. There will be a revival such as the world has never seen before. Smith Wigglesworth prophesied it in 1947; Rick Joyner had seen it when he published The Harvest in 1997; Jarrod Cooper saw it in 1996 and wrote about it in Days of Wonder. Many less well-known prophets all around the world have had visions and words about this coming revival.

The multitudes are coming. Are we ready? As Smith Wigglesworth wrote (his prophesy is published in many places online), the prophesied glory will be nothing like the world has known. The glory of God has flickered briefly throughout the ages, but the new wine has always burst the old wineskin. In the past there was still hope in the world systems. There have always been signs of decay, but the grass was green, the water flowed, economies grew, and families looked forward: the future held promise. But today is different. The environment that seemed strong enough to bear the weight of its increasing population is now as fragile as wet paper, the debt-ridden international economy has about the strength of a cobweb, the most powerful nation in the world is governed by a senile old man, and moral confusion is so rife not even the basic polarities of gender are no longer a certainty in a child’s world. The multitude are coming, because promise has gone from the world.

Where do we go? Do we shore up our Church systems to prepare ourselves (or maybe, in some cases, to hide…)? Do we run to meet them in missionary fervour? Do we build great platforms from which we can address the crowds? No. We go up the mountain and we sit down with Jesus. We wait in His presence, and while we are waiting, we renew our strength and learn what it is to rise up on Eagles wings, because when the multitudes arrive He will give us our instructions, and one thing that we can be certain of is this: whatever He tells us to do it will not be what we expect, and it will be nothing that can be bought from the world, any more than the disciples could have bought enough bread from the local villages. Nobody will minister to the crowds from a platform built by human hands.

Jesus is bringing a revelation of His glory to the Church. He is God, through whom the worlds were made; whereas “all the glory of man is as the flowers of the grass,” (Ps 103:15) and even the nations are “like a drop in a bucket, and are reckoned as dust on the scales.” (Isaiah 40:15) God will provide for the multitudes out of His glory, in the presence of which our greatest achievements are less than dust. All we can bring to Jesus is our faith and our thankful love, and our desire for His presence above all things.  He told the disciples to make the people sit down, even though they had still had nothing in their hands to give them, and they obeyed in faith.  Then He gave thanks for the loaves and fishes, and handed them to His disciples to feed the crowd.

Up on the mountain, Jesus is fashioning a new wineskin that will not burst. The multitude will be fed by the insignificant in the hands of the glorious, distributed by the obedient.