The Children of God

That August of 1970, David and Maria left the ranch in Texas to drive to New York to make preparations for their advance scouting team (the two of them) to Europe. Arriving in New York with little money to spare, they bought a little tent and camped out the whole time they were there making their arrangements.

One night during the trip David became terribly ill, having the most severe heart attack he had had in years, and was almost discouraged from even making the trip.

He said later, “I found that God usually gives me the most severe test, allows the Enemy to tempt and test me the worst, just as I’m considering or am about to begin a new task for Him or a new project. We have the most difficult trials and the most severe testings because God wants to know if you’re really going to go through with it, live or die, sink or swim, whether you really mean business, whether you’re really going to trust Him or not, and whether you have really got what it takes to see it through. After that, it’s not nearly as hard as we are afraid it is going to be.”

God gave him the victory, and on September 10, 1970, they boarded an Icelandic Airways propjet and took off for Europe as planned. One of the reasons for going was to get firsthand information from personal observation in preparation for the invasion of Europe with the Revolution for Jesus. But the major reason for going was to check out Israel in preparation for establishing a major colony in that country—a move made as a result of many prophecies and revelations received by David and others.

Being part Jewish, David had always almost worshipped the physical land of Israel. So he was really expecting heaven on earth when he arrived in Israel. But upon arriving in Israel, he received a revelation that physical Israel was not a place where Christianity, much less the COG, would be nurtured, which was so contrary to David’s previous conceptions, that they experienced very hard and trying times there. The Lord took his misconceptions and dashed them to pieces.

“It was like death! But because I cried out to God, it was also like a miraculous birth and glorious resurrection! I had been entombed in the flesh and in the energy of the flesh, but suddenly I was born again into a world of the Spirit such as I had never known before! I would say it was the greatest crisis of my life. I thank God for all the other crises, but God had to give me all those others to prepare me for that death, to help me over the Dead Sea at which I was soon to arrive.

“If it had not been for that, and for God speaking through me and giving me the answer, I wouldn’t have survived. If nothing else, I would have died of shame and embarrassment! Here I was supposed to be a prophet of God, and yet to be so deceived!

“But because I cried out to God, it was not the end, but it was the beginning of a ministry I never dreamed of! Then God revealed to me the spiritual realities which he was trying to show me all the time: that my ministry was not to be that of a great and flaming evangelist or great personal leader speaking before great multitudes in person. But I would go into total seclusion and through that God would create a greater revolution than I could have ever thought of!”

David said that God had made him cross the Jordan early in order to prepare the COG through his instruction and revelations via the written word so that the disciples would be able to go in and possess the kingdom—not Fred Jordan’s ranch, or the physical kingdom of Israel, but the mighty, all-powerful kingdom of God throughout the world, in the hearts of those who would accept it!

In Israel David found to his dismay that he had applied all the prophecies given before he left, and the promises God had made in the Bible, to flesh-and-blood Israel, and that was not what God was talking about at all! “They were meant for us,” he said. “Some are yet unfulfilled and either had a spiritual meaning as applied to us, His children, His spiritual Israel, His New Jerusalem, His Promised Land, the kingdom of God, or are yet to be fulfilled at a later date, during the very last days or the Millennium.”

The Lord had to almost crush David, and did drive him into exile so that he could write what was needed. He removed him from the few disciples he lived with so that he could be available to many through his writings. David began to send back an almost endless stream of inspirational, revelatory, and instructional letters to the disciples.