Naomi and her husband and two sons left home and moved to Moab because there was a famine in Bethlehem. Consider the literal meaning of the Hebrew name of their hometown: Bethlehem means "house of bread." The reason they left the house of bread is that there was no bread in the house. It's simple, why people leave churches—there's no bread. Bread was part of the temple practices as well; it was proof of His presence—the showbread, the bread of the presence. Bread has always been the one thing historically that was an indicator of His presence. We find in the Old Testament that bread in the form of the showbread was in the Holy Place. It was called "the bread of the Presence" (Num. 4: 7 NRSV). Showbread might better be interpreted as "show up bread," or in the Hebraic terms, "face bread." It was a heavenly symbol of God Himself.
Naomi and her family have something in common with the people who leave or totally avoid our churches today—they left "that" place and went somewhere else to try to find bread. I can tell you why people are flocking to the bars, the clubs, and the psychics by the millions. They're just trying to get by; they are just trying to survive because the Church has failed them. They looked, or their parents and friends looked and reported, and the spiritual cupboard was bare. There was no presence in the pantry; just empty shelves and offices full Of recipes for bread. But the oven was cold and dusty.
We have falsely advertised and hyped-up our claims that there is bread in our house. But when the hungry come, all they can dois scrounge through the carpet for a few crumbs of yesteryears* revivals. We talk grandly about where He has been and what He has done, but we can say very little about what He is doing among us today. That isn't God's fault; it is ours. We have only remnants of what used to be—a residue of the fading glory. And unfortunately, we keep the veil of secrecy over that fact. much in the same way Moses kept the veil over his face after the shine of -glory dust- faded. (See 2 Corinthians 3: 13 NW.) We camouflage our emptiness like the priesthood in Jesus' day kept the veil in place with no ark of the covenant behind it.
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God may have to "pierce" the veil of our flesh to reveal our (the Church's) inner emptiness also. It's a pride problem—we point with pride to where He has been (protecting the temple tradition) while we deny the obviously apparent -glory- of the Son of God.
The religious spirits of Jesus' day didn't want the populace to realize that there was no glory behind their veil. Jesus' presence presented problems. Religious spirits must preserve where He's been at the expense of where He is!
But a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with only an argument. "All I know is I was blind but now I see!- (See John 9:25.) If we can lead people into the manifest presence of God. all false theological houses of cards will tumble down.
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Yet we wonder why people hardly bow their heads when they come in our meetings and places of worship. has the fear of God gone?" we cry like A.W. Tozer. People don't sense God's presence in our gatherings because it's just not there sufficiently enough to register on our gauges. This, in turn, creates another problem. When people get just a little touch of God mixed with a lot of something that is not God, it inoculates them against the real thing. Once they've been "inoculated" by a crumb of God's presence, then when we say, "God really is here"; they say, "No, I've been there, done that. I bought that T-shirt, and I didn't find Him; it really didn't work for me." The problem is that God was there all right, but not enough Of Him! There was no experience of meeting Him at the Damasct1S road. There was no undeniable, overwhelming sense of His manifest presence.
People have come to the House of Bread time and again only to find there was simply too much of man and tm little of Gm there.
Almighty One is out to restore the sense of His awesome manifest presence in our lives and places of worship. Over and over we talk about the glory of God covering the earth, but how is it going to flow through the streets of our cities if it can't even flow down the aisles of our churches? It's got to start somewhere, and it's not going to start out "there." It must start in "here"! It must start at -the temple.- as Ezekiel wrote. "...I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple..." (Ezek. 47: 1 NIV).
If God's glory can't flow through the aisles of the church because of seducing spirits and manipulating men, then God will have to turn somewhere else as He did the day Jesus rode past -the house Of bread" (temple) in Jerusalem on a donkey. If there is no bread in the house, then I don't blame the hungry for not going there! I wouldn't!