Go! Set a Watchman

By Thomas Greaves

All of us have a God-given calling. Our faith is not a passive one. We are purposed for the action of great and mighty deeds. We are called to advance against an unseen enemy, take the high ground, and take back lost territory in the spiritual realm. Are you a prayer warrior? A watchman standing in the night hours when it is not easy to stand in this present darkness that seems too willing to overtake us if we fall asleep spiritually. Are you a prayer warrior? A watchman or watchwoman standing on the frontlines when it is not easy and the dawning of God's coming seems far away. Learn how to take on these spiritual dark forces head-on. Ever wanted to be in God's special forces for the breaking of spiritual strongholds? You must be an open instrument for God's purposes to flow through you. If you are clogged with the worldly things of this life, you will not be able to send a clear message to those who need to hear the good news. Learn the ways of the ancient watchman that are just as vital in this modern age. Learn how God has used the shofar horn from Mount Sinai to the far reaches of this modern age by taking that trumpet sound outside the walls of your congregations. We all need to protect ourselves by putting on the full armor of God in order to be ready for the greatest of special operations missions--when we are all suddenly taken off the battlefield at the trumpet call of God's shofar horn at the rapture of believers. The stories are all true, and now I see that when I was in my mother's womb, God said, "Go, set a watchman."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886447583

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

1: The Calling of a Watchman

2: The Watchman

3: Weapon of War—the Shofar

4: The TSA Loves the Shofar

5: Piercing the Darkness

6: The Tallit—the Mantle of Kings and Priests

7: By Divine Appointment

8: Journey to the Center of the Universe

9: Days of Elijah

10: And in the End

11: Anointing Oil

About the Author

cover.jpg

Go! Set a Watchman

Thomas Greaves

ISBN 979-8-88644-757-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88644-903-7 (Hardcover)

ISBN 979-8-88644-758-3 (Digital)

Copyright © 2023 Thomas Greaves

All rights reserved

Second Edition

All Bible scriptures are taken from New American Standard Bible, Zondervan Spirit-Filled Life Bible, New King James, Nelson, The Watchman in Scripture.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

To the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our coming King and Messiah

To Rabbi Jonathan Cahn, for the awesome leadership, mentorship, friendship, and bringing us deeper in the Word and uncovering the deeper mysteries that Yeshua has placed in the Holy Scriptures for us to seek out and, in God's awesomeness, connecting the dots for us in mysteries to seek out and reveal in God's perfect timing

To Pastor Perry Stone, for your taking us deeper into God's prophetic messages to us

To my Maria, Andrew, and Susannah, you have blessed me more than I can express in words.

To Mom, who inspired me in the gifts of the Spirit, the prayer language, and the precursor to my picking up God's trumpet—the shofar

To my fellow Shofar Watchmen standing on the wall at Beth Israel Congregation, Charles M., Mario M., Arnaldo A., Ismael Z, and Luis S.,

Colonel Shalom Almog of Coral Tours

Expert Israeli guide—Guy Leibowitz

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, for their leadership and moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem, the Eternal Capital

My brother in Yeshua—Chad Johnson

1

The Calling of a Watchman

It all started on a seventy-two-acre farm in Upstate New York on the rolling mountains near Watkins Glen. My parents were active in the First Baptist Church near the southern end of Seneca Lake. This is wine country. I remember I was six or seven years young when my mother asked me if I wanted to ask Jesus into my heart and the words I spoke were, I know Jesus. I love Jesus! I still have the first Bible I ever had. It has a painting of Jesus with all these children sitting around Him as our loving Savior. In my mind's eye, I can see the water baptism pool at the First Baptist Church there, the rich wood tones of the church pews and the red carpeting and the pastor dunking me underneath the waters. Our family moved to a Christian dude ranch in Northwestern Pennsylvania called the Miracle Mountain Ranch. My parents were the hired ranch hands to Pastor Limbaugh who ran the Western-style ranch as a Christian retreat center with country cabins, riding horses and cattle. It was here that my mother would start speaking in a strange language that really sounded out of this world, and it was a Holy Spirit language. We would go to praise and worship meetings, and at one of these, there was a report of a young ranch hand being injured after his tractor overturned. She ran out to see him and, when she got back, stated that the young man had broken his arm and that my mother had prayed over him, and his arm was healed right there. I was amazed by this Jesus that we could pray to and supernaturally heal the sick and injured.

I remember going to a Baptist church in Horseheads, New York, with my Uncle Phil and Aunt Mary and cousins Tim and Tina, watching the pastor preach to us on Sundays. On one service, I remember thinking that I really could not see myself growing up to be a preacher or pastor of a church and asking God if there was anything else I could do as I did not feel any calling to preach or lead a congregation. Little did I know at that time what marvelous things that God was grooming me for. My mother had started taking my sister and me to a Lutheran church as she was in pursuit of knowing God closer and wanted a deeper walk as did we all. As it turned out, we found out from the pastor that the catechism class, as a symbol of learning, had just finished the most recent class and would have to wait in order to properly join at the age of thirteen. My mother insisted that I be given the chance to take the final exam anyway. Pastor Larson agreed and, within the hour, had aced the test to the great surprise of our new Pastor Larson.

In the middle nineteen seventies, my mother would take my sister and me on many road trips across the country. It was a great time to fellowship in the Lord during these lengthy drives. At some point, my mother would be praying and singing out loud, literally taking the praise and worship on the road where ever we went, and I noticed that these prayers out loud would sound like a foreign language, but more precisely, it was a prayer language. To the casual listener's ear, it would sound like a rapid-fire Morse code of utterings that make no sense in the human world. This was a high-speed prayer line right to the very throne room of God. It's a holy prayer language known by many who go deeper in their walk with God Himself. I was a front-seat witness to all of these prayers and continually astonished at all the things God was revealing. My own prayer language skills would not manifest itself until years later. At first, I did not know what these crazy-sounding voiced prayers were, and I likely dismissed the Holy Spirit promptings at earlier times in my walk just because I did not know what to make of this and how to process this new thing in my brain. It was not until years later that it returned to me. Usually, these times when the Holy Spirit would be able to work with me would be after a long day on the road for work and your mind is much more open to the Spirit than at other times. Your mouth just goes on its own power, rapid-fire prayers, and groanings; and as long as you have breath, they would keep on coming.

A few years passed during this time, I was very interested in aircraft and airplanes, wanting to work on them and fly them. In school, for an art class assignment, I made a four-foot-wide F4U Corsair made out of balsa wood and crepe paper, inspired by books such as God Is My Co-Pilot and Black Sheep Squadron led by Pappy Boyington. As it turned out, my eyesight was too bad for pilot training, and I looked at the Air Force Academy but did not want to wait for my congressman to get nominated for the next season of new cadets. I instead just signed up and picked an interesting job description called Avionic Sensor Systems. It turned out to be the best job I could have chosen as it would turn out to be on the leading edge of smart weapons that are so prevalent now. I had the best of all worlds of technology using infrared night vision cameras, targeting lasers, and tactical radar systems.

At this time, I could not see what calling God had for me, but He was grooming and preparing me for greater things that I would not know of until much later. It was not until my second tour to South Korea and being stationed at Osan Air Base that the Holy Spirit prompted me to seek out what was then the largest Protestant church in the world and that was the Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea. Led by Pastor Paul Yonggi Cho, this gigantic church could fit five thousand people in one sitting, and not only that, but it would also have five services each and every Sunday.

It was at one of these services in my young adult life of twenty-eight that I found myself weeping and crying even though I thought to myself that I was not thinking of anything sad, and I knew it was the Holy Spirit coming upon me for the very first time in my memory. Oh, what a wonderful feeling of His peace and His Holy presence. It was like being gifted with the keys to the very throne room of God. From then on, every church had to be Holy Spirit filled. My mother came to visit our home in Korea with a special fare from the military. During her stay, the government of Korea would give military families a weeklong tour of the history of their country. We also saw the greatly fortified demilitarized military zone with antitank fields, great earthworks to keep armies from moving swiftly through the flat agricultural fields and the North Korean tunnels dug underneath the Korean border with the South. In the border town of Panmunjom, we were able to walk a few feet into North Korea all the while being heavily watched by the ever-serious North Korean Army border guards. Korea is historically a Buddhist country; however, in the last twenty years, there is a very large Holy Spirit-filled Christian population. So here in Korea, my mother rose as a spiritual warfare warrior as she would anoint with holy oil all the Buddhist temples that we encountered in the beautiful mountains we walked in.

It came time for my young family of my son Andrew and daughter Susannah to move back to the United States and continue to serve at an Air Force Special Operations base in Charleston, South Carolina. We found Northwoods Assembly church there, and as soon as I walked in, I felt the Holy Spirit and said to myself, I guess we do need to look any further!

This was the first base that I did not work on fighter aircraft; the planes we worked on were Special Operations-modified C-141B Special Forces carrier jets. Our missions were to take Army, Navy, and Air Force Special teams to the Persian Gulf area and drop them off usually midflight to their highly classified missions.

Personally, it was a great time to draw closer to the Lord in Charleston South Carolina, and a great blessing was enrolling my two kids into Christian school at the Northwoods Assembly School from kindergarten through the third grade. What a great start for them. It was a great sacrifice to send them to this school, but I wanted them rooted in God's truth before anything else. It seems, looking back on events through this period of my life, that God was still preparing me for greater things of which I had no idea, but God always does as He is outside time.

Military orders would take me and my family to Korea for a third tour of duty. Normally for most military people stationed in Korea, it is an unaccompanied tour, which means that there are not a lot of accommodations for families, and in theory, North Korea and South Korea are technically at war. Those of us who braved the extra challenges of bringing families with us were fairly few. But it meant so much to me to have my loved ones with me, and I knew that God would be my sword and shield and keep me from harm's way. My work was at the avionic sensor maintenance facility close to the flight line. I had accomplished much in the last time I was here, but things changed while I was gone, and I spent a lot of my time refurbishing the whole maintenance facility including the weapon sensors. There is a high rate of turnover, and with processing in and out of this short tour, you only get nine quick months to train new people, and then they are off to other bases. One week we had two feet of snowfall overnight, so all base operations were closed. I wanted to get some work done at the sensor shop, got my parka and knee-length snow boots on, and trudged through two miles of snow. When I got to the maintenance shop, one other good friend of mine was already there (like-minded people). We both looked at each other and said, What are you doing here? Needless to say, we were not disturbed and got a lot done that day. It was on this long tour here that I was chosen to brief generals, theater commanders, and foreign dignitaries about our cutting-edge technology to enable us to be the strong tip of the spear. One week, we hosted the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. You know how hard these girls train, but they also act as goodwill emissaries. So when I spoke with them explaining our vital work in Korea, every one of them was focused on every word. To visually explain how thermal sensors work, I placed my hand on a metal cabinet, pulled my hand away, and showed them on the video display that the thermal handprint was still there. They were amazed and exclaimed that it was just like in that Predator movie!

It was time to move back to my last duty assignment, this time working on the ferocious and formidable AC-130 Gunship. The night vision infrared cameras on this aircraft enabled the huge guns to precisely take out enemy positions and decimate a football-sized field in a matter of seconds. Time flies when you are having fun, and soon, it was time to leave the Air Force after twenty-one years. I was a world traveler all those years, so my first thoughts were to move back to the northeast region where friends and family still lived. God was positioning me!

My twenty-one years in the Air Force was finished, and I moved up to New Jersey with my son and daughter and settled in Morris County New Jersey. Again, we would spend weekends searching for a church to belong to and to minister in and be an integral part of. One weekend, we decided on one older classic stone church in town. It was beautiful outside and grand on the inside. Not too many people, you could tell it was dying. It was only at the very end that when the woman pastor went to the back door to greet everyone going out, she was saying hello and shaking hands. It all stopped as soon as we three came up. She got rigid, with no outstretched hand and no smile, and she had the blackest eyes you can imagine; and she just stared at us as we passed by. We never went back as I sensed this was nothing but a demonic presence.

There was one other time I saw very clearly what I call evil eyes. On a trip that I took to Crimea, which is part of Ukraine and on the northern part of the Black Sea, my tour guide says that the day would be spent seeing an ancient monastery, heading down to the coast to Livadia where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met during World War II; have dinner at a clifftop castle; and then head back to the hotel. On the way to the monastery, my guide says that we can also see an old khan prince royal palace. I was not too crazy about it, but since it was on the way, I acquiesced. The grounds were palatial as we drew near to the main entrance. We entered the main hall that held many displays of artifacts, weapons, and period clothing. It was then that I spotted a woman standing on the far opposite side of the hall near a doorway. It shocked me to discover that even from far away, she had the darkest, blackest, most piercing eyes that I had ever witnessed. It was right then that I knew that the woman had a demonic presence in her as I could feel her eyes from across this large hall. Quickly, I realized what I had encountered, so I said to her in a quiet voice, I know who you are; and of course, this demonic presence knew that I was a man of God. We did not stay long at the palace and went on our way, but that moment has remained clear in my memory ever since.

The Prayer

The timeframe is now around 2011 to 2012, and I was still looking for a spirit-filled church to be a part of. I had begun attending a church a few miles away as a means to be a part of a body of believers and wanted to put my tithe to work. The church was friendly, but the Holy Spirit was not moving in this place. At the very least, it offered community with my neighbors and a place to receive God's next steps. It was at this time that my daily prayers were going up, as usual, seeking the Lord's direction as usual, but this time was different as I shifted the wording of my prayers to match those of an ancient warrior preparing for battle against an unseen enemy force. I prayed, Lord, You know I am a military-minded man. I served as a watchman over my country all these past decades. Lord, I run to danger and threat even at the midnight hour. I have that Warrior Spirit that You placed within my very soul with that heavy sense of right and wrong and of good that prevails against evil. Abba Father, send me to a Holy Spirit-filled church of believers. Lord, I have the warrior spirit that You placed inside of me. Send me, Lord, to the very front lines of this spiritual battle. Lord, do not send me to a middle-line church but at the very front lines of this spiritual battle of good over evil. Lord, I also ask of You that to not only send me to where the fighting is at the front lines but also send me, Lord, to where the fighting is the heaviest, the strongest, and the thickest. Yes, Lord, to where the spiritual battle over the soul of America is at its gate.

I did not have to wait long for my answer.

At the same time as my prayers are ascending to heaven, I