House of Faith Ministries
Personal Introduction
The Revelation Unveiled
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Written by Pastor Marcos Marrero
It was early morning Sunday, February 12, 1989 in the Southern California city of Garden Grove, somewhere about 4:30 AM that I was dreaming about my little hometown of La Isabela where I was born and grew up, in the northern coast of central Cuba. It was one of those dreams that just seemed to keep on going all night long. It was a very dark night in the dream and my wife was walking with me, I was trying to get to “my father’s house,” that’s how I was referring to it in the dream even though in reality I always called that house “my home.” Since I was born in that house in 1947 and it was from the front porch of that same house that was built on stilts over the water, that I got in a small boat eighteen years later and came over to America where I was granted political asylum in 1965. In the dream there was a great deal of gunfire that had erupted throughout the entire small town, which made it very
difficult to navigate the narrow streets to “my father’s house” where we would be safe. In the dream I was feeling so guilty that I had gotten my wife in such a mess, since in real life she refuses to travel to Cuba where she feels that it is not safe to go. Continuing with the dream, I knocked on the door of a house less than a block from where I was trying to go, and we were given shelter within that house. However, I was so restless that I kept pacing back and forth and could not find rest, trying to figure out how I was going to get us to “my father’s house.” Finally I got so exhausted that I found a chair in the kitchen where my wife had been sitting around a table and gratefully enjoying the company of our gracious hosts. As I sat down, my mind was still racing; I refused to engage in trivial conversation, keeping my focus on the dangers that surrounded us and on the goal of getting safely to my appointed destination.
Realizing this, those who sat around the table asked me to teach them about all that was taking place and what it meant. Breathing a sight of release I said to myself: “Finally someone is taking seriously all these events that encompass us and are now desirous to know what they mean.” In the dream I immediately began to tell them that these were the signs of the end times; I had barely spoken these words when all of the sudden the walls around me disappeared, the darkened skies rolled away in an instant and I was not dreaming anymore! It is so hard to accurately describe what takes place during a spiritual vision because what one experiences is usually lost in the narrative, since the feelings cannot be adequately explained. In an instant I found myself in a realm more real than anything I’ve ever encountered in my life. How could I explain the shock I experienced when faced with the empirical evidence of the existence of another dimension? I was in it! There is no human way to describe how the spiritual mind is able to process so much more information when heighten into the euphoric state of the dimension of the heavenly lights. Instantaneously I was able to think, reason, question, test, and apply myself to understand what was happening within me in many different levels simultaneously, while at the same time observing and participating in the external events that were unfolding around me.
John 21:25 “And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” This Scripture is not an exaggeration! The events that take place in one second of time in the spiritual realm in which Jesus operates, would take millions and millions of words to properly detail, catalogue and explain. Within seconds my eyes saw Him! As the skies receded and I was looking up into the bright white sky, Jesus came out into full view out of the east. He was walking in the air towards me at a very rapid pace but yet at the same time, it was like if He was moving at the speed of light. I know that what I am saying does not make sense, but like I said; extra dimensional experiences elude natural explanation. It was like if someone was rapidly walking on top of a flat train cart going forward while the train is moving at an incredible rate of speed. I was able to perceive both movements at the same time that they were occurring even though He was headed towards me on nothing but bright sky. I feel so inadequate trying to explain the multitudes of feelings that I experienced the very instant that I first saw Him. Next month it will be nineteen years since I had the vision and this is the very first time that I am truly making an effort to write about it in detail. And the only reason that I am doing it, is to try and put into context the why I am writing this expository work on the book of Revelation. My desire is to prepare you for what I believe to be the time for the soon coming of our King and Savior, even our Lord Jesus Christ!
A variety of things happened within me when I first saw Him; there was no order as to how they happened, I was able to experience them simultaneously. I remembered seeing His eyes intensely focused on me, the expression on His face was: I AM coming to get you! I was trembling to my very core, there is a Scripture in Isaiah 6:5 that really nails this experience: “So I said: ‘Woe is me, for I am undone!’” I swear I could feel every cell in my body trembling so hard that they became unglued from one another, while at the same time marveling at the fact that I, for the first time in my life was fully aware of how many of them it took to form my physical body. While I was experiencing both, the joy and the fear of His glorious countenance from a still great distance away with a kind of natural telescopic vision, a very intellectual discussion was taking place in my mind as to whether I should try to remember what Jesus looked like and be tempted to make an mental image of Him when I came back, or erase His likeness from my cognitive mind so that I would not have to deal with that aspect of the vision when I came back. So here I was fully aware that what I was experiencing was not the actual rapture but a rehearsal of it, with the ability to retain or release certain parts of the experience.
From the time that I first saw Him and had the manifold experiences of which I just shared a couple with you, to the time that He reached the place where I was standing there could not have been more than a couple of seconds. It happened so fast that even though my mind was processing information at a great rate of speed, He was much faster than even my ability to turbo-think. It was like a violent collision, He came from a great distance away with great velocity; without slowing down He crashed into my chest. That was how it felt at first, but then I realized that it was His right hand that had reached and grabbed my chest as He flew by. The closer that He got to me the more that I trembled, that’s when I realized that His holiness was too glorious for my carnality and the cells that form my body were rapidly dying their own individual deaths. I found myself going from zero to the speed of light in less than a microsecond. The speed into which I was suddenly thrust into caused my tongue to flatten like a pancake within my mouth, causing me to feel the empty cavities of missing teeth feeling up. In an instant everything that died became alive, I could feel new teeth growing inside of my mouth, and every cell in my body became reanimated into a perfect man. His touch together with His glorious light brought forth an indescribable new life.
While I have been describing the physical aspect of my experience in the catching away, there were other things taking place as well in my spiritual side. The closer that Jesus came to me, the more aware that I became of my spirit man within me. I was able to experience the “real me” for the first time in his full entity. The more of the physical “me” that died, the stronger the spiritual “I” was able to emerge, such dichotomy cannot be properly explained, it has to be experienced. But this one thing I know for certain, in the midst of the torrential flood of emotions that I was experiencing, a vigorous new man rose up from within me, and with a strong masculine voice and with uninhibited zeal, he cried out incessantly with strong conviction: “HALLELUJAH! HE KEPT HIS PROMISE!” Over and over again he repeated this shout with greater exuberance each time he shouted it.
The duration of the entire vision, not counting the dreaming part, could not have lasted over a minutes’ time. But in those precious few seconds I experienced more love and more fear, more death and more life, than I could ever experience if I could live hundreds and hundreds of years. I now have a totally different concept of reality, and an ability to understand visions from a very different perspective as you will see as your read my rendering of the visions detailed for us in the book of Revelation by the apostle John.
My wife was abruptly awakened when she felt my body shaking uncontrollably as I was lying on the bed. She reached over and grabbed me on the chest to wake me up; my chest and belly areas were so sensitive from experiencing Jesus’ touch, that when she grabbed me I screamed so loud that it brought me out of the vision. After experiencing that other dimension, coming back to this one was so disappointing, but my experience was so vivid that I could not stop talking about it to my sleepy wife at 4:45 in the morning. I got up and went into my living room to pray, but I could not stand still not even for a second. I phoned my mom and woke her up crying that Jesus was coming soon and that she needed to get ready, it was before five am. I was so charged from the experience that I repented before God of all the people that I had neglected to witness to. I swore that I would tell everyone I knew about Jesus plus everybody else; I was so on fire with the zeal of God that the only thing that mattered to me at the time was winning souls for Jesus Christ. Whether good or bad that euphoria waned as the day passed. If I didn’t come down I know they would have locked me up. As I taught adult Sunday school that morning, people were staring at me in a weird sort of way, no doubt wondering what kind of happy influence I was under. By the time evening came I got in bed early so that I could feel closer to the experience, as I lay there, my belly and chest areas got so sensitive again that I could not bring myself to close my eyes, fearful that he would touch me again, and just as fearful that He would not.
A few months later, having given myself enough time to digest the experience and with the knowledge that I could now make a rational decision as to the purpose for which God revealed the vision to me, I came to the conclusion that Jesus wanted me to learn about end time prophecy and about the sign of His soon coming. My wife and I entered into a new covenant with the Lord that year; we gave to Him our future, our business, our home, as well as all our personal desires. Needless to say our emphasis changed from normal church attendance and our normal church involvement which we were part of since we got saved in 1976, to a radical pursuit of preparation, training and the all needed times of deliverance that we had to go through, in order to fully let go of those things that hinder the flow of revelation from the Holy Spirit.
Eight very difficult years went by; I learned that when God reveals radical things, the enemy steps up with equally radical tricks and attacks. But I also learned that those are the things that God allows in order to refine us and to bring us to total trust in Him and Him alone. During those eight years we had months and months out of every year with no work and no income, every morning I got up I had a choice to make, I could worry about our desperate situation or see it as one more day of home bible schooling, I stayed true to the revelation and chose to study the bible and the signs of His soon coming. After many long hours, months and years of studying and seeking the revelation that only the Lord is able to bring, the framework that would allow me to understand the book of Revelation became clear. Everything made perfect sense all of the sudden, all the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place. I remember thanking Jesus for His great patience, and I wondered inwardly as to how many times Jesus though how hardheaded I was. I had piles and piles of notes, charts and genealogies all over the pool table that had become my working station, as I wrote the date in a notebook where I made entries of important discoveries, I realized that the day when I finally received the understanding of the framework of the book of Revelation, was much to my surprise February 12, 1997, exactly eight years from the time I had experienced the rapture of the church of Jesus Christ in a vision.