Demystifying the Kingdom of God

January 12, 2010

We often speak of the “Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven” in Christian circles but I am afraid that very few of us actually know what we are talking about.  I say this because there seems to be volume upon volume written on the kingdom, each volume trying to present the kingdom slightly differently and, at the end of the day, it seems most believers are confused as to what the kingdom actually is and are unable to clearly articulate the kingdom when asked to define exactly what the kingdom of God is.   I have seen a teacher pose that question to seasoned believers and the saints questioned looked dumbfounded and were at a loss for words to clearly articulate exactly what the kingdom is.  It is a significant issue that we struggle to understand something that is at the cornerstone of Christian theology and is at the heart of the apostolic proclamation of the gospel.

Now, obviously I cannot give the kingdom a full treatment in one post.  Volumes have been written on the kingdom so any small thing I can post here cannot even begin to be exhaustive.  However, I believe a few short words about the essence of what the apostles, and Jesus, actually meant when they used the term “The Kingdom of God” may help to demystify the kingdom making it much more approachable and understandable.

Two Primary Misunderstandings

I believe there are two primary misunderstandings that have caused confusion about what the kingdom actually is.  The first misunderstanding arises in the fact that the word kingdom is a foreign word to the western mind.  We operate in  governmental structures that are rooted in the ideas of democracy and, to a lesser extent, a republic and so the word kingdom is foreign to us.  For us it is a word that we encounter only in fairly tales and ancient history.  It is not something that we can tangibly relate to.  Dictator would probably be the closest word to kingdom that we could understand, but it has negative connotations that make its use unsuitable.

The second misunderstanding that causes confusion is the influence of Greek thought on Christianity.  Because of Greek influence on western thought and culture, we spend more time looking for the “ultimate meaning” of a passage rather than wrestling with the literal words in front of us as the Hebrews would.  Compounding the issue is Matthew’s description of the kingdom as the “Kingdom of Heaven” which, because of the Greek dualism which separates “heaven” and “earth” that we have embraced, makes the kingdom even more ethereal.  So, because of our heritage of Greek thought, we are looking for the ultimate meaning of a kingdom that seems just as ethereal and mystical as “heaven.”  Because we think that “heaven” is some other ethereal realm, we struggle to create ways to make the “kingdom of heaven” relevant and tangible to existence on the earth.  Understanding the misunderstandings that have clouded the definition of the kingdom for us, let’s now look at a few simple concepts that will help us gain a better understanding of what the kingdom actually is.

The Kingdom is Simply a Government

The simplest way to properly view the kingdom, coming from a western perspective, is to use the word government rather than kingdom.  When you swap this word it is amazing how clear Biblical passages become.  When Jesus or the apostles declare the “kingdom of God” they are essentially declaring the “government of God.”   When you read a passage and substitute the word government for kingdom,  just that word substitution will immediately enable the western mind to better understand the passage as the apostles intended.

The second concept that can help us understand the kingdom, or government of God, is understanding why Matthew uses “Kingdom of Heaven” rather than “Kingdom of God.”  First, Matthew never wrote “Kingdom of Heaven.”  He wrote “Kingdom of Heavens.”  (Use any Bible software, or consult commentaries, and you will see clearly that heaven in the book of Matthew is always plural even though it is translated in English in the singular.)   Now, this did not make sense to the Greek mind and so translators have rendered it “Kingdom of Heaven” in accordance with the Greek concept and model of reality which defined two distinct realities consisting of “heaven” and the physical, or earthly, realm rather than according to the Hebraic understanding of one unified reality consisting of both the heavens and the earth.

So what is the “Kingdom of Heavens”?  This is explained in Genesis 1:1 when we are told that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  God created the heavens as the place of His throne, or His government, and then created the earth as man’s place of government.  The earth then was under the heavens, or subservient, to God’s throne.  This idea is all throughout the Old Testament once you understand what the language means and understand that the word “heaven” is never in the Old Testament as a singular but is always plural.

The Old Testament is filled with consistent references to the heavens as God’s dwelling place and as the seat of all power and authority over the earth.  This was the Jewish, and apostolic, understanding of the universe.  The key is understanding that the Greek idea of “heaven” is foreign to the Jewish mind.  Once you understand the basics of the Jewish concept of “the heavens” the Old Testament becomes much more understandable and the simplicity of the Jewish understanding of the cosmos becomes very apparent when you read the Scriptures.

The Apostolic Proclamation of the Kingdom

Now it is a popular misconception that earth is under satan’s rule until Jesus returns.  This is actually false.  The earth is still completely under the power of the heavens.  This is actually the correct understanding of the sovereignty of God.  The sovereignty of God is not primarily His ability to manipulate events to produce a desired outcome, but rather His present rule over all of creation.  The Bible makes this completely clear in multiple places.  Just a few references that are helpful on this subject are Daniel 4:32, Psalm 103:19, Romans 13:1-2, and 1 Peter 2:13-23.  (Leave a note in the comments if you are struggling to understand the present authority of God and I’ll try to write a post on that topic in the future.)

So we now can understand that “kingdom” is another word for government and “heaven,” or the more accurately “the heavens” is a reference to the throne of that government.  Now notice how Young’s Literal Translation helps us understand this even futher:

And in those days cometh John the Baptist, proclaiming in the wilderness of Judea, and saying, ‘Reform, for come nigh hath the reign of the heavens,’ – Matthew 3:1-2 (YLT)

Young’s translation, being literal, makes the text clear.  John was proclaiming the the ruler of the heavens, in other words God Himself, was coming near to them.  Can you see now why the people flocked to John to repent and to cleanse themselves in an act of baptism?  John was not announcing some sort of ethereal or “spiritual” kingdom, but rather was declaring that the ruler from the throne over all creation was coming near among the people.  The ruler of the heavens, the location of God’s throne, was now coming near His people as a man.

If ever anything would drive men to repentance this would be it!  And so it did with the people flocking to John to prepare their hearts for his arrival.  They knew full well how disastrous it was when God appeared to His people in the wilderness during the Exodus so they were now preparing their hearts for His visitation in their day and time.  You can see now also why Matthew used the phrase “Kingdom of the Heavens.”  He was writing to a Jewish audience so that phrase clearly conveyed what he was trying to convey which is that the very ruler of the government of God was among them.  In addition, the Jews would have read “the Heavens” as a euphemism for God since the heavens are His dwelling place.  This would allow Matthew to clearly convey the Kingdom of God to a Jewish audience.

The other writers were targeted on a wider audience than Matthew so they used the phrase the Kingdom of God because the Greeks, and others, did not necessarily have the same understanding as the Jews of the heavens so they, rather than using the euphemism that Matthew used, just plainly used the term the kingdom of God which clearly communicated that they were referencing the very government of God.

And Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus – Acts 17:7 (ESV)

We can see clearly that the apostolic presentation of the gospel continued in this same vein.  They clearly preached the government of God.  In fact, this is one of the major factors in the early persecution of the Christians.  The Jews shared the morality and monotheism of the Christians, but it was the aggressive message of the early apostles of a real and present government over the government of Caesar and the coming of the ruler of that government, Jesus, to shatter all the governments of the earth that caused such an uproar.  The Romans could not tolerate such preaching because they were declaring another kingdom that was going to usurp Rome.

In fact the Greek words used to refer to the preaching of the gospel in the New Testament are the same words that were used of a messenger of Caesar who was delivering Caesar’s decree to the people in remote places.  In other words, the proclamation of the gospel was a governmental decree carried by messengers of God’s government called “apostles,” which simply means “sent ones.”  The apostles were offering the people redemption and forgiveness that they might have right standing with God’s government and be kept safe in the hour when God Himself chose to smash the rebellion of the nations and to move His governmental headquarters from the heavens to the earth.

Can you see now why Paul who write letters encouraging the saints of their citizenship in the kingdom of the heavens and their role as ambassadors of this government?  The early church clearly understood the “Kingdom of God” to be a governmental reality that they were declaring, both as a present reality and as a coming reality in the installment of Jesus as an earthly, as well as in the heavens, king and the destruction of all unrighteous government.  This why the church in Thessalonica, though Paul was only with them a very short time, had been taught eschatology.  Paul simply declared the government of God and the repentance that was necessary before that government destroyed the rebellion of other governments.  The apostolic proclamation of the kingdom was governmental.

This is also why Jesus could say that the kingdom was within us when our hearts were submitted to His government.  The earth at present is in rebellion against His government and is in the delusion that the rebellion is successful.  Those who have repented understand that there is a higher government consisting of a present king that is also coming to destroy the delusion and rebellion on earth.  In their repentance, they now become messengers of this government, carrying the reality of it in their hearts and in their witness.   This coming government, along with the offer of redemption and immorality through the Spirit, is the cornerstone of the apostolic proclamation of the gospel.

Why is the kingdom demonstrated when signs and wonders occur?  It is simple.  Healing and other signs serve two purposes.  First they demonstrate the nature of God’s government.  Satan has deceived man that God is a tyrant who desires to inhibit man from true freedom.  Healing and deliverance oppose that lie by demonstrating the true nature of God’s government.  These signs clearly demonstrate that satan is actually the tyrant and it is God’s government that brings the maximum freedom and pleasure to man.

The second purpose these signs serve is to validate the governmental proclamation of the gospel.  We are to declare a present ruling King as well as a King that is coming.  How are men, under the delusion of the present rebellion, to know that this proclamation is valid?  In order that men might know, God grants signs and wonders as a miraculous testimony that our proclamation is true because they demonstrate an authority beyond that which man, or satan, can exert.

There is much more than can be written on this topic, but this should help to simplify the issue of the “Kingdom of God” or the “Kingdom of Heaven.”  Hopefully you can see that it is much simpler than we have made it out to be.  It is simply God’s present government which also includes a future military action, led by Jesus, in which He will destroy all rebellion and relocate the headquarters of His government from the heavens to the earth.  Many valid insights have been taught over the years, but I fear we have made the kingdom too mystical and not as practical and real as it is.

Let us return to the roots of the faith and the simplicity of the gospel proclamation rather than trying to examine the apostolic proclamation through hundreds of years of philosophy and cultural mindsets that are different from the cultural understanding that Jesus and the apostles preached from.

An Open Letter to Senator Nelson

December 21, 2009

To The Honorable Senator Nelson,

I was so proud of your stand for life against the current health care bill. No matter what the President or other leaders might say, we all know that the ultimate goal is to craft a plan that will provide Federally funded abortions. That has been patently obvious with the rejection of every simple amendment to the bill that clearly prohibited federally funded abortions, and that is why your stand was so inspiring especially considering the pressure coming from the leadership of your own party.

That being said, it was so disappointing to see that your stand for life ended in a compromise and in securing some funding to assist your state. While I understand the pressure on you is immense, citizens all around the nation were looking for you to stand firm and were extremely disappointed to see that the pressures of the moment overcame your own personal convictions and gave way to a compromise that ultimately will not protect us from the government sponsored execution of the nation’s own children.  Make no mistake Senator, making abortion “safe and rare” or putting a few conditions on a federal abortion are not the same thing as protecting the lives of the unborn.

You could rightly argue that many of us do not understand the pressures and intricacies of federal politics.  No doubt this is very true.  Few of us have known the kind of pressure that can come from the leadership of the nation.  It is also true that politics is, by its nature, a game of compromise.  However, it is also true that history is made when a politician stands firm for what is right and rejects the mechanics of compromise when life and death issues are at stake.  There are plenty of bills where compromise is good and necessary for without it our government would come to a grinding halt.  However, when the lives of children are at state, the time comes to make a stand and lead the nation into what is right.  An a historical example, could you imagine William Wilberforce agreeing to a “compromise” on human slavery?

You could also rightly argue that many of us compromise our heart values on a daily basis when much lesser things are at stake.  Sadly, you would be right there as well.  Millions of us compromise on a daily basis to avoid confrontation, pain, and cost preferring ease or the hope of some opportunity over staying true to what we know, deep down, is right.  However this is exactly why we need you. We are a nation with precious few heroes.  We need men like yourself to stand up unflinchingly for what is right and inspire us to also discard the compromise in their own lives and stand for what is right no matter how little or how great the cost.  We have become a week kneed compromising society and we need heros to look to that stand unflinchingly for what they know in their heart is right that we might be inspired to do the same.

The good news is that there are still several days before the final vote. There is still time for you to vote your heart, rather than vote, under pressure, for something that you know is wrong and not in the best interest of the country. If you vote for this bill, this will be a vote that will haunt you your entire life.  It is not enough to be personally opposed to abortion if you do not make a public stand, without compromise, for life.  There is a reason this bill has been put together in private rather than publicly as the President promised. There is a reason there is such a rush to get it passed with claims that the bill does not fund abortion while any amendments that secure that promise are quickly rejected.

You and I both know that the leadership of both the senate and house are counting on using the process of reconciling the bills to remove any abortion restrictions.  I am sure, Senator, that you would argue that your stand did secure a measure of restriction on abortion, however, I would expect that these restrictions will be reduced to paperwork or eliminated by the time the actual final bill is formed.  They are securing your vote only so that they can push a bill forward.  Based on the response to amendments restricting abortion funding and the development of the bill behind closed doors, we all know well and good that they know how to eliminate all abortion restrictions from this bill by the time it is made law.

Your compromise then will not even secure the restrictions you asked for, your compromise will only enable those who seek to provide full federally funded abortion.  This is the cost of compromise on moral issues.  In the end, the compromise does not even secure the ends that are desired.  This is why moral issues cannot be compromised.  By their very nature, once compromise has entered the picture they are lost.  Do you want your vote to be the enabling vote to a process that has proven thus far that it is committed to a final outcome that will include the federally funded extermination of our children?

Public opinion polls show clearly that the health care bill is not the top agenda in the minds of citizens. Public opinion polls also show that the nation is becoming increasingly pro life. This is a bad time to hastily compromise and rush through a very significant bill that will have negative implications for the nation for decades to come as well as help to promote the slaughter of millions of our unborn children.  The very fact that they are trying to rush this bill through so quickly before an election year when it is not the top agenda of the America people along should give you pause in making last minute compromises.

Senator, many of us are praying for you. We are praying that you will make history by standing firm in your convictions, as those who make history must do, rather than succumbing to political favors to vote for something you know in your heart is wrong.  Voting against this bill, at this point, may look like political suicide.  However, better that than suicide of the heart.  I have to believe the people of the great state of Nebraska, whether they agreed with you or not, would respect your history making stand to refuse to vote for this bill in its current form.  Men of character are hard to come by and I, for one, would be proud to see my Senator set his face like flint and stand for what is right.

Stand firm Senator, and be an example to the nation. Know that there are millions looking to you for a strong stand even if that means, at times, a stand against our President.

Blessings,

Samuel

Who Will Share God’s Grief?

October 7, 2009

Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. – Matthew 5:4 (ESV)

The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. – Genesis 6:5-6 (ESV)

The Call to Grief

Is not the call into the place of mourning, the call to share God’s own heart? We often feel like we know God in His love and, we sometimes see His anger or other parts of His personality recorded in the Scriptures, but who has known the grief of God? Who among us has asked the share the pain in God’s heart? True we have asked to share in His joys, and this is correct as He invites us into His joys, but there is another level of relationship and that is to be be found in sharing in His grief.

God made man for relationship and valid relationship contains the experiences of both joy and pain. The angels are His servants, and no doubt companions of a sort, but they are not made in His image and likeness. They do not have the same capacity we do to feel the way His heart feels. No doubt they have some level of emotion, but God made our heart after the pattern of His own, so we are be the ones that have the capacity to share His emotions more than any other creature and therefore we should be the ones to carry grief with Him.

The word Jesus used here for mourning can often be used in the sense of mourning or grieving for the dead. It can include the idea of lamentation. While Jesus’ context is not specifically the dead, we must ask who mourns for the death that pervades creation? True we have felt a measure of the pain of the effects of our sin and the glad release of our forgiveness in God, but there should be a mourning as we continue to consider the effects of sin that remain on our body and the weight of sin that remains on the earth.

God’s Grief Over Creation

We were made to be the express image of God and yet we continue to destroy creation with our own sinfulness. Our sin destroys the earth even as we see our own bodies deteriorate because of sin. Do we really consider that man is actively destroying creation with His sin? To make it personal, have you considered that your own sin destroys God’s creation? Furthermore, beyond the issue of death, who mourns for their own sin?

Romans 8 tells us that all of creation is crying out under a burden for its own release. If all of creation is mourning for release to come, how can we not be as well? You see not only does sin destroy you, which is no small thing because you were created for God and in destroying yourself you are destroying the thing that God made for Himself and robbing Him of His creation, but you must realize that nothing is done in isolation.

Every act, whether we perceive it our not, reverberates throughout creation and our sin, no matter how minor in our eyes, does not end with us, but rather effects all of creation. Every secret sin reverberates throughout creation adding to the weight of bondage the creation is already under. We do not have time to fully develop this issue here, but remember that just one sin in the garden so marred creation that it fell to its current state. Our sin destroys God’s creation which is why in Revelation God’s judgment against the wicked is celebrated with the song, “The nations raged, but your wrath came…for destroying the destroyers of the earth.” (Revelation 11:18)

Why We Do Not Mourn

Our lack of mourning is rooted in a lack of perspective. We do not mourn because we lack perspective. We are content with an earth and an age that is so marred by sin it barely demonstrates the glory of the original creation. If we understood the original glory of creation and if we understood the honor that Jesus is to have on the earth, and what will happen to the earth when He begins ruling from Jerusalem, our hearts would be filled with mourning in this age, longing for the glory of the age to come. It is our own lack of expectation, understanding, and desire for what is to come that causes our hearts to be content rather than to mourn at what man has done to God’s creation.

If we even barely understood the sacrifice of Jesus, we would be in mourning for His global exaltation. How can we not feel the weight of the Father’s sorrow at the earth’s rejection of His act of redemption? God gave everything He had, eternally marring His own being in the man Jesus and the earth He came to redeem rejected Him unto death. Who cannot mourn? Whose Son has been so abused? Whose Son is so worthy of honor? Who cannot feel the pain of the Father over the issue of the Son and His global exaltation?

Do we consider that Jesus, right now, is highly exalted in the place of rulership over the heavens and the earth and yet, on earth, a cloud of deception persists leaving most men totally ignorant of His rulership? Can we mourn with the Father that most of mankind, His most glorious creation, will ultimately be destroyed because they have persisted in darkness and rejecting the very One that was sacrificed so that they might have life? Can we mourn over how few will receive the advantage of His costly sacrifice?

Who reads the prophets and the book of the Revelation and mourns over the judgments to come? Who has fully considered the events that are going to hit the earth as man’s wickedness are put on full display and Jesus finally breaks in releasing the judgments of God to purge the earth. Anyone who considers these events should come away shaking inside, unable to fully consider what is coming. The shaking coming to the planet is beyond all we can conceive. Can we not mourn with God over what is coming? Can we not share God’s grief over the birth-pains that are to come? The birth-pains coming are the most violent, destructive things coming and God’s heart no doubt is mourning over what the earth must endure in the transition to Jesus’ rule from Zion.

Does anyone grieve with the Father over the trials that are coming to Israel? Does anyone weep over the holocaust to come? To give just one example, Zechariah records two thirds of the nation perishing (Zechariah 13:8-9), but do we weep over it? The Father weeps that His very chosen people are under a cloak of blindness, rejecting the One that can give them live. He is in grief over the events that will fall on His chosen people at the end of the age. We analyze and evaluate the events of the end, but do we mourn with the Father over the things that must come and the real implications of those events?

Many of us are content for the earth to be destroyed, but God is not. The way we would mourn over a son lost in sin, longing to see him restored rather than destroyed, so God longs to see His creation restored rather than destroyed. We must ask for the revelation of God’s love over all creation that we may feel His present grief over the condition of it. His grief is deeper than any parent’s grief over a prodigal son. His handiwork is constantly destroyed as the ones He gave stewardship to continue to defile it.

We need a vision of God’s brokenheartedness over a world that rests under a weight of constant sin rejecting the very One that gives life. We need an understanding of the liberation of creation to come. God is not coming to the planet to destroy it, but to liberate it from sin gloriously. We are offered this moment in time to share in God’s grief. There will be a time when our own bodies, and all creation, will be liberated from sin in the ultimate act of comfort and we will share then in God’s joy over the restoration of creation. In this age, though, it is the time of mourning. We mourn over the damage of sin in own hearts first and then the damage of sin in the entire cosmos. It is a unique invitation to mourn, because it will not always be available.

Those that mourn now will have shared God’s grief with Him. When we step into the age to come those who have shared His grief will have an unusual friendship with God. We cannot mourn unless we share His heart. To enter into the place of mourning, we must have revelation from God to our hearts about what He really feels about creation.

We must know what is in God’s heart as His Son is mocked and disparaged day after day. We have to feel what is in God’s heart as He watches man destroy man with brutality. We need to feel God’s heart as the innocent girl is seduced and the love she was created for destroyed by a man’s sexual drive. We need to consider the longing in God’s heart to restore creation and install His Son in His rightful place as king over the earth. We need revelation to enter into this place of mourning.

Sadly, we are often too content with this age to share God’s grief over it. We wait for some sort of release, which we call heaven, from our present trials but the reality is what we’re really wanting is to just be free of some difficulties. We fail to perceive the real weight of sin that rests on the entire creation, even in it’s joys.

We fail to feel the oppression that is constant so long as sin is not banished completely. We are escapist looking to fly away to heaven when God is set on redeeming the earth. We fail to love what God loves. God loves the earth and intends to gloriously renovate it and restore it. God has bound Himself to earth, both in promises, and in taking on the very dirt of the earth in His own incarnation.

The Precious Opportunity for Eternal Intimacy with God in Present Mourning

Intimate relationships are not just forged in joys, they are forged in sorrows. When you consider those who are closest friends, it is those who shared your grief with you. You may be separated from those friends by distance and life changes, but you always feel a connection to those who shared your griefs with you. Anyway can laugh with you, but it is only a select few who can cry with you.

Innately we often hide our pain from one another because we know that if we lay out the burden of our hearts on an acquaintance it is uncomfortable for them. Likewise, if another unloads their sorrows on us our first response is typically discomfort unless we are closely related to the person. While joys may be shared freely, sharing grief with others is uncomfortable and awkward without intimacy . We know that in life there are only a handful of friends that will share our sorrows. The sharing of sorrows requires intimacy.

God too shares His sorrows with His friends. In the age to come those that shared God’s grief with Him now in this age will have a special place in God’s heart. Many desire to share the joys of His heart and the blessings of His nearness, but few turn aside and ask Him to also share His grief.

While we come, time and time again, asking Him to minister to our hearts, and rightfully so, let us turn aside and ask Him how we can minister to His heart. Let us, like the friends of Job, come sit with God just to share His grief. Let us come just to minister to Him as man was made to do. Real relationship is forged as we walk with God through the sorrows of this age and not just the joys.

In His grief preparing for the cross, Jesus asked the disciples to pray and watch with them, but they could only sleep. They were weary and ignorant of the depths of pain that was in Jesus’ heart. He longed for some companions and yet He was forced to grieve alone. Obviously they could not have born the depth of His own grief over what was coming, but they could have comforted His heart in some measure. God was looking for men to share grief with Him, even if they did not understand it, and they were unable to comfort the Lord’s heart.

Are we able to comfort our God’s heart? The earth is racing towards a final judgment. The earth is under a weight of sin that causes a pain in God’s heart that we cannot understand. Moment by moment men die eternally lost and God grieves. Those He made for Himself choose destruction. We cannot bear the weight of pain in the earth, but do we mourn? Do we even make ourselves available to share His heart in grief or are we, like the disciples, too ignorant tired or distracted to share our God’s grief?

In the age to come, as the reign of Jesus on the earth restores creation, these sorrows will be destroyed. They will be a memory in God’s heart and in our own. However, those that shared those sorrows with God will have created a depth in their relationship with God that will last forever. Today, let us set our hearts to minister to the living God in sharing His sorrow. Let us examine our hearts rightly and mourn before our God for everything in our hearts, and even our bodies, that bears the marks of sin. Let us fix our eyes on God’s dream, the liberation of redeemed man and all of creation through the rule of His Son.

Praying the Book of Revelation

September 19, 2009

It has been very encouraging to my heart to see more and more people studying the book of Revelation studying it to find the revelation of Jesus (Revelation 1:1) and to prepare their hearts to both boldly declare the gospel and endure persecution.  Because of this, I plan to share some ideas on how to study the book of Revelation in a very practical way in a future post.  The book is full of very practical information with regard to what the Lord ultimately sees as important in our lives and in preparing our hearts for coming storms and for the coming storm.

As a mentioned recently in praying the Bible, taking specific promises and warnings from a passage of Scripture and praying them can help us to really root the Scripture in our hearts.  It also helps us to develop a more clear picture of exactly what the Lord is saying to us in a passage.  At the bottom of this post is a link you can use to download a document on praying the book of Revelation.  For those that are frightened of the book of Revelation, take a few minutes and read it.  You will be amazed at how practical this is.  I am finding a lot of material in the book for prayer.

The book of Revelation is filled with a lot of sobering material for devotional prayer.  There are very specific admonitions that will keep us from disaster in the faith and there are very specific exhortations concerning weighty rewards that are available.  I fear what it might cost our hearts to neglect the critical issues that Jesus addresses in this book.

Click Here to Download Praying the Book of Revelation.

What Other Nation has a God so Near?

September 8, 2009

“For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? – Deuteronomy 4:7 (ESV)

This phrase “a god so near” should cause us all to fall down in worship before the God who would utter such a great phrase. The word itself has the literal meaning of “near kinsman.” Truly do we grasp that God describes Himself, in relation to those who follow His statutes, as a “near kinsman?” How can we fail to encounter the God that draws near? How faithless must we be that we are content with the concept of an absent God rather than gazing upward, crying out to Him out of a heart in pain that He might remove everything in our hearts that obstructs the experience of God as a near kinsman? How much more, at this time, is God a near kinsman than when Moses penned these words?

At that time God was in close proximity to the people but it was a nearness that also created distance and separation due to the requirement of God’s holiness and the condition of the people. Truly God was near, but the people were terrified of that nearness as it caused death and separation. Truly His nearness was a fascination to Moses, Joshua, and other but a terror to the nation at large. Sadly, this condition has not changed and today there is still a minority few who find God’s declaration of His nearness as an invitation to the pursuit of the gloriously terrifying God, while most of the people demonstrate the coldness of their hearts by being content with a distant God, even having the audacity to accuse God of causing the issue.

The children of Israel struggled with this nearness and In Deuteronomy 18:17 God declares that the people are correct in their expression of the need for a human intermediary, or intercessor, to properly relate to God. God affirms their need and promises a prophet who will arise as that mediator. The people then expected another man like Moses, but God had a shocking move in store. His desire for nearness to His people was so great and so strong that He Himself had chosen to become that mediator.

He would become the One that at the same time was God among the people and also the mediator preparing and introducing people to the uncreated God. He did not just send us another Moses, He Himself became a better Moses. We should be bursting with amazement and joy at the mystery of the incarnation. If we just had an accurate perspective, we would realize how truly radical it is that the transcendent God put on human flesh and how unfathomably near He now is.

Have we allowed the incarnation to show us how deeply God’s heart yearns for nearness to His people? Jesus is God’s plainly spoken declaration of His desire for nearness. First, He declared that He was God among us. It was a thought that was blasphemy to the Jewish mind, so rightfully lofty was their concept of the divine, and yet Jesus was clear that He was God actually living among us, speaking face to face with us.

Not content with this, Jesus then poured out God’s Spirit on us that we might have the living God indwelling us. How radical was that? God had become one of us but He was not content with interacting with us only externally as that limited His nearness to us to those who could come into close physical proximity. In God’s heart a nearness limited to physical proximity was unacceptable and therefore He poured out His Spirit into our very hearts. Who among us has considered this fully?

How can God even place Himself in fallen man? How is it that your frame and mine can actually carry the living God? God has come to dwell inside, not just in one man, but in every redeemed man (Note that we still must maintain the proper division between Jesus’ divinity and our non-divinity). Saints, if we could only perceive the majesty and mystery of this thing! I fear our language and our doctrinal statements have numbed our hearts to the glorious reality of the indwelling God and the implications to our experience of Him.

Our pursuit of “power by the Spirit” has obscured the very real indwelling of God which has power as its side effect and the revelation of God to the human heart as its primary effect. He desires to be our near kinsman, and too often we are taking that gift and trying to manipulate it for a more powerful ministry or to solve the problem of our boredom with Christianity.

Finally, as though all this nearness was not enough, God closes out Scripture with the very clear promise in Revelation 21 and 22 that when Jesus takes the throne in Jerusalem, leading the earth in the millennial reign, His express purpose will be to prepare us for face to face interaction with the Father. He will draw us near to the One whom the Israelites in the desert found unbearable. Can we not see how intense God’s pursuit of being a near kinsman to us has been? God agreed in the desert with the people that His nearness was unbearable, so He gave us Himself as an intermediary and having become the ultimate near kinsman, He continues to pursue nearness with us until He gets the nearness that He Himself desires.

Can we not see that history is the very story of a God doing all that He might be near to us? How can we be content with a distant concept of God when God has so invested Himself in us? Is the radical passion in God’s heart for nearness, illustrated by His ongoing pursuit of nearness with us, not brilliantly clear, or are our hearts too blind to see? If it is not clear to us, we must ask, “Why is my heart so blind to God’s desire?” If God’s desire for nearness is clear to our hearts and yet we are content with distance, we must ask, “Why am I so dull in heart that I am content to remain apart from the glorious God?”

Saints, God wants a people that are near and He will get that people. The question for you and me is whether or not we will be part of that company. God has done all that He can. He has clearly demonstrated and declared His intentions to us, and yet we remain distant. To address the question of “why do we remain distant?” is to put our heart on full display. It is to uncover the hidden things and expose what is truly there, seeing just why it is that we avoid God.

We place the blame on the God who is distant, but He, with eyes of fire, looks directly into our hearts melting all our excuses exposing our lack of desire for His nearness. It is one of the greatest tragedies that we as believers in the 21st century consider God aloof and distant. We must allow the Spirit to expose and search our hearts that it may be clear to us just why we have settled for the distant God when the story of history clearly shows God’s increasingly radical steps to draw near to us. Why then do we do not believe that He is near to us? Perhaps there are many reasons, but there are two that stand out clearly.

For one, we do not have ears to hear the invitation. Jesus often cried out to them that have “ears to hear.” There are two common reasons that we do not have ears. For one there are few trumpets declaring to God’s people that they must ascend the hill. Sadly, often instead ministers protect their ministry by unconsciously promoting a model where they ascend rather than the people. This breaks God’s heart and yet it is a pattern that we continue to follow even though we’ve broken the tyranny of Roman theology and all nod our heads in assent to the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Those who love God deepest and are given a place to minister must, like Moses, call the people to the mountain of nearness with God, not be content to be an intermediary.

God Himself alone is the intermediary now. For a minister to place himself in that place is a dangerous place and, even when accidental, is in active opposition to God’s desire for His people. This does not invalidate ministerial gifts, but rather sets the standard for them. Valid ministerial gifts do not serve as an intermediary between God and the people but rather function as a friend of the bridegroom (John 3:29), exhorting and leading the people to face to face communion with the living God with no intermediary other than the man Jesus. For those that minister, there is safety in ministering as though you were trying to work yourself out of a job, freely giving all you have to those under your ministry and actively calling and empowering them to the place where you are in God.

The second issue with regard to “ears to hear” is that our ears are so dull and continually filled with other voices and amusements that we do not have ears to hear the voice of God inviting us up the hill. We spend precious little time meditating on the Word of God and hearing the Spirit breathe on it until we know the heart of God for us. We turn our imagination lesser things, becoming satisfied by cheap, empty thrills rather than allowing our ears and appetites to change until only a word from God will satisfy the longings of our hearts. We must cut off lesser voices that we might hear the voice of reality from the throne beckoning us to come near.

The second primary obstacle with God’s nearness is that we do not ascend the hill due to the issue of cost. Like the Israelites of old, we are afraid of what it will cost us to draw near to the place where the fire burns and the voice speaks. We are content to remain with dark, dull hearts because it might be costly to draw near to God. Deep within we know that what we are is painfully short of what we are made for, but like a madman we continue to resist the radical change necessary that our hearts may be fully alive. Can we imagine what an affront this is to God? He has provided the intercessor that was necessary, freely places the fire of the mountain in us by the Spirit, and concludes Scripture with the promise of face to face interaction, yet we remain unresponsive.

Our God promises to be near to our call. His promises it not be be near our whim, but our call. Our call contains within it a cry and desire for Him that offers up all of our being. It holds nothing back but invites the fire of God to purge everything in our heart that we might be near Him. It is this sort of cry that brings His nearness. A lesser cry will not suffice. It is the lack of a cry of this kind that causes us to remain distant from the One who is ever near.

We must call out and cry to Him with a longing heart. We must cry, with the Spirit and the bride (Revelation 22:17) that He come, no matter what the cost to us or, ultimately, the cost to the planet in the day of the Lord. When He comes the mountain quakes and our heart is filled with fear, but if we have a proper cry in our heart none of this matters so long as He comes. A valid cry is one that says, “even if I die, I must have Him near. Let Him come near and my being be burnt up, let every other thing I love be shattered, but just let Him come because I cannot remain living so long as He is distant.”

He has left us with a promise to respond to a cry and with no obstacle to drawing near, but our response, typically not in words but in lifestyle, is to remain distant in our own hearts while blaming God for how distant He is. The demands of nearness have caused us, like the children of Israel, to stand back content to ask others to go to God for us. Again, have we really comprehended what a rejection of God this is?

He has called us near and provided the one and only intercessor and still we continue to look to others to ascend the hill for us. He has paid an awful price to enable us to ascend the hill and yet we spurn His invitation content to fill our lives with much lesser pleasures. This is heresy in a day and age when all men have been given access to the living God. Whatever the cost may be to live in the manifest nearness of God, it is truly far less than the cost of living a dull life in bondage to lesser things.

Saints, have we considered how deeply this must hurt His heart? Our God is near. Let anyone who doubts that fact be silenced. It is us who are distant. Let us set our hearts to pay the cost and draw near to the heart of the living One. Let us be those that fill His heart with joy. Man’s consistent rejection of the God that is in pursuit has already caused our God more pain than a human frame can comprehend. Our God has promised to be near when we call. Seeing as our God cannot lie, the issue must remain in our lack of calling rather than in His lack of nearness

As a final note, there are those desperately longing for God who are enduring seasons of wilderness. For those dry and lonely and yet longing for God with every fiber of your being, willing to obey any call for Him to be near, do not feel condemned, but rather encouraged that the God who holds your days in His hand longs for nearness greater than you do and is, in truth, much nearer than you perceive Him to be. Remain steady. He is near. Your perception of His nearness will change if you remain faithful.

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit Part 2

September 5, 2009

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. – Matthew 5:3 (ESV)

One of the core issues of embracing poverty is the issue of self-existence. What makes God unique in all the universe is that He is self-sustaining. Only He can sustain Himself by Himself. All the rest of the creation is dependent on God both for its very existence and for its continued sustenance. When Moses pressed God for a name in Exodus, God declared Himself to be the self-sustaining One that exists with no dependencies on anyone or anything. He is the One that exists irrespective of the existence of any other.

Man, on the other hand, as a created being requires the sustenance from God that He might live and this is at the root of the issue in the garden. The enemy was attempting to divorce man from His reliance on God. He presented this as a deception so that man would imagine that becoming self sustaining, choosing for himself what things are good and evil, would allow Him to ascend to a place like God when in reality it would bring him into a place of death and decay. The glorious life that man was given required the sustenance of the Creator. Man is not self-existent, but lucifer was determined to deceive man because of the tragedy of his own revolt.

As the most beautiful being yet created, lucifer challenged God because his heart was so full of pride that he imagined he could sustain his own beauty. When he staged a rebellion based on the confidence that he could sustain himself without the Creator, to his own horror he became the most horrific and corrupt creature in all of creation. No longer exalted and beautiful, a death of a sorts came in when he attempted independence from the sustainer and it destroyed the beauty in him corrupting all that was beautiful into something horrific and hideous. Lucifer now became satan.

Satan, filled with pride and now finding himself in this horrible place where he was still in subjection to God but now as a hideous, evil being rather than one of beauty, expressed his anger towards God by taking aim to corrupt God’s prize creation. He immediately went to man in the garden and offered man the same decision that he himself had made without telling man of the horrific consequences. Man fell to the same temptation that had seized satan’s heart, that of being self-sustaining or independent of God’s wisdom and sustaining power, and immediately man’s being fell from a place of glory to a place of death. The most beautiful of God’s creatures in the heavens, lucifer, had fallen and become infected with death. Now, the very height of God’s creation, man, had also fallen for the same ruse and now death infected man in that same way that evil had destroyed lucifer’s beauty.

We find this same foundational issue in the next great temptation in human history when satan comes to Jesus in the desert again trying to thwart God’s plan by taking advantage of Jesus’ humanity in the same way that he destroyed the man in the garden. The scene is no longer a plush garden, but this time it is a barren wilderness. When satan first tempted man, he had to convince man there was something better than the beauty and provision of the garden. This time, Jesus was in a barren wasteland. He was surrounded by a hard place and desperately hungry. Surely satan imagined he had the advantage. In the garden, he had to be deceive a man that was completely provided for, living in bliss and in communion with God. This time he only needed to offer a deception of relief to a man exhausted in a dry and barren place that so illustrated man’s fallen condition. Surely he could get Jesus to escape this place. Surely Jesus would long for the place of comfort and sustenance.

With this in my mind, satan went straight to the primary issue and attacked Jesus with the temptation of self sustenance. Satan came and immediately challenged Him to use His divine power to self-sustain Himself as a man in turning bread to stone. Jesus clearly understood what was at state and quickly replied, from the Scripture, that man should not live by bread alone but by every word proceeding from the mouth of God. In other words, man must rely on something proceeding from God to live. Even if He could turn the stones to bread, the issue was that He, as a man, would be sustained by God and not by Himself. Jesus refused self sufficiency as a man, even when it could be obtained using His own divine power, rebuking the enemy by declaring that man, as a creature, was designed to live dependent on God. Satan had begun with the temptation that caused his own fall and that he used to effect the fall of man, but this time Jesus immediately resisted.

In order to make the issue even more clear, God has also given us a parable in our own bodies. Scientists tells us how our bodies are self-sustaining with the cells constantly replenishing themselves until the aging process shuts down cell replacement and we slowly die. From this we can see that the human body was made to sustain itself and live immortally as the Bible teaches. However, no matter how marvelous the human body’s capacity may be, it requires food. Though the body can sustain itself once it obtains fuel, we are still dependent on an external source of nutrients to supply our bodies with the fuel necessary to sustain life. Though our bodies were designed to live forever, they were designed so that they cannot live without any external nutrients. We are dependent on external food sources to fuel the life that is in our bodies.

So too our spirits are designed to live forever and yet are dependent on a fuel which we receive from the only One that is ultimately self-sustaining. We can live in a delusion that we have enough to supply ourselves because we may be popular or talented in ministry, but the reality is that our spirits starve and die if we are not constantly being fueled from the One who is the sustainer of all things. It is those who, like Jesus, live in that place of dependence on the eternal One for daily fuel for their spirits that will be fit to participate in the heavenly government. The poor and the hungry eat everything that is offered to them. It is only those that imagine themselves to be full that push away the gift of food from another. When we truly know our inner poverty, it will cause us to lay hold of the One that can supply and sustain us. Living in that manner will fit us to stand before the One who alone is self-sustaining as we understand, acknowledge, and even celebrate our great need of His abundance.

Really the root issue is dependence. Creation is made to be dependent on God for its supply. Not because God is some sort of ego, but rather because He simply is the only self-sustaining One that exists and He sustains His creation with love and tender care.  However, when creation refuses this dependence, death enters the equation because once you cut yourself off from the One that is eternal life the only option is death. If you get the root of the issue with those in the western world that mock the gospel and are the most vocal opponents of the gospel it will come down to the issue of dependence.  The mockers of the gospel refuse to be in the place of dependence.  They do not want to depend on Him for their life and they refuse to depend upon Him for the definition of morality.  Man desires to do what he wants, the way he wants, even when it ends in death. This is the corruption whose only remedy is poverty of spirit.

This is why in John 17 Jesus defined eternal life as the intimate knowledge of God (John 17:3).  Apart from intimate communion with Him from a heart posture of poverty, there is no life.   I fear that we are too full in our spirits and unaware of how much fuel we really need from the One upon the throne that our spirits may have the fuel that is necessary. Let us go to Him daily in poverty of spirit that He might fuel us with Himself.

Blessed are the Poor in Spirit

September 3, 2009

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. – Matthew 5:3 (ESV)

Jesus promises a governmental position in the government, or rule, of the heavens to all those that are poor in spirit. Remembering that the heavens, being the location of God’s governmental throne, are clearly above the earth, we can see that Jesus is promising a place of authority in His own personal government that is ruling over all that exists both on the earth and above it. What is clearly implicated here is that poverty of spirit is a necessary requirement for ruling in God’s government. Lucifer was cast down because he lost poverty of spirit and chose to embrace the power and strength of his own spirit. This led to him becoming so deluded that he challenged God in his own might, resulting in a flash when God cast him down from his privileged, governmental position.

When lucifer embraced personal power in his own spirit, he changed from being one of the most beautiful of all creatures to being the most dark and terrible of all beings. He was transformed from one filled with light to one filled with oppressive darkness. His rejection of poverty of spirit transformed his being into a selfish, dark, and evil being with a capacity to destroy that has brought destruction not just to his own nature, but has also brought manifold destruction to others in his corruption of one third of the angels and his subsquent acts in corrupting all the earth. Lucifer so successfully transmitted this disease to humanity, that we too embraced strength in our own spirit, with the end result being that our inner man became corrupt and depraved as well and human history has became the tale of the dark deeds of humanity. Do we consider the disastrous consequences of embracing the strengh of our own spirit, rather than the poverty of it as Jesus exhorts us to do? Do we consider that strength of spirit may be cloked in religious language and religious ambition so that we may end up pursuinig the very thing Jesus desires us to reject within a religious framework?

Jesus, on the other hand, calls us to poverty of spirit. He calls us to return to the primary issue of the garden and re-embrace the leadership of God in refusing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Rather than embracing the promise of its fruit, we are to bring our spirit in poverty before God desiring to once again know the thrill of being filled with His spirit rather than dominating others with our own. His Spirit alone is capable of ruling over others while keeping the well being of others as His first priority. Our spirits are not equipped to rule as His is and so any time we attempt to live out of our own spirits, the inevitable result is selfishness, pain, and suffering. Only God’s Spirit has the capacity to rule others in a way that is ultimately selfless. We do not have that capacity in our own spirits and to thing otherwise is delusional, though it be couched in religious language.

For this reason, only those that embrace poverty of spirit will be equipped to rule in the government of God. This is truly a high call because Jesus is offering us access, not just to the government of the earth, but to the government of the heavens. As we noted at the start, the government of the heavens sits over all creation and is the location of God’s very own throne. How high an exaltation Jesus offers us! Yet, at the same time, the qualifications for that exaltation are paradoxical. To ascend to the high place, our spirits must embrace a low place. We sit enthroned in government with God only when we acknowledge our total lack and poverty, not when we stand on our own accomplishments and power. Who can embrace such a thing? Who will empty themselves that they might be exalted by God? Who can lay aside from our natural methods of improving ourselves? Who can reject our human ideals of embracing power, ability, and stature thinking that our strength offers something to God that is necessary to His government? Do we desire what Jesus offers or do we have the secret desire that we may rule over our brethren in the age to come?

Only the poor in spirit can stand in the place God desires us to stand. Only the poor in spirit will endure in that place. Anyone else, no matter how talented, gifted, or accomplished, when raised to the right hand of God will fall in corruption just as lucifer did, corrupting both himself and others. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything any creature in creation does reverberates throughout creation impacting others. For that reason, God cannot allow an individual to be open to the place of corruption because an individual’s corruption never remains isolated. When you and I fall, others fall as well. Our corruption touches all those that we make contact with and so our corruption is not just an issue of our own personal nature, but it is an issue of our effect upon others. For this reason, a ruler in God’s government must lay aside his own strength, which will enslave and corrupt others, that he might be filled with the strength and Spirit of God which alone is fit to rule over others in a benevolent way.

Poverty in spirit is not just a phrase, it is a critical reality that you and I are called to embrace. To neglect this offer is to suffer great loss for Jesus is offering us an incredible place of privilege if we are willing to embrace His requirement. The offer is great, but the cost of that position is high as well. Forget your own achievements, ministerial or otherwise. In Matthew 5:3 Jesus gives you what He wants to see on your resume if you desire a place in His government, and it’s a poverty in your own spirit, not the massive strength that sadly we spend so much time pursuing. Let us embrace His paradigm so that on that great day, He can invite us with joy in His voice to sit on His very own throne with Him participating in His brilliant rule.

In short, the answer is clear. Embrace lack that you might prosper. Ask for emptiness that you may be filled.  Beware the temptation of your own spiritual fullness though and in your filling, stay in the place of poverty.

Praying the Bible

August 28, 2009

Praying the Scripture is something that I believe is often overlooked, but has incredible value. Recently I’ve been making an intentional effort to pray the Scripture and it has really moved my heart. Just to clarify what I mean by praying the Scriptures, I am not talking about what I call “pray reading.” Pray reading is where, as you read, you turn phrases and verses into prayer and basically dialog with the Lord over the Scripture. This is much slower than just reading the passage, but also helps bring real life into the passage and helps apply it deeper to your heart. This method of devotional reading is very valuable but it not what I am talking about here. If you’re not familiar with this, just leave a comment or send me an email and I can point you to some resources.

What I mean by “Praying the Scriptures” is extracting key phrases, promises of rewards, commands, warnings, and blessings from a book of the Bible or a passage of Scripture and creating a prayer list from these verses. For example, the book of Revelation uses the phrase “ears to hear” at least seven times. From that you could create the following point on a prayer list: “God give me ears to hear. Let me hear what you are saying, both to my heart, and my generation.” Under that prayer you write out the seven verses, reading those verses as you are praying so that your heart is filled with the combination of your own personal heart cry and God’s language describing the need of the human heart.

What this does is help really drive the Scripture into your heart. It does not replace reading and studying entire passages because that is very valuable, but by taking specific action points from the Scripture and specifically praying those we take God’s direction, or His law, and plant it deep in our heart all the while using the Biblical language that God gave us. It is an incredible way to go deeper in the Word and to plant in our hearts what God says really matters. By following the study of a passage with the repeated praying of the passage’s action points over time it helps us to set our hearts to obey the Scriptures in an intentional way rather than just hoping to remember what the Scripture says.

Using this method you will also start seeing patterns in a passage of Scripture. Often God hits the same topic more than once. How often something is repeated in the Scripture is very valuable because it underscores the importance of the directive to our hearts. The sad truth is that we quickly forget much of what we read, but when we intentionally pray the action points that the Scripture gives us, we begin retaining specific things that God directed us to do, to seek for, or to avoid.

The goal is to use this type of prayer as a pattern of heart engagement with the Word and obedience to the Word that we might be found obedient and mature on that great day. Without using techniques like this, there are many promises, and warnings, in the Scriptures that will never stay in our heart.

As far as methodology goes, praying this way does not have to be a rigid type of liturgy. As you develop prayer lists from various passage or books, keep a written record of them and periodically review them in your personal prayer time. God may highlight one particular thing in your prayer list one day and, if He does, just focus on that one thing. The goal is not to follow a certain liturgy or get every prayer point covered that one day, but that over time the Scripture goes deep in our hearts and, in doing so, increases our fellowship and communion with the One who is Holy and to whom we will give account.

In future days, I’ll post some examples of prayer lists I have developed from passages of Scripture. I would love to hear comments or see lists that others have developed.

Understanding the Spirit of Prophecy

August 13, 2009

…For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy. – Revelation 19:10b (ESV)

I’ll admit up front that this post is long, but the topic is critical and the full consideration of it is has profound implications for how we interpret Scripture and therefore how we live.

Revelation 19:10 is an absolutely critical passage containing a massive, hidden gem. I’ll admit up front that we all know that Scripture repeatedly provides us with multiple meanings from a single passage. However, what follows is a critical, and I might argue the primary, meaning that is often lost on readers and has significant repercussions for the way you interpret Scripture. In short, Revelation 19:10 unlocks all prophecy by providing the key that is necessary to rightly interpret the prophetic Scriptures. Now let’s examine that key.

Given just how much of the Bible is dedicated to the writings of the prophets and how much of our theology is based on the proclamation of the prophets, understanding this key rightly has massive implications for how we read and understand the Bible. Once you grasp the key of Rev 19:10, you can better navigate the entire Scriptures and especially the Old Testament prophets. The lack of the application of this key has caused many to be confused as they read the Old Testament and also caused the development of faulty hermeneutics that allegorize passages that are intended to be literal. Let’s break down Revelation 19:10 then and find the critical key contained within it.

I want to focus on the final sentence of the verse. The verse says, depending on your version, that the testimony (or witness) of Jesus is the spirit (or essence) of prophecy. So we have the spirit, or essence, of all prophecy being connected to the witness of testimony of Jesus. So then at the root of prophecy you will find the declaration of Jesus and a testimony of Jesus. Prophecy, by nature, is a forward looking gift. We also know from I Corinthians 13 that prophecy will cease at the end of the age when Jesus comes. Therefore, the witness of Jesus given by the spirit of prophecy is forward looking but only necessary before the end of the age. In other words, it exists only to give testimony of Jesus in this age.

Therefore so long as prophecy exists, there must be a testimony of Jesus still to be given. Implied in that is that for prophecy to cease, the testimony of Jesus contained within prophecy, must no longer be necessary. In other words, in our current age which is filled with darkness, we have need of prophecy to point us forwards to a testimony of Jesus that is yet future, but when we enter an age of light we will no longer need prophecy as a testimony to Jesus. Now we know that the majesty and mystery of Jesus will be proclaimed for all eternity. Therefore prophecy is aiming at a specific testimony of Jesus that is desperately needed in this age, but not in the age to come.

The one thing that marks the age to come above all else is that Jesus will physically reign in Jerusalem. The present age and the age to come are separated by many things, but the one primary thing is that presently we await Jesus’ return from the heavens whereas in the age to come He will be openly reigning over the whole earth from a throne in Jerusalem. So then prophecy gives a needed witness of Jesus until Jesus Himself is reigning on the earth bringing “that which is perfect” and eliminating the need for prophecy as we know it.

From that we can clearly say that the spirit of prophecy is aiming towards the installation of Jesus as King over the Earth at the end of the age. After that event occurs, prophecy is no longer needed. But why is the spirit of prophecy necessary in this age? It is because men’s hearts and minds are blind to the judgment to come and to the reality of Jesus’ rule. They are as mockers in Noah’s day (Matthew 24:37-38) and it requires the spirit of prophecy to confront the cloud of deception on the earth with the bold declaration that Messiah is coming.

Understanding this, we could now re-write Revelation 19:10 in the following way: the Spirit of prophecy, or the root life and essence of it, is the full revelation of the Messiah ruling over the whole earth. Implied in that definition is the declaration of the events that will lead to the installation of the Messiah on the earth at the end of the age. Therefore, prophecy’s life consists, not merely in its present accuracy with regard to current events, but rather in whether or not it contains the essence of the eternal mystery of God’s glorious day of judgment whereby God installs the Messiah over the earth, judges all wickedness, and restores creation by the Messiah.

The prophets collectively refer to this event as the “Day of the Lord.” The spirit of prophecy then always contains, not just direction concerning the situation at hand, but a witness to the ultimate “Day of the Lord.” This is quickly illustrated by a brief examination of the prophetic Scriptures. Not only is this found in the prophets, but a careful reading of the New Testament will point out continual references to the day of the Lord showing its preeminence in the minds of the apostles.

Here is how the lack of this key has caused confusion among many in reading the Scriptures. In the Scriptures, the prophets may address a particular situation, leader, or dilemma but as you read the prophetic words you begin to notice that prophecies almost always include elements of language that seem to supersede or go beyond the issue at hand. The prophetic will address an event but then add climatic language, usually in the first person for God, describing an ultimate victory or destruction always accompanied by a Divine claim of personally visiting the planet and extreme events that accompany that appearing. The problem that some face is that the specific event being addressed is clearly understood, but the climatic language almost seems to be hyperbole when it is only considered in relation to the actual events that unfolded.

The language of the prophets then becomes confusing for many and, not understanding the spirit of prophecy, is interpreted as allegorical by others. The reality is that these prophecies are merely operating according to the spirit of prophecy which means that, at their core, they are always aiming at the ultimate revelation of the Messiah on the Day of the Lord. The exaggerated language or visual language that supersedes the issue at hand is not allegorical, but rather it is the prophet seeing that the moment at hand is merely a picture or a parable of actual events and an actual day to come.

In a moment or crisis, the prophet is also seeing the ultimate crisis of the end of the age. In a period of judgment, the prophet may erupt in terrifying language which is not out of character with the prophecy but rather is connecting the present prophecy with the ultimate judgment at the end of the age. The description of rulers and characters in the prophets accompanied by unusual language is serving to illustrate something concerning the Messiah or something that is anti-Messiah.

The reality is that the ultimate events of the end of the age which are the full revelation of Messiah, the ultimate judgment of all evil, and the permanent installment of the Messiah as the supreme ruler and representation of God on the earth, are intricately interwoven with every period of history. In the age to come we are going to see that all of history was an exact parable illustrating the human predicament and constantly foretelling the ultimate conclusion of the age. We are going to find that God was so kind and loving that virtually all the events of human history are illustrations of some facet of the drama concluding in the restoration of all things.

Once we understand this paradigm, we will see that the correct hermeneutic when interpreting the Scripture is far more literal than we thought it was. We read over the prophets thinking that their predictions refer only to events past and pass over the extreme language where the prophet sees a glimpse of the judgment at the end of the age in the midst of the present judgment. In reality, we were meant to consider the tragedy the prophet was confronting as a picture and then carefully consider the prophet’s language and prepare our hearts with trembling for the yet future day that the prophet was seeing.

Jesus Himself obviously communicated a literal hermeneutic to the apostles when He opened the Scriptures for them because when you read the New Testament you see the writers interpreting Old Testament passages that perhaps could be seen as allegorical or figurative before the appearance of Jesus, as literal. If you sift through the Old Testament references used by the apostles you will find them connecting all sorts of verses that we would not naturally consider to be literal and using them as literal prophecies of elements of Jesus and His life.

Amazingly you will find a tremendous amount of the apostles theology came from the Psalms, a book which we look at primarily as emotional and figurative. That alone should give us pause because the Psalms have far more to say about the ultimate events of the age and the installation of Messiah as a global ruler than they do of His first appearance as a redeemer.

Since we are approaching so many of these passages in hindsight after the Lord’s first appearing, we don’t seem to notice that, absent the knowledge of the first coming, we would not naturally interpret these passages as literal. This becomes especially terrifying when we consider the events of the second coming because most of our interpretation of the Day of the Lord and the ultimate events of the age is not literal.

We seem constantly in search of a code to explain the Scripture rather than wrestling with the Scriptures as a literal record of the events and issues of the age. The Angel’s declaration to John in Revelation 19:10 clearly directs us that the prophecy and events recorded in the Scriptures is critical for us since all true prophecy contains a witness to a great and terrible day that is yet future. It should radically affect the way we live when we realize with clarity that these prophecies are not hyperbole, nor merely symbolic, but literal declarations of a day to come.

Demystifying Prayer

August 4, 2009

We were recently discussing some of the ways prayer is misused and it immediately came to me that perhaps some of our error in praying is that we have so mystified it that we really do not have a solid paradigm for exactly what we are doing when we pray. Because our governmental model of the universe is not sound and because we do not see intercession as a primarily governmental occupation, our prayer suffers and is subject to all sorts of frustrations and excesses. We may use a lot of volume and many repetitions (Matthew 6:7) and even consistently “bind satan” and yet our prayers seem to have little effect.

My argument here will be that the lack of a governmental model of prayer is at the root of many of our issues in prayer. Now, while this is entitled “Demystifying Prayer,” I will acknowledge up front that prayer is inherently mystical in the sense that fallen man is communing with the Divine which is a relationship that is beyond human capacity. The issue though is that we have added a mystical layer on top of prayer that makes it frustrating and unfruitful. If we remove the unnecessary mysticism we will find that we begin to pray in a much more Scriptural and far less frustrating manner. Understanding the governmental model behind prayer helps to clear our hearts so that we see prayer less as an ethereal thing and more as something substantial and real.

Rather than seek to examine all the possible errors of our methods of prayer as if we are the proper authority on prayer, let us simply examine the proper paradigm of prayer. When we pray out of the proper paradigm, we will naturally adjust the way we pray.

We obviously do not have the space to examine Luke 18, but let us suffice it to say that Luke 18 presents the model for intercession. We can get a basic grasp of how we are to prayer from Luke 18:1-8. If you’re not familiar with the passage, take a moment now and read it. We learn the following from Luke 18:

• There is injustice, sin, and evil on the earth. It is caused by the adversary working through fallen humans and the systems of this age.
• We are affected by it in a substantial way. In fact, it is the oppression from evil that we experience and observe that becomes the groundwork for our intercession.
• The proper response then to the predicament we find ourselves in is to go to the judge who alone can rescue us and beseech him until He answers.
• The judge may appear silent, but each request is moving him. He will act. In fact, Jesus asks the leading question of whether He will find men interceding with a confidence that God will act. Even if He withholds His action until the Day of the Lord, we are still to have faith that He will act.

If we properly understand the governmental paradigm of Luke 18, it will clear the fog that surrounds intercession and lead us to more effective praying. The problem is that we have so thoroughly adopted Greek dualism that we see God as completely dwelling in another realm and do not see Him in His governmental position over our realm. Some see our job in prayer as trying to get Him to cross the boundary of His realm into our reality and do something. Others see our job in intercession to be attacking opposing spirit beings so that God can do what He desires in our realm. The reality is that intercession can be long, painful, and deep but our model for it does not need to be confusing, nor overly mystical.

In short, to intercede is simply to approach the throne of grace to find help in our time of need. When we pray we are approaching a King. This King is enthroned above all other kings. He presently, at this time, has full authority and dominion over all of creation. When we perceive the need for wrongs to be made right, we simply stand before the King, as did Queen Ester, and beseech Him to act on our behalf and break in.

We must see that prayer is primarily a governmental function. The secret to prayer is not figuring out which spirit is the problem or which language will finally move His heart, but to realize that when you step into the place of prayer the Scriptures tell us that you are standing before a very real God on a very real throne that hears the cries of His people (Exodus 2:23). We do not fully consider the idea of God as a real and present King reigning over the earth, but this is the Biblical paradigm. Just consider some of the most significant theophanies in the Scriptures and you will repeatedly see the revelation of a King upon a throne and the recipient of the vision being undone at the present ruling majesty of the living God over both the recipient of the revelation and the entire earth.

Just the recognition that you are approaching the King of the universe in a governmental capacity should dramatically alter your perspective of prayer. You are beseeching this great King, asking Him to move on your behalf. We are subject to His rule and yet He invites us as men to take on His heart and beseech Him for the very things He desires to do. This is a stunning partnership that few of us really take the time to comprehend, and this partnership takes place in a governmental paradigm where we beseech the King to act.

Beyond the issue of partnership, is the core, fundamental motivation behind intercession and that is the issue of evil. Most of our intercession at this time arises primarily from the problem of evil. The problem is that, absent the proper governmental paradigm, we lose our way and can end up trying to attack evil in our prayers rather than following the Luke 18 model of simply going to the King and asking Him for justice. To better illustrate this, if you were in a kingdom and there was a usurper propagating evil what would you do? Would you go to the usurper and ask him to stop, or would you go to the king, the one who has full power and authority, and ask him to drive the usurper out of the kingdom?

The obvious answer is that we would enter the king’s courts and appeal to the king. Is this not exactly what the Scriptures exhort us to do? What then should be our primary approach to evil and spiritual warfare? Should it be to incessantly bind the devil, which the Scriptures clearly say is bound at Jesus’ coming and not until then, or should it be to appeal to the King to break out in power and stop the infusion of darkness?

Now, as we ask the King to break in, we recognize from Luke 18 that we are also in a place where we are awaiting the ultimate justice of the Day of the Lord. This keeps our hearts in faith with regard to the issue of delay. The question is not whether or not the King will act on our behalf, but rather it is a matter of when. Remember that in the book of Revelation, it is bowls of the saints prayers that sure as the fuel for God’s judgment as He breaks in on the earth. All the intercession throughout the ages that has been delayed, is finally answered in that great day. On that day full justice comes and the usurper is totally destroyed.

Intercession then, seen in its complete context, is to stand before the creator and to ask Him to break in now and demonstrate a preview of the goodness, kindness, and liberation that is coming in His ultimate act of justice on the Day of the Lord. When we ask Him to execute justice, heal, deliver, or liberate men we are asking Him to demonstrate who He is now as a prophetic picture of what He will ultimately do on a global level in the present.

How much would it alter your prayer life if you began to see your intercession as literally standing before the Judge of the universe beseeching Him to break in a rule on a particular issue? What if, rather than searching for more powerful language or new techniques, you merely closed your eyes and saw yourself before the throne of Hebrew 4:16? How would that alter the entire way you approach prayer and the language you use? What if you began to understand that when God delays His justice that He is also filling a bowl in heaven with the cry for justice and that bowl is going to overflow one day when the world is immersed in the justice and judgment of God? Your “unanswered” prayers are not unanswered, but rather assembled by the King into a great bowl of prayers that He is going to answer in His time and in response to His saint’s continued cries.

What if that King not only tolerated your petitions as the king did with Esther, but what if the King had actually invited you to come and beseech Him in your time of need? In our case we are welcomed by the Sovereign of the universe to approach Him and make known our needs, or our injustices.

Read Revelation 4 and consider the throne room of the King of the Universe, the “One upon the throne.” Then, take the thing you need to intercede before the Lord as though you were a subject being welcomed by the King to petition Him for the thing that you need Him to act on. You will find that addressing God in the proper governmental context is far more satisfying than trying to find better language, stir up more volume, or attempting to randomly bind spiritual enemies. Approach and address Him as a just and willing King. You just may see your prayer time transformed.

As in the Days of Noah

June 26, 2009

Recently I was spending some time with one of my daughters and at her request, we ended up watching one of her videos. When it stopped, the television defaulted to a Christian channel and they were showing a movie of Noah and the ark. She begged to watch it, so we watched some of it. It was a great example of what I would call “Biblical film making.” The dialogue was a little humorous in that the language was so archaic that it made King James English almost seem conversational. At the same time Noah seemed to always be looking off into the distance making profound statements with an air of wisdom about him. Regardless of Noah’s depiction, their depiction of the ark was actually interesting. They had an interesting view of how the ark was laid out and what life was like inside the ark both for people and animals. However, after the initial ark scene, I was totally unprepared for what was about to happen.

After the ark was loaded, Noah and his family were secured in the ark and soon the rain began to fall. As the rains fell the ark slowly began to be lifted and drift on top of the waters. At the same time the people outside the ark were panicking and frantically climbing to the highest places they could find to escape the water that was slowly overtaking them as a steady and unstoppable force. In the midst of this, there is a scene inside the ark where you can hear the muted sounds of screaming and shrieks from from all those that are lost outside the ark and frantically trying to escape the ever encroaching waters. As you hear these sounds, Noah’s wife has a look on her face of horror. Up until now the family hasn’t fully considered their predicament, and suddenly the full realization of what is going on strikes them. Noah’s wife looks to Noah and their eyes meet. Her expression is begging the question, “am I really hearing what I think I’m hearing?” Here Noah’s family is saved in the midst of cataclysmic destruction and yet the realization is finally hitting them that everything is real. Everything Noah had been preaching had been words up until this point, but now those words were reality and the terror of the reality was more than any of them anticipated.

I was so struck with that scene that I trembled on the inside. My mind raced to the Scriptures and I considered more and more how every time I pick up the Scriptures I am seeing such a clear declaration of the coming Day of the Lord. Whether it is the historical books, the prophets, the gospels, the acts of the early church, or the apocalypse of Revelation, there is a consistent and persistent declaration of the Day of the Lord in the Scriptures. It is almost as if there is a veil causing us to miss the preeminence the Day of the Lord has in the Scriptures and when that veil begins to lift, one is astounded as just how much of the Scriptures is given over to declaring that God is coming to the planet and that coming is something so dramatic that words fail in the description of it.

The prophets saw and declared this coming day. The Jews so anticipated that day that when John Baptist declared that Messiah was coming, they were baptized in repentance to prepare themselves for the day. In fact, the primary stumbling block for the first century Jews was that they were expecting the ultimate day of the Lord and not a coming that, in kindness, made available a redemption prior to that cataclysmic day. In Paul’s writings, we find that he motivated both himself and the saints he wrote to by exhorting them that they would be found in Christ on that day.

The coming of that day and the ensuing events were the cornerstone of the apostolic proclamation and the motivation to declare the gospel to the earth that as many as possible might be saved in the great day of God that was coming.  Remember that salvation Biblically is mostly presented as a future thing and what we have failed to perceive is that future salvation is not just salvation from hell, but salvation in the great Day of the Lord.  This doesn’t negate the present need of an encounter with God or of being born again, but rather our present experience of redemption and the indwelling presence of the Spirit, among other things, gives us assurance of full salvation on that day.

Every temporal judgment is a warning of an ultimate day of reckoning for the earth and those who have walked upon it. While we often focus on whether current events are judgments or not we miss the fact that any present judgment event is merely an illustration that is meant to point us to that ultimate day and warn us of a judgment that far surpasses anything we have presently experienced. Even the flood, as cataclysmic as it was, was not an event in itself, but rather meant to be an prophetic picture to shock and awaken us to the nature of what’s coming when God comes to the planet.

The issue of God’s coming is not an issue merely of an angry deity, but rather the issue of what happens when the One who is truly perfect and good comes into full contact with all the evil on the earth and in man.  The drama of that day is actually part of the love and kindness of God because the present evil that we tolerate is having horrific effects on creation that we don’t even recognize because we are so numb to it.  Since we are part of the environment and over it we can’t even see the full effects on our environment of the evil dwelling within us.  God is not content to see this destruction continue forever and so His coming brings a massive judgment that is rooted, not in anger, but in perfect love.

I have to believe that, like Noah’s family, this event may be a part of our creeds and theology, but that our hearts have not truly anticipated just how devastating and traumatic this day is going to be. The Scriptures clearly describe an event that man cannot endure and that even the earth can barely endure. Regardless of how literal your hermeneutic is, and the further I go the more convinced I am that the Scriptures are far more literal than we have imagined, as you read the prophetic scriptures concerning this day, anyone who seriously considers these events will come to the conclusion that this day is going to be beyond anything any of us have imagined.

Jesus said that the end would be “as in the days of Noah.” He chose the days of Noah as the example of the end. Just as in the days of Noah, men live totally ignorant of the impending judgment. Men scoff at the idea that God is going to judge all wickedness and restore the earth in purity and goodness just as He has promised. As in the days of Noah, God has made an ark of escape in Jesus that we might endure that terrible day when God comes to earth in holiness and in zeal to cleanse and redeem the earth.  And the real terror of that day is that, as in the days of Noah, the horror of what is coming will not be fully evident until the event is fully in motion and there is nothing that can be done. 

The real horror of the look on Noah’s wife’s face is that she only understood the magnitude of what was happening after it was too late to take any more action. By the time she fully understood what was going on it was too late to do anything about it.  It was too late to prepare any more.  It was too late to warn others, and it was too late to rescue any more souls.  The door was closed and the deluge had come and there was nothing that could be done to stop it.  So too the real terror of the Day of the Lord is going to be that we will only fully grasp it on that day and on that day it will be too late to prepare our hearts to face the fullness of God and too late to declare to others the need to repent that they may be saved in that day.  What has been done will have been done.  In that moment, the fog will lift and we will clearly see our lives and actions for what they were and the pain of regret, which for some will be an eternal terror, will be immense.

Just like Noah’s family in the movie, believers are living in intellectual assent to the idea that Jesus is coming but with virtually no understanding of just what that day is going to be like and no preparation for it. Our theology may be correct in our hearts, but in our hearts we live as though everything that day will destroy is actually permanent.  That day will literally shake the earth. Men will seek the escape of death because of the appearance of a holy God on the planet. We must begin to read the Scriptures simply, taking them at face value, and see that throughout the entire book there is a consistent declaration that God is coming to physically dwell on the earth among His people, and that coming will demand a complete judgment of all that is wicked and a restoration of the earth. We must also begin to see that all other themes in Scripture are in the context of this coming day and God’s purpose for it.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; – Isaiah 61:1-2 (ESV)

We are presently living in the year of God’s favor. It is the time period when salvation is made available.  God in His immense love and kindness has repeatedly, though His Word and through messengers each generation, warned us of the events to come and provided, at the cost of His own blood, an ark of escape in that great day.  However, this salvation makes little sense without the context of the day of vengeance against all wickedness, no matter how minor or how subtle,  that is coming. One thing is sure: Something is coming far beyond what we can imagine. We are presently blessed with a period of time to come under God’s mercy and allow Him to prepare us that we might stand on that day, but this blessing will be a curse in that day if we find, like Noah’s family, that it never was real to us.

If you are not right with God through Jesus Christ, I don’t have words that are strong enough to urge you to turn your heart to the cleansing in Jesus Christ that you might be prepared for that day. If you are already a believer, I would challenge you that you probably do not live in preparation for that day. Like Noah’s family, we have heard the message but we really haven’t anticipated exactly what that day will be. Most of us are expecting the inauguration of some sort of utopia and heavenly retirement age and this bears no resemblance to the way the Scripture describes this day.  While the end result is a cleansing and a perfect dwelling with God, we have grossly estimated the trauma of that process and the full purity of our God.

The reality is that this coming day is so dramatic that none of us can fully anticipate what is coming. Even those who give their hearts to prepare will, in some measure, stand like Noah’s family trembling under the weight of it all when it actually unfolds. Saints, that day is clearly described in Scripture if we only open our eyes to read it. Let us prepare our hearts in accordance with what the Scriptures really say while allowing our hearts to take the message to all those who are unprepared for this day. Malachi perhaps has the best summary of our predicament:

But who can endure the day of His coming, and who can stand when He appears? – Malachi 3:2a (ESV)

Gao Zhinsheng

May 22, 2009

Recently the Chinese government has re-arrested Gao Zhinsheng.  His crime is publicizing the kinds of abuses the Chinese government regularly inflicts on its own people. A website named “Free Gao” has published information about Gao including a video re-enacting Gao’s first imprisonment.  As you watch the video consider that this is the kind of reality that believers in many parts of China face each day.  They know that following Jesus may lead them into this kind of torture and yet they continue to evangelize passionately knowing that Jesus is the only hope for China.  Older believers even teach the younger ones how to escape the police and how to endure persecution when caught.

For most of us, China is a little unreal.  It is a place very far away possessing a culture we find unusual.  Sadly, China in the America mind is often merely a collection of labor and factories producing all our consumer goods at cheap prices.  It is the country that we both love and hate.  We love its low prices and efficient industry even as we decry the fact that it’s “cheap” and “communist.”

In the church, we often hear of Chinese Christians but their experience is also more of a detached reality for us.  Take a few minutes and allow God to knit your heart together with the Chinese, not only enjoying their stories of evangelistic success, but also sharing in their pain.

Remember those in prison, as if you were there yourself. Remember also those being mistreated, as if you felt their pain in your own bodies. – Hebrews 13:3 (NLT)

Visit the Free Gao site and take a moment to learn more of what happens behind closed doors in China.   Remember, the saints there are part of our family.

Here’s the link: http://www.freegao.com/ .

The Anatomy of Deception

April 16, 2009

I wanted to make everyone aware of a new work available by Art Katz titled  The Anatomy of Deception.  This book was published posthumously from Art’s messages.   Recently a friend was kind enough to send me a copy of it before I was even aware that it was available for purchase and I am very grateful for his kindness.  Years ago Art’s writings were for me a deep drink of refreshing water amidst an arid land.  He gave perspective to yearnings in my soul and helped form the basis of a Biblical, New Testament theology in my heart.  After just spending a few moments in the introduction of this book, my heart was again stirred in a similar manner.  As I read through this work, Art’s words were again proving to be a deep drink of refreshing water.

In this Art takes aim at the critical issues in the church which, when unaddressed, lead us into deception and become avenues for even greater deceptions and delusions.  While manifestations of power are important to the church, Art takes aim at the deeper issues of our heart before the Lord and our life, both individually and together as believers, and demonstrates how, when these things are lacking, power can become a dangerous thing and ultimately even a means to deception.  This book is an excellent examination of things that we often fail to examine and in so doing cause great harm to ourselves and the church.  If you have a burden to see a church that is genuinely apostolic and prophetic, you would do well to spend a few hours in this book and let it test and try your soul.

In the days ahead, we are going to desperately need the kind of truth that is found in this little book, so I have to encourage you to get a copy of it and read it.  I also wanted to make a note of the fact that this is a relatively small book and I also found it to be one of Art’s easiest books to read.  In fact, if you’ve never read Art before this would be a fabulous book to begin with as it’s relatively short and very approachable while clearly communicating Art’s burden.

I wanted to add one last comment about the issue of signs and wonders.  Some saints might walk away from Art’s writings with a cynical heart towards the miraculous.  I want to encourage us all, as saints, to not become cynical towards signs and wonders simply because of their misuse.   Signs were an important component of Jesus’ ministry as well as that of the early apostles.  When we hear of God working in an extraordinary way, we should be like the Bereans who were both excited to hear of what God was doing and, at the same time, verified the word to be sure that it was true.

The reality is that we desperately need the power of God accompanying the gospel in our day and we must understand that God sometimes works in amazing ways through individuals that are imperfect and that imperfection does not necessarily invalidate the signs themselves.   In fact, we even see apostolic correction and tension even in the New Testament between Paul and Peter at one point.  My point here is to ensure that we properly apply Art’s message and do not let the enemy twist it so that we develop a cynical spirit.

That having been said, Art’s message may seem to some to be very strong but remember that when the pendulum swings too far in one direction we often need an equally exaggerated message to bring us back to the full counsel of the Lord.   While I have warned against developing a cynical spirit, at the same time realize that without the word Art brings in this book being applied, we will not have the ultimate depth that God requires and any signs in our mist will not be capable of having God’s intended effect and could even end up being tools in the hands of the enemy.

You can get a copy of The Anatomy of Deception at the Art Katz Ministries Online Bookstore which is located at http://artkatzministries.org/online_bookstore/.  If you have not read Art’s other major works such as Apostolic Foundations and the Spirit of Truth, go ahead and order those as well.  They will add a depth to your life will be greatly needed for the days ahead.  While you are visiting the Art Katz Ministries site you may want to sign up for updates because I believe there are also some other new works that will be coming out in the future that you will want to take advantage of.

Works such as The Anatomy of Deception are rare and valuable.

Politics and Government

February 23, 2009

Politics is like marrying and crying and laughing and buying. We should do it, but only as though not doing it – John Piper.

The Christian response to the recent elections has been somewhat troubling to me.  On one side, there are the despondent ones.  These act as though the Kingdom of God is almost subservient to the government and seem to believe that God is finished with America since the government is in the control of the “liberals.”  On the other hand there are those that are engaging in a bitter spirit of political contention.  They tend to appear to be more passionate about conservative talk show hosts than Christ, and are more energized by the liberal versus conservative debate than they are the eternal elements of the kingdom.  They seem to have forgotten that God is not a Republican, nor a Democrat, and that no system of man, moral or not, is a substitute for the coming kingdom and the coming King.

Please do not understand.  I know the moral policies that the government embraces are significant and have significant consequences.  I believe in passionate intercession for the nation and understanding the criticality of the hour the western nations are in.  Yes, we must vote and maintain a voice for righteousness.  By all means let us cry out that God might have mercy and overturn unjust laws and give us righteous leaders.  However, let us always keep this in eternal perspective and realize just whose kingdom we truly are citizens of.   I believe you will find John Piper’s post election comments to be a refreshing exhortation that is valuable in mainting the proper perspective.

Read on here for the rest of what he had to say:

http://www.worldmag.com/articles/14639

I have had some tell me that when they click the link, they cannot read the entire article.  Apparently the article is available if you are referred by Google, but not by other sites. Here is how to read the article:

• Go to Google.  Enter the following as your search: “Marry. Cry. Rejoice. Buy. john piper”
• The article will be the first search result.  Click on it and World magazine will display the entire article.  Yes, I know this is bizarre, but it works.

John Piper also wrote essentially the same thing before the election and you can read it at the Desiring God block by clicking on this link.

Greater Works than These

February 12, 2009

I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, if anyone steadfastly believes in Me, he will himself be able to do the things that I do; and he will do even greater things than these, because I go to the Father. – John 14:12

Many of us have heard this passage preached many times with various interpretations of the passage.  While I do not want to try to evaluate what the proper interpretation of the passage is, I do want to propose that there is a nugget in this passage that could radically affect the culture of ministry that we operate in.

The Ministry Culture of Jesus

If you examine Jesus’ ministry, one thing that immediately stands out is how limited His sphere of ministry actually was.  While His ministry was spectacular, it is also amazing how He limited Himself to a specific area, refused the promotion of men, devoted only 3 years of His life to public ministry, and poured Himself into His disciples.  To understand why Jesus orchestrated His ministry in this way, it is critical that we examine how He launched the gospel through the disciples.

What is so amazing is that rather than seeking the largest public platform, Jesus poured Himself into the disciples.  In some cases, His ministry was limited to the 12 and in other cases it was the 70, and at times it included some other followers.  Regardless of the exact number, the point is that Jesus really only gave Himself to a small number of followers.  He also freely shared His power with them even when they were immature.  Not only did He send the disciples out with power, He even sent Judas out with supernatural power on him.  That alone should astound most of us.

Have you considered that Jesus invested His life in this small group of people and then He entrusted them with the propagation of the gospel to the nations?  If you think about it, it is almost inconceivable that Jesus would ascend just after His moment of triumph and leave the declaration of His victory to a handful of unstable followers.  If we are honest, we have to admit that we would consider Jesus’ ministry strategy to be ridiculous. 

How many of us would adopt that kind of strategy?  How many of us would repel the crowds that were ready to exalt us and instead invest in a small group that were struggling with proper theology?  How many of us would put power on a group of young men still struggling with their own egos?  How many of us, at the very height of victory, would step aside from visible ministry and instead give our spirit to others that they might be empowered to take the gospel to world and do great exploits?

Now, understand the point here and don’t read too much theology into it, but if you judge Jesus purely by ministry output you will see that the apostles superseded Him in virtually every way.  Most of them had much longer ministries, affected much wider areas, and produced more converts.  What was so radically different about Jesus’ value system that caused Him to minister in this way?  The answer has profound implications for just how deep our own ministry can go. Continue Reading Greater Works than These »

The Fall of Jerusalem

January 14, 2009

I have been considering the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD.  The siege and the ensuing conquest stands out as one of the most painful and graphic events in history.  In taking Jerusalem, it is recorded that the Romans killed nearly 1.1 million people.  The Jews were so starved that Josephus says they staggered around looking for anything to eat, even chewing leather.  It is even recorded that at least one person ate their own child.  Escaping Jews were crucified all around the city to the point that the Romans ran out of crosses.  The Jews, though bickering among themselves, desperately fought the Romans to the end in a losing battle.  It is said that the Romans, when they finally broke through to the temple area, were in such a passion of anger against the Jews that they did not even follow Titus’ orders but brutally slaughtered anyone and destroyed everything.  In the heat of this passion, a soldier threw a flaming torch into a room around the temple which started the temple burning.  Though Titus apparently did not intend to destroy the temple, the fire grew out of control and the temple was soon completely destroyed.  In the process, man, women, and children were burned to death and those that did escape were slaughtered by the Romans.  It is recorded that Titus refused to accept a wreath of victory for the conquest, saying that there was “no merit in vanquishing people forsaken by their own God.”

When He approached Jerusalem, He saw the city and wept over it, saying, “If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will throw up a barricade against you, and surround you and hem you in on every side, and they will level you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.” – Luke 19:41-44

After solemnly considering these events, I believe this event has grave implications for us.  Consider just for a moment all the brutality, death, and destruction during the fall.  Consider that the area around Jerusalem, previously lush and desirable, was left practically a desert.  Why did Jeruslaem fall in such a dramatic way?  According to Jesus the city was going to suffer tremendously because it did not know the day of its visitation.  The city that rejected God in the flesh and condemned Him to a cross, just 40 years later was surrounded by a multitude of men on crosses as the Roman war machine steadily tore down the Jewish resistance.  They rejected one man on a cross and so were surrounded by the death of the cross.  Some translations in verse 41 show that Jesus wept audibly.  His heart was in pain because He knew what was coming.

What we must realize is that this event is a graphic foretaste of the end of the age.  One reason why we struggle with various prophecies in books like Revelation, Daniel, and the other prophets is because of the extreme nature of the events the prophet foretells.  The events seem so far beyond what we are accustomed to and so we tend to discard what the text actually says trying to ascribe symbolism to the text.  The fall of Jerusalem stands in contrast that that method of hermeneutics, instead demanding that we take prophecy literally.  In the fall of Jerusalem, God is gave us a foretaste of what the entire world will experience due to the global rejection of His Son.  If Jerusalem suffered so violently because it did not know the day of its visitation, how much more will the entire world suffer having not known the last 2,000 years of visitation?

We must realize that violent days are coming upon us.  The Scripture tells us that the earth will stagger like a drunkard.  If Jerusalem suffered so terribly for rejecting Jesus in their day, what is going to happen when God calls the entire world to judgment for the rejection of His Son?  What are the days going to be like when God unleashes the destruction, not just of one city, but of the world?  If one city could suffer so much for rejecting 3 years of ministry,  it should cause us to tremble at what the world will endure for rejecting 2,000 years of light.

We must begin to prepare out hearts for what is to come.  I do believe the Lord will keep us in the day of His wrath, although we will suffer to an extent just as Jeremiah suffered along with the others in Jerusalem in His day.  That being said, we must begin to trumpet a wake up call because the earth has no idea what is coming.  The earth has been lulled to sleep.  Humanity is in the same position as they were just before the great deluge.  The idea of such a flood was beyond their comprehension and so they ignored it until the rains finally fell and it was too late.  Let us not be like those that ignored Noah’s pleas, but rather let us be like Noah a preacher of righteousness preparing for the days ahead and warning men that they might be saved.

The best way to prepare our hearts is to begin to take the Word of God literally.  We must begin to read the Word and realize that there are things to come and those things are not exclusively symbolic, but rather are real events that must come to pass when God chooses to call the world to accountability for their treatment of His Son.  Yes, God is rich in mercy and even now calls men to repentance, but there will come a day when the fruit of the earth is fully ripe and God will swing his great sickle into the harvest of the earth.  Those that are His will welcome that day, but the earth though will experience the wrath of God against the great rejection of His Son.  What happened in Jerusalem in 70AD is merely a terrifying foretaste of what will come all over the earth in that day.  Let us live our lives in light of that day and let us warn others to throw themselves upon the merciful arms of the living God while He still delays His final days of reckoning with the earth.

One thing is for sure:  God is going to vindicate His Son, and I don’t think we have the slightest comprehension of what it will look like when God decides to vindicate His Son on a global level.

The Law – Part Five – Christ is Supreme

January 7, 2009

In the last post we attempted to put some definition around the New Testament law.  We are now brought to the climax of the law, which is the person of Jesus Christ.  As we have seen in these last installments, God’s requirement of mankind in the New Testament, far from being minimized, is actually filled up and maximized in the revelation of Jesus Christ.  As God has now indwelt man, He now has every legal right to make inner requirements of man that far exceed the Law of Moses.  We have seen how this dramatically affects our evangelism and our understanding of our own calling.

The Great Need of Mercy

You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. – Matthew 5:48 (AMP)

As we consider the requirements of God’s morality upon the inner man, we see that absolute need of Christ.  We see that there is no way any living human being will ever be able to assert any measure of morality against the standard of God, for we are all left completely helpless before His requirements.  When we finish the words of the Sermon on the Mount, if we have truly understood it, our hearts cry out, “What shall we do?”

The requirement of God is so deep, so vast, and yet so just that you and are are left without excuse and without hope before the judgment bar of God.  This is not without purpose however, for we are left in this great place that God may be all in all.  God Himself, in His own perfect love for man in our predicament, brings salvation through His own right hand in the person of Jesus.  By understanding the law, and its present application, we can understand more than ever the great need of the person of Jesus.  Jesus said, “those who are forgiven much love much,” and as the law of God penetrates our heart, our inner man should sing the highest praises to the One who has made a way for us to be redeemed from the just and proper condemnation of God’s law.

Let us now see that great paradox that God uses our very violation of the law to bring us into the demonstration of its requirements.  As the gospel is proclaimed in truth and power our hearts become heavy under the weight of condemnation and conviction.  This condemnation is just and true for we can never fulfill God’s requirements on us.  Many avoid this pressure point by lessening God’s requirements, but the solution is not to lessen God’s requirements, but to come into the reality of our spirit’s situation and then receive God’s solution.

While we struggle under the weight of our own condemnation and the black hell of hopelessness closes in on our hearts which have been awakened to God’s law, God comes in like a shaft of light and presents Himself as the ultimate sacrifice and rescue from our own black heart.  We see Him in that instant as the liberator from all that we are and all that we have become.  This experience is slow for some and quicker for others, but for all there is that moment when light dawns and we see that the very One who has condemned us by making just requirements of our heart, now offers Himself to us as the very redeemer for our blackness.  At this moment, we are born again as we grab onto the glorious hope of God whose love is so vast that He is, in that moment, both the One who condemns and the One who rescues.

God’s plan is so glorious though, that it continues from there.  Being liberated by His glorious love, the natural response of the human heart is then to love Him desperately, passionately, and completely for His act of redemption from our own condemnation.  In the wisdom of God then, it is the pressure of our condemnation that forms in a heart a love for the God who rescues us and this love then naturally begins fulfilling the first great commandment of God’s law to love God with all our hearts.

You see, it is the knowledge of the depth of our depravity and condemnation that leads us to the heights of love.  We become those with the capacity to fulfill the law only once we have been awakened to our birth position as those under the condemnation of the law.  Only the wisdom of God could take the very thing that condemns us and sets us at odds with Him and use it as the seed of eternal love and holiness in His redeemed people.  Once again, we find that God is all and all and that Jesus is worth of supreme adulation for His great redemption.  He alone provides mercy for our sins as we stand helpless before the judgment bar of God.  Let us love Him desperately for the mercy He provides and then vigorously share that mercy with others understanding that God uses the tool of condemnation as the key to open the door to divine mercy. Continue Reading The Law – Part Five – Christ is Supreme »

The Law – Part Four – The New Testament Law

January 6, 2009

In the last post, we discussed how a proper understanding of God’s law affects our evangelism and saw that our evangelism is a strong indicator of our theology and also has serious implications for the future vitality of the church itself.  As we have discussed the New Testament law in this series, we have made a few observations.  One is that Jesus extended the reach of the law by pressing it past man’s outward behavior into the thoughts and intents of the heart.  We have also noted that Jesus came to complete God’s law that it might accomplish the thing that He gave it to accomplish.

In addition, the point has been made repeatedly that it is critical that we live in light of the fact that we are still under a divine law and in light of that, we must acknowledge that God continues to have the right to place demands upon on.  While we have examined these characteristics of the New Testament Law, we have not examined what the declarations of the New Testament law are.  We have seen clearly that the scope of the law extends to all things, and we have seen that the depth of the law presses it deep in the heart of man, but is there a clear list of the directives of this law?  Well, though it receives little attention, Jesus clearly details for us the requirements of the New Testament law.

The Definition of the Law

In a very real sense, the Sermon on the Mount could be seen as a law giving moment.  Just as Moses ascended a hill and descended with the written requirements of God, so to Jesus ascended the hillside and clearly spoke forth the code and law He came to bring.  In that sense, we should see the Sermon on the Mount, not just as a nostalgic ideal, but as the present requirement of God.  God does not simply give us instructions and values that we might then live “under grace” in the commonly understood meaning of the term.  We can never discount grace, and we will address it in the final post, but God desires that grace become something that empowers us to live within that which He demands.  To understand the New Testament law, the Sermon on the Mount then is the proper starting place so long as we can begin to see it as Jesus’ parallel to Moses’ directives given from Sinai and not just as an idyllic sermon that is not actually binding on every day life.

While the Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the foundational passage for the New Testament law, there are a few other passages we should examine.  These passages are all familiar, but we have not considered these passages to be as weighty as they truly are.  Consider Jesus’ answer to one seeking salvation:

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.  These two commandments sum up and upon them depend all the Law and the Prophets. – Matthew 22:37-40 (AMP)

Notice that just before the cross, Jesus affirms this requirement to His disciples:

If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love and live on in it, just as I have obeyed My Father’s commandments and live on in His love…This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than to lay down his own life for his friends…You are My friends if you keep on doing the things which I command you to do…This is what I command you: that you love one another. – John 15:10, 12-14, 17 (AMP)

Again, we are familiar with these Scriptures, but we must ask ourselves if we see these passages as Jesus’ requirements for His people or do we see them as cute phrases and New Testament ideals? I fear that because of a misunderstanding of grace that we do not consider the full weight of these passages.  In these passages, Jesus is putting a requirement on us and defining the way that He expects His people to live.

No one would deny that believers often fail to experience the full materialization of the promises recorded in Scripture, but could is be that we fail to obtain some of the benefits of the gospel because we have not esteemed the requirements of the gospel as such? Perhaps if we saw these commands as just as binding upon us as Moses’ Law was on the nation gathered around Sinai, we might become a radically different people.

The Weight of the Law

We began by pointing out that Jesus filled up the law and turned its requirements inward that He might deal with the very root of sin rather than merely prescribe good behavior. That consideration alone has the power to greatly alter our understanding of Jesus’ statements. After coming into that understanding, we have now considered some of the direct commands that Jesus gave to believers.

Now, we must ask an honest question which is who can fulfill such a law? While we are rightfully grateful that Jesus freed us from the outward bondage of Moses’ law, we fail to consider with much gravity the requirements of the law Jesus instituted. While Moses’ law was full of outward obligations that one might follow in some measure, Jesus law completely supersedes all outward observances and leaves men under greater condemnation than before.

If we honestly examine what He required, we must say, “who can fulfill such things?” for Jesus’ law is all encompassing. Can we not honestly say that every mode of life comes under the requirement to love God with all that we have and then extend love to others just the same as we would love ourselves? Beloved, this is a weighty requirement indeed. Moses’ law at least had specific requirements and limited scope, but Jesus’ law decrees that every thought, every desire, and every action are to be with regard to the supreme love of God and love of one another.

Can anyone among us have the audacity to declare that they could fulfill such a law? Can you see now that when the Spirit gives unction to preach such a law that there is no man who can stand in smug, self-righteousness? Saints we need to pray that God puts power on us again for the proclamation of this gospel. We have awkwardly proclaimed, at the same time, both the conviction of the Mosaic Law and the freedom from it, but we have not pressed men with the Law of Christ.

The reality is that God has not changed His demands upon man; He has only now intensified them in the revelation of Jesus. In the revelation of Jesus, He reveals what he created man for all along. You see, God does not intend to have a people that can merely follow a few moral axioms or fulfill religions ceremonies, He desires a people that are a physical display on earth of Himself.  This is what it means that man is made in the image of God.

We are made in His image and so He presses upon us the same law that He Himself demonstrates in all that He does. He makes a requirement on us that no man can possibly fulfill, and yet He has every right to demand it because He made us in His own image that we might live as a physical demonstration of Himself and spread the knowledge of God by our very living.  This requirement should crush all our righteousness and drive us to Christ both for forgiveness and for transformation to live in this manner, but tragically our gospel proclamation seems to have lost the weightiness of both of these values in its rush to declare us free from Moses’ prescribed diet and ceremonies!

Because we have lost these values, our evangelism is weak and anemic and our proclamation to the saints is hollow.  We are content to gaze horizontally at our own righteousness and not gaze upwardly that we might demonstrate Him; the very thing to which we are called!  We are content to demonstrate something a little better than other men rather than putting on display the glory of God and that is the fundamental issue. Continue Reading The Law – Part Four – The New Testament Law »

The Call to Dunkirk

January 2, 2009

Saints, why do we continue to send Christian children to schools that are dedicated to challenging our values? Honestly, I do not believe there is any way we can keep our kids short of taking drastic measures with their education and socialization.  We must begin raising children in Christ infused greenhouses or they will all be lost.

The Law – Part Three – Evangelism

December 24, 2008

In the last post in this series we discussed the issue of genuine repentance.  At this point we must discuss a related topic which is the issue of evangelism, so let’s take a moment and examine evangelism in light of the New Testament law.  Evangelism is always a critical indicator of what our practical theology is.  I use the word practical because most of us would assent to correct doctrine if we were given a test on proper belief systems, however often there is a great gulf between our mental theology and our practical theology.  Our practical theology is on display in the way that we live and interact with others.  In our daily living we demonstrate what we truly believe rather than what we may simply assent to or think that we believe.

Beyond our theology, there are also three things that evangelism uniquely reveals.  First, it reveals how we view man’s interaction with God.  The way that we communicate the context and requirements of the gospel reveal how we practically believe that man and God relate.  Secondly, it reveals how we view ourselves.  In our interactions with others and the sharing of our “testimony,” we reveal in a great measure how we view ourselves in general, and in particular how we view ourselves before God.  Thirdly, our evangelism reveals what we think about others.  The way that we relate the gospel to others, or whether we relate it at all to others, shows how we view those who are presently dead in sin.

The Effects of the Law on our Gospel Presentation

As we have demonstrated, most believers have a decidedly Old Testament understanding to God’s law rather than the New Testament understanding that Jesus clearly laid out in the Sermon on the Mount.  While many might dispute that point, the reality is that our methods of evangelism illustrate this disconnect perhaps better than any other place.  Let’s examine a few characteristics of western evangelism that illustrate the great ignorance of the church with regard to the law.

To begin there is the issue that we have already covered which is that we know only how to apply the law to outward behavior, rather than to the inward motives of the heart.  This brings several problems both to our gospel presentation and also to our own understanding of ourselves.  For one, because we are so outwardly focused, we tend to be quite ignorant of our own inward depravity.  The depravity, or wickedness, of man as it is inherited from Adam is one of those things that we might be able to check off on a theology quiz, but it is not a doctrine that we believe to the point that it affects the way we view ourselves and others.

Because we do not truly grasp our own inward depravity, we are at a loss to press the gospel upon another individual who appears to be relatively moral outwardly.  We are at a loss for words when they fail to have an interest in a salvation that they do not see the need of.  Why do they not see the need of salvation?  Because we have largely presented them with an outward salvation over an inward one and this flows from the fact that we do not articulate the inner requirements of God’s law, only the outward requirements of a law that, once they are saved, we argue against lest we embrace “legalism” over grace.

Because we do not truly understand, or perhaps even believe, in the depravity of man, we are also tempted to justify wicked behavior in both ourselves and others.  As we noted, the people we present the gospel to often have a level of moral conduct that is very similar to our own.  When we try to present the need for Christ, we fail because we do not know how to properly convict the heart at the root of the issue.  We struggle and stumble to present to an individual their great need of Christ because the reality is that we are not really convinced that the person is all that bad, mostly because we have not ever considered ourselves to be “that bad.”

In fact, from this lack of understanding of depravity has arisen various modes of comparison, such as “good person” compared with “bad person” and the idea that some sin is worse than others.  True, some sin has more extensive effects in this age, but in the eternal age, all wickedness is evil.  We fail to understand this because we fail to see unredeemed man, “good” or “bad” as essentially wicked.  We fail to see them as essentially wicked, because we do not clearly see how the law of God cuts beyond behavior into the very essence of each thought and impulse of the heart.  The proof of man’s wickedness lies not in what impulses he restrains and what impulses he allows, the proof of man’s wickedness is that fact that the evil impulse arises at all within his being. Continue Reading The Law – Part Three – Evangelism »

The Law – Part Two – Defining Repentance

December 22, 2008

In the first post in this series, we introduced the idea of the law in the New Testament by referring to Jesus’ statements in the Sermon on the Mount.  Now that we are considering that the law was not discarded by Jesus but rather fulfilled so that God might accomplish through the law that which He desired to accomplish, we must address the issue of repentance.  If you remember from the first post, the critical understanding that Jesus brought is that while the law given to Moses was primarily an external law, the law in the New Testament was to be an internal law.  While this may appear to be a superficial point, it has deep implications for how we, as believers, live with regard to the law.

Defining Repentance

Repentance is a fundamental concept to the Christian faith.  John Baptist and Jesus both began their ministries preaching repentance.  With such a clear precedent, we can likewise expect that the church in our day should be preaching repentance as well.  So, if the church has a requirement to preach repentance, and many churches do preach repentance, why is it that it seems to have so little effect?  Well, a significant part of the problem could be whether or not we actually know how to define repentance.

When we define repentance in the church at large, what we generally have in mind is turning from sinful behavior to holy behavior.  Different streams of theology would define exactly what that looks like in practice a little differently, but that is the essence of the understanding that commonly persists.  The problem is that there is a fundamental error in this definition of repentance and that is that this is a distinctly Mosaic view of repentance and it is at odds with the New Testament directive regarding repentance.

New Testament Repentance

Remember now, that the critical issue is that the law in the New Testament goes right into the heart of man whereas the Old Testament law focused on external behavior.  New Testament repentance then is not focused on external behavior, but on the inward life of the heart.  If you do not understand this, you will never understand the ministry of Jesus.  This understanding is crucial to seeing how Jesus could minister to tax collectors and prostitutues with greater success than He could minister to moral, religious individuals.  When you can see outward evil in your life, it makes it easier to accept inward depravity.  Conversely, when you believe your outward morals to be sound, it makes it harder to receive the message of inward depravity.

In light of this, a true New Testament repentance preacher will bypass externals and pierce men directly in their heart.  This sort of preaching may well expose the life long church-goer as a man more in need of repentance than the town drunk because the root of iniquity can exist in a religious man just as strongly as it can in an irreligious man.  In fact, at times it can persist even more strongly in a religious heart as it provides fertile ground for the sins of pride and self-righteousness.

The New Testament message properly sees external behavior as a secondary issue that is at best a symptom of sickness of the heart.  The call to repentance is not primarily a call towards behavior modification, but rather the call to repentance is to dig deep within.  It is a call like unto Abraham’s whereby each individual is called to take their own personal Isaac, which is their own inner morality, up the dark mountain of sacrifice.  Once on that mountain, you must bind him to the altar, and allow God to replace your treasured Isaac with Himself.  Once would think that this is elementary.  Who would not want God’s rule over him?  Who would not think that God is the most perfect one to rule and reign in a man’s heart?

Saints, if nothing else illuminates for you the depravity of man, let this one example illustrate for you the sickness of the human heart.  There is no battle known to man, even to Christian men, that is akin to the battle one faces when God comes into take over.  The very One we should welcome with open arms we resist with all our strength.  This is the issue of heart repentance.  This battle shows our inner animosity towards God no matter how moral our outward behavior.  Praise God that He alone can conquer such a heart and fill it with His own Spirit.

Genuine repentance bypasses everything external and requires this sort of turning within a man.  The call for repentance goes deep into the essence of the man, confronts him with the supremacy of God and the right of God to rule the individual and then calls for that man to turn whole heartedly from his own life, religious or not, to a life consumed by God.

This turning from a life where man is obsessed with himself, which may or may not be moral and religious, to a life where man is wholly given over to God is repentance in the Biblical sense.  Many of the problems in our churches arise because we are dealing with individuals that have never truly repented and part of the reason they have never repented is because they have never heard a proper message of repentance that has the power to cut through their soul and their behavior to the essence of what God is after.  If we are to see men genuinely repent, we must begin to proclaim a message of genuine repentance to them. Continue Reading The Law – Part Two – Defining Repentance »

The Law – Part One – Introduction

December 22, 2008

Do not think that I have come to do away with or undo the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to do away with or undo but to complete and fulfill them. – Matthew 5:17 (AMP)

I was reading through a message by John G. Lake on the question of Sunday or Saturday worship and found in it some startling insights into the relationship between the law and the believer.  As I considered what John was saying the implications of what he was saying hit me, and what hit me was far beyond the question of whether or not our primary worship gathering should be on a Saturday or a Sunday.  As I continued to ponder this issue, I began to realize that what I was seeing was so simple and so clearly the gospel and yet at the same time, I believe there is something here of the relationship of the believer to the law that has been lost.  I believe it is vital that we understand with a new clarity the appropriate relationship between the believer and the law because it vitally impacts many different areas.  With that in mind, I’ll break out these thoughts across several posts so that each can be digested separately.  Each part of the series will build up to the conclusion, so you’ll want to read through each one to participate in the complete conversation.

The Mosaic Law

The first thing we must consider is that the Mosaic Law, as a means to the sanctification and redemption of God’s people, utterly failed.  There are obviously many purposes for which God gave the Mosaic Law, but for one He gave it that men might demonstrate whether they had the ability to adhere to even an outward display of righteousness.   God dealt with men on the basis of outward behavior during this time and men fell woefully short.  When the Israelites were given over to judgment, it was not just the judgment of a nation, but the judgment of systems of external morality.  It was not just the failure of the Jewish nation; it was the failure of mankind to keep covenant with God by virtue of man’s own will.

What we find then is that outward requirements were incapable of dealing with inward corruption.  While this may sound like an elementary principle, we will find a little later that most of the church has not yet fully grasped this issue.   Seeing as the law could not produce a righteous man then, we must see that the law is powerless to do anything but demonstrate that man has a corruption that cannot be cured by himself.  As an aside, the astute reader might notice that to fully grasp this statement is also to bring a question around much of our present evangelism.  Our evangelism primarily revolves around telling “lost” people, whom the Bible actually calls dead not lost, that they need to make a decision of their will to choose Jesus.  Without exploring this topic here, if the wills of the ancient Israelites did not have the capacity to choose good even in the face of the demonstrations on Mt. Sinai, what makes us think modern man’s will has the capacity to make a choice that brings salvation?

The Sermon on the Mount

The Sermon on the Mount, the height of the gospel declaration, gives us insight into the operation and direction of the law in the New Testament.  As quoted at the top, in Matthew 5:17, Jesus makes the bold claim that He has come to fulfill the law.  Most of us read that merely in the sense that Jesus is ending the Mosaic law, but if you look at the Greek word for fulfill, which is “pleroo” you will notice the meaning includes the following: “to make something full, or fill it up, or render it full or complete.”

Jesus follows this in verse 18 to say that nothing will pass away until the law has been accomplished.  In other words, the law was given for a purpose that has not yet been accomplished.  What is that purpose?  The purpose is to have a people set apart, or sanctified, unto God.  The law was given towards that purpose, but it failed to accomplish it and thus God injected Himself into the process in the person of His Son in order that God’s law might be extended and come to its marvelous conclusion.  Do we consider that God is looking for an accomplishment to His law, or are we so eager to loose ourselves from the Mosaic requirements that we fail to consider the great accomplishment of God’s law that Jesus desires?  Saints, God has in mind something more grand and glorious than our liberation from a ceremonial law.  His law is going to accomplish something of eternal significance.

Jesus continues from this statement to declare that the righteousness of the people must exceed that of the scribes and the Pharisees (vs. 20).  In other words, God is about to require a righteousness greater than those that best understood, best kept, and publicly contended for the Mosaic law.  Now this created a very real problem for the people of God listening to Jesus.  Not only was there no one who could obtain righteousness under the law, but now they find that God is going to require an even greater righteousness of the people.

Jesus then explains that statement by giving examples of the righteousness that God requires (vs. 21-32).   He begins each shocking new example with the phrase, “you have heard that it was said,” clearly referencing the law, in which He makes examples of what we would consider to be “major sins.”   In order to be perfectly clear, Jesus does not use the example of “small sins,” (as if there were such a thing) but rather he uses the blatant sins like murder and adultery so that no one will misunderstand the gravity of His message.

Jesus then continues to destroy every man’s hope for righteousness by looking at the most holy among then and declaring, “You have looked at a woman and become sexually aroused and that is the same as the adultery for which you would convict a brother.”  He looks then to a religious leader and declares, “Your anger with a fellow Jew is the same act before God as the one who murders another.”  The audience is now spell bound.  What will Jesus say next?  Their very hope of standing with God, the law, now that it has been expounded by Jesus has been found to be their greatest enemy.

Furthermore, Jesus is filling up and completing this law that it might come to God’s glorious conclusion, but in that filling up the requirement of the law is enlarged.  Who will be able to stand before this new law?  Understand though that this was entirely within the expectation of the people because of John Baptists’s ministry.  John’s ministry had been, “repent for the ruler of God’s kingdom (the Messiah) is coming.”  People responded to John and repented precisely because they wanted to cleanse their hearts before His appearing so that they would be numbered among the righteous and not the  wicked when Messiah executed judgment.  Now the people, already having trembling hearts, are sitting before Messiah Himself and He is enlarging the concept of righteousness beyond what they had already failed to keep.

What we miss is that Jesus is introducing the basis here for the New Testament law.  We sometimes are so pre-occupied with the desire to be free of modes of worship and kosher foods that we fail to see that while Jesus did liberate us from the Mosaic Law, He also brought it to fullness and brought into place a complete law which we fail to examine or consider.

Continue Reading The Law – Part One – Introduction »

What is Apostolic?

December 18, 2008

I realize that title of this post is a little misleading as it is a question that cannot be answered in a single post.  In fact, books have been written on this subject and I would propose that there are still books that need to be written on this subject.  Up front I have to say that, as always, I highly recommend Art Katz’s classic Apostolic Foundations when seeking illumination on the apostolic church.  So, while I cannot examine the subject in one post, I want to add a few thoughts to the discussion and perhaps even re-direct our common considerations of the apostolic and the prophetic.

I have to admit that recently I have become a little weary of the phrase “Apostolic and Prophetic.”  It is probably because the phrase seems to have become yet another buzzword.    At the moment it seems like everyone is posturing their ministries to make sure they are “Apostolic” or “Apostolically aligned,” and, while I am not criticizing for that, I have to wonder if we have lost something in the mix.

Most definitions of what is “apostolic” seem to revolve around leadership structures or functions and I believe this is where we go astray.   For example, if someone leads a large enough group then they are apostolic or if they can plant another fellowship and send out individuals then they are considered apostolic.  I believe it is fair to say that if we examined most of our present teaching and our actions around the words “apostolic and prophetic” it would revolve around authority structures or functions.  The question I think we need to ask is what if that is not the essence of the apostolic and the prophetic?  What if they are defined by something entirely difficult than a leadership role or a function?  What if there is something entirely different to be demonstrated in these gifts that we are missing but is very necessary?  Could it be that the very progress of the church is impaired for want of a correct understanding of these terms?

For those of you, like me, that get confused or wearisome of some of the apostolic and prophetic rhetoric, for a moment let’s lay aside all that we have previously known and examine this for a moment and see if God does not open up something entirely different. Continue Reading What is Apostolic? »

The Issue of Dispensational Thinking

December 2, 2008

My heart has been stirred lately on the issue of dispensationalism.  Proponents of dispensationalism would argue that it has been taught in the Scriptures since the New Testament.  For the sake of clarification, what we need to examine is more what we might call the effects of the dispensational theology that was initially formalized in the 19th century.  Now many might wonder why it is significant to examine this issue.  Others might point out that more recent dispensationalists seem to have moderated their position and perhaps corrected the errors of earlier dispensationalists.  While that may be true, that is not the fundamental issue.

One of the crisises that may well be brewing in the church in America is that the average churchgoer has little appetite for theology.  Now, lest you think I am promoting intellectually driven seminaries (some would call them “cemeteries”) or large, dusty books written by well educated men debating nuances of doctrine let me explain myself.  Theology is simply the study of God.  It is what we believe about God.  Now, the core essence of God is perceived by the Spirit and transcends human understanding.  It is important that we understand that, or we will be given to boxing God into human models of understanding.  With that being said, God gave us a capacity to think and to know.  This capacity is modeled after His capacity because we are made in His image and yet it is far beneath His capacity.

While this capacity must necessarily operate below the revelation of God’s Spirit to man’s spirit, it is still a vital part of our makeup.  Because of this it is vitally important how and what we think about God.  When we do not think rightly about God, it causes great loss to the believer and ultimately the church.  We must become very jealous for the issue of theology.  We must always be careful not to reduce God to diagrams and systems of theology that man can comprehend, and we must remain ever vigilant of a concept of God that is man derived and man comprehended.  With those proper guardians watching over our heart, we must then make every effort to allow God to reveal Himself to us that we might think great thoughts about Him.  We must also be ruthless in discerning and rejecting thoughts and ideas about God that are untrue.  These ideas can taint the lens through which we view the world causing us to miss God’s revelation and fall into error.

Now with that being said, let me set a few caveats in place.  Dispensationalism, like any other movement or doctrine, does exist across a wide spectrum.  An examination of every particular flavor of it is certainly beyond the scope of a blog post, so let it suffice to say that we will examine specific effects of the results of dispensationalism thinking rather than examining every individual dispensational tenet.  I am not attempting to paint all dispensationalists as heretics with a single broad stroke, but rather want to examine specific ideas that have been associated with or have come as a result of various streams of dispensational thought.

I also acknowledge up front that I am not an expert in dispensational theology, so theologians of that persuasion may have addressed some of the issues that I raise; however my primary concern over specific tenets of doctrine is the effect of this way of thinking on believers at large.  So, again, I am dealing with the effects of ideas and ways of thinking over specific beliefs and have no desire to paint a broad stroke of “heresy” on anyone.  In that spirit, just because we see some dangerous ideas, let us not label everyone from here on that uses the word “dispensation” as a heretic.  Let’s continue in Christian love and charity contending for proper ideas and thoughts about God, but not allowing ourselves to execute improper judgment on individuals simply because of the use of a single word or phrase.  With these warnings and caveats out of the way, let’s now examine the effects of dispensational thinking. Continue Reading The Issue of Dispensational Thinking »

Two Powerful Quotes

December 1, 2008

While working on a new post, I came across two powerful quotes I wanted to pass along.   Both are worth some time and consideration.  Thanks to Becky over at IHOP for posting these.

First from John Piper, Hunger for God, p. 14 -

The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of the triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife (Luke 14:18-20). The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable.

The Second from Allen Hood, The Excellencies of Christ -

Satan the adversary, the ‘bringer of light,’ opposes the advances of the Gospel primarily through the realm of ideas and deception.  The object of his deception and the subject matter of his deception is who?  It is Jesus.

That is why for the first four-hundred years the Church fought vigorously for the Person of Christ, to the shedding of blood to the laying down of their life.  There is a reason why they could not worship at the emperor’s altar.  Beloved, if Jesus is just a good teacher, if He just shows you the way to God, then they can easily worship at the altar of the emperor.  Yet hundreds and hundreds of thousands of believers year after year after year were led to the lions, were filleted alive, were skinned alive, were run through, were crucified upside down, were hung on crosses, they were burned and set on fire.  Why?

Because He is not optional.  He is the unique, supreme, revelation of the Living God.  When you have Him you have it all.  When you do not, you do not.  Satan will oppose that revelation over everything, and he will do it through the most popular polished people on the globe.  He does not mind feeding the poor.  He minds the testimony of Jesus who is the only King who will return and set the poor truly free… [The testimony of Jesus Christ] is the subject matter that will enflame our hearts and set us on fire and make us fearless before the most powerful men and women of the earth.