Wednesday, January 29, 2014

God the Revisionist

A sad and unenlightened trend of late is how many historians are rewriting our history books.  Some assuredly make appropriate revisions based on indisputable and unbiased discoveries made during their research, but alas, much of it is based on less than true scholarship and shoddy research.  God, however, intervenes in the affairs of men, and by so doing, brings His Omnipresence into the equation (He’s always there and is always righting wrongs [but not on our timetable and not always in ways which make sense to us]).  Technically, God is no revisionist, but from our perspective, He is.  Indeed, God is rewriting the history book of His people (you didn’t know God was a revisionist did you?).  He is restoring back to them their initial placement within the Garden of Eden, and consequently back to the origins of the destiny they lost when the thorns and thistles of the curse choked the life out of them. 

And in that garden there were four rivers, the fourth one being the Euphrates, and the meaning of its name is “fruitfulness, to bear fruit, sweet water”; and that is very pertinent to us in this particular hour in history.  The fact that it was the fourth river (and considering that four is the WORLD NUMBER and about MATERIAL COMPLETENESS) and that it was the only river of the four in Eden which did not flow to anywhere worth mentioning by Moses, the author of Genesis, suggests a significance worth noting.

A 2009 article by the NY Times reported: “The river [the Euphrates] is drying up as a result of the water policies of Iraq's neighbors, a drought and years of misuse by Iraq”; I think perhaps it might really be because: “The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up, to prepare the way for the kings from the east” (Revelation 16:22 ESV).  I believe the “kings of the east” mentioned here represent enthroned deception; the fact that it is crowned only after a natural disaster of biblical proportions indicates the true origin from where most people draw the waters of their lives from. If they draw from the true wells of salvation (their spirits infused with God’s Spirit) they remain unmoved even if they lose all their possessions; if they draw from the false wells of salvation (their souls infused with their own interpretations of life and from pseudo-spirituality) they are moved (from off their centers) and are discombobulated when they lose all their possessions.

I believe the hour has come; it is declared, “Release the FOUR angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates” (Revelation 9:14 ESV).  And once the Euphrates river is done drying up, when the river of natural vigor has entirely evaporated (when mankind is done populating the earth with their first Adams), when God wraps up the age, natural man will be left with little option but to be divinely led to their death in the valley of Meggido at the feet of true Israelites.  Those addicted to their appetites will suffer, some more than others, but God is faithful.  Those who know their God will flourish; their souls will fatten while their bellies flatten.  But those who trust in their riches and the abundance of their stores will wither away; their souls and their bellies will both alike flatten.

These are parallel realities, circumstantially identical, but experientially different.  That which is drying up naturally is removing all joy for those whose joy is dependent on natural pleasures, but for His spiritual children, the evaporation of the Euphrates is but the trials and tribulations through which we must enter the Kingdom of God.  Indeed, His children have suffered the loss of all things (some really, but all figuratively); then another river comes into view.  It too must be traversed upon dry ground, except not by kings of the east, but by the King of Kings Himself (and we following).  It is a modest and insignificant river (as viewed by the natural eye), this river Jordan; and it too does not want to stay in its bed.  It is supernaturally rolling back like a scroll (God rewriting our past and failed histories) all the way back to the first Adam.  And this is not only the key, or the door into the Promised Land, it IS the Promised Land.  Yes, there is an advancement into a glory-land beyond its dried up river bed plot, but in the very channel which once ran red with blood and miry clay, there at the breach of the river (at the wound of our circumcision), God inserts Himself and forever changes the course of our lives.

Just as Moses threw a tree in the bitter waters of Meribah and thereby forever sweetened them, so God throws Himself into the river course of our lives and sweetens our dispositions forever.  Many are given over to the sword (destroyed by the death power of the tongue), famine (by want of knowledge people perish), and to be torn apart by wild animals (the end result of what the works of the flesh produce); we however (those who walk out life in the Spirit), are given our lives back to us as our booty (the reward or treasure [the pearl of great price] of following on, enduring to the end (through the trials and tribulations), to know the Lord (the upward call of God in Christ Jesus).

The Promised Land is us with Christ inserted.  We are those who have obeyed and lost our souls (temporarily) to gain them back (forever); we are the second generation of Israelites, those which entered the Promised Land, children of the second/last Adam.  Again, the essence of what He is ultimately giving us is OURSELVES (as we were originally designed to be); we are the booty, the city, the prize.  The Promise Land is between our ears and in our gut!  He rolls all the intervening failures, tributaries of tears, and rivulets of sin, which swim about within the stream of our lives (past, present, and future), that river of God He made inside us (but which we degraded to the lowest place on earth), that basest place in us, and He removes it once and for all by taking our stream (and everything in it) back to its origin, to its root in the first Adam.  Indeed, God the revisionist!


Sunday, January 26, 2014

Realizing the Kingdom of God on Earth as it is in Heaven

“Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 25:34 KJV).

While there is little doubt that we are closer to the end of the age today than we were yesterday, and that the divine stone which becomes a mountain and displaces and crushes all human government is more established and pervasive today than yesterday, there has always been those who transcended the confines of the clock, those who saw and operated within the timeless domain of the eternal and illimited parameters of the Kingdom of God.

Just as Christ was “foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times…” so, that which is, is also a was, and always will be.  “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.  Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was before us” (Ecclesiastes 1:9-10 KJV).

Indeed, no less than the genius of Einstein concluded that the fourth dimension, the realm of time, was a persistent illusion.  Even from the time that Jesus declared the greatest words ever spoken: “It is finished!” it was too late to be original, He having already been slain from before the foundation of the world (and supposedly) having already uttered “It is finished!” in time immemorial.
“I know that whatever God does, it endures forever; nothing can be added to it nor anything taken from it. … THAT WHICH IS NOW ALREADY HAS BEEN, AND THAT WHICH IS TO BE ALREADY HAS BEEN; and God seeks that which has passed by [so that history repeats itself]” (Ecclesiastes 3:14-15 Amp.).  Yet history is the frame of the illusion of time, the context of vaporous man; it has no meaning in relationship to a God who inhabits eternity.  But the human high priest, as an example, had to offer sacrifices every year (history repeating itself); the human/divine High Priest of our faith, contradistinctively, sacrificed Himself once for all time and outside of time (the same yesterday, today, and forever).
To us, both time and revelation unfold, but from God’s perspective (the whole truth and nothing but the truth) it is already unfolded; He spans time and eternity; He’s inside the box and outside it too.  Likewise His Kingdom is already unfolded and has already been populating from time immemorial.  Many are speaking of the Kingdom Age, of a Third Day, and of a Restoration of all Things in our time; and time is the context of our reality and the perspective of our dim sight.  Perhaps God bends down in loving and tender condescension to unfold to us that which is always open and obvious to Him, but just as absence from the body is present with the Lord, so absence from illusory time is present with the reality of eternity. 
“For we which have believed do enter into rest” because “THE WORKS WERE FINISHED FROM THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD”; “For we are God’s [own] handiwork (His workmanship), recreated in Christ Jesus, [born anew] that we may do those good works which God predestined (planned beforehand) for us [TAKING PATHS WHICH HE PREPARED AHEAD OF TIME], THAT WE SHOULD WALK IN THEM [living the good life which He prearranged and made ready for us to live]” (Hebrews 4:3 KJV; Ephesians 2:10 Amp.).
Finally, G. Campbell Morgan, writing more than one hundred years ago, said: “Passion for the establishment of the Kingdom of God in the world is the deepest note in prayer.”  Also, the Kingdom of God which is in us, and comes without observation, is, from God’s perspective anyways, already established in us and in our midst (or in the realms of our influences). 
Indeed, unfolded or open to God is the reality, but folded and closed to us is the persistent illusion.  Our deepest note in prayer needs to be about asking God to open our SPIRITUAL eyes and that bittersweet scroll resident in our bellies (we need to receive what we already have, the word already implanted into us, that unfolded and revealed to us understanding, which is able to save our souls).  We need to awaken and open our eyes to that which we are presently obtuse and blinded to, THE REALITY OF THE ALREADY ESTABLISHED KINGDOM OF GOD in us and in our midst.  Indeed, I, with Paul, “Pray that the eyes of your [and my] heart may be enlightened” to see that which already is (Hebrews 1:18 NASB).  Prayer is not so much about effecting external change, but about realizing and aligning to the internal change God has already accomplished in us; let us pray without ceasing until we SEE THE KINGDOM OF GOD ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.