Thursday, December 31, 2015

The Unveiled Year (2016)

“By and by God will give an unveiled year and reveal the wonder of what He has been doing in us all the time”—Oswald Chambers

Here in the last hours on the last day of the year of our Lord two-thousand and fifteen (finished at 11:02 PM on December 31, 2015 Anno Domini or A.D.), I am sitting quietly reading and meditating on some of the words of Oswald Chambers.  Generally, I am reading “The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers” (Discovery House Publishers, 2000), and specifically “The Psychology of Redemption,” and even more specifically, pages 1072-1074 starting under the heading “The Unveiled Year” (from which I also got my title to this article).

Chambers said, “God will bring us to an unveiled year, when we will realize how we have grown without knowing it.”  And here at the end of another year, and having recently, only three days back, turned another year older, I come to the end of 2015 realizing, not so much growth as grace to believe it is a fact nonetheless (in spite of my blindness).  In times past God has faithfully illuminated Himself through me as a diadem in His hand, multi-faceted and multi-dimensionally.  He once made me aware that, even in my mess, He bragged on and through me to others, demonstrating His power through me in spite of my flawed character.  He reminded me of this—that “He has rays flashing from His hand, and there is the hiding of His power” (Habakkuk 3:4).  His power is hidden in His hand, and we are those varying rays that His power flashes through from that hand.

According to Chambers, “Human nature is called upon to live a life of drudgery,” and therefore, assuming this is true (and I think it is...properly understood) we need to be careful that our high times with God don’t become idols.  This is not to lower our expectations, but rather to inspire us to the greater heights of that rarified air where the simple and subtle truth is that “godliness with contentment is great gain” (1 Timothy 6:6).  “Most of our life is lived in ordinary human affairs, not in crises.  It is comparatively easy for human nature to live in a big strain for a few minutes, but that is not what human nature is called upon to do” (Chambers).

Since this is mostly and reflexively about Chambers and his ideas, allow me to quote him to the end of this paragraph: “We get our moments of light and insight when we see what God is after, and then we come to where there is no crisis, but just the ordinary life to be lived.  By and by God will give AN UNVEILED YEAR [emphasis mine] and reveal the wonder of what He has been doing in us all the time.”  “The mature saint is just like a little child, absolutely simple and joyful and gay.  Go on living the life that God would have you live and you will grow younger instead of older.  There is a marvelous rejuvenescence when once you let God have His way.”

The world only wants to “unfold their faculties,” whereas the Christian needs “an unveiled year.”  The difference between the two is the first one is about expressing self indiscriminately, whereas the second one is about revealing Christ in and through us discriminately (so as not to cast pearls before swine).  God hides the diadems in the palm of His hand, both for protection and readiness; we are those diadems, the hiding of His power, and for many, the year 2016 will be a REVEALING of that power.  May God richly bless you and me in this, THE UNVEILED YEAR!

Saturday, December 26, 2015

Some Measure of Deliverance

“When the kingdom of Rehoboam was established and strong, he and all Israel with him forsook the law of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 12:1).

“When the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah, saying, ‘They have humbled themselves so I will not destroy them, but I will grant them SOME MEASURE OF DELIVERANCE” (2 Chronicles 12:7). 

Scripture declares that “everyone who sins is a slave to sin” (John 8:34), and that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).  But, “I find...the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good.  For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members” (Romans 7:21-23).  And such is the experience of all the sons of Adam who are also the sons of God; full deliverance is promised, assured, and something we patiently wait for—the redemption of our bodies.  Though sin repented of is forgiven, the consequences of sin—the reaping and sowing principle behind it—remains in full force except as God occasionally disrupts and nullifies consequences as He sees fit.

What God declared to Moses concerning Himself, He declares to all: “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and truth (faithfulness); keeping mercy and lovingkindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin; BUT HE WILL BY NO MEANS LEAVE THE GUILTY UNPUNISHED [emphasis mine], visiting (avenging) the iniquity (sin, guilt) of the fathers upon the children and the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations [that is, calling the children to account for the sins of their fathers]” (Exodus 34:6-7).  Clearly “the guilty” which God “will by no means leave...unpunished” are not those who occasionally sin, but are those who sin long enough and strong enough to make themselves staunch haters of God, because the following elaboration of similar words as that of Exodus 34:6-7 brings it out more explicitly.  “You must have no other gods before me.  Do not make an idol for yourself—no form whatsoever—of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth.  Do not bow down to them or worship them because I, the Lord your God, am a passionate [jealous] God.  I punish children for their parents’ sins—even to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.  But I am loyal and gracious to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Deuteronomy 5:7-10).  The progressive revelation in Scripture concerning genealogical culpability or benefit starts with God unambiguously declaring to man that He will punish children for their father’s sin as far out as the fourth generation.  That punishment, however, is prefaced by a declaration of His loving and longsuffering essential nature.  Then the revelation expands along two tracks, one positive and one negative, reaching as far as “the thousandth generation” along the positive track of love and obedience, and reaching only as far as the fourth generation along the negative track of hate; and therefore, in ultimate and mathematical terms, love reaches two-hundred and fifty times as far as hate does.  It is noteworthy that the number one thousand, in spiritual significance, means, “divine completeness and the glory of God.”  Four means “cosmic, world, God’s creative works”; four also “stands for the WEAKNESS found in the world and man.”  Two-hundred and fifty is a combination of two-hundred (“insufficiency”) and fifty (“Holy Spirit”).  All quotes about number significance (here and throughout this writing) are from Biblical Mathematics: Keys to Scripture Numerics, by Evangelist Ed. F. Vallowe.  Putting it all together, and relating it to God’s formulaic response to those who either love or hate Him, we see that love, in generational extension, reaches all the way out to “divine completeness and the glory of God,” whereas hate, in generational extension, only reaches as far as “the WEAKNESS found in the world and man.”  Nonetheless, and notwithstanding man’s free-will hate and God’s sovereign love (and how those contrary facts ultimately play out for each individual soul in final destiny), the Holy Spirit added to insufficiency and multiplied by that hateful weakness in man and his fallen world reaches exponentially beyond the material facts and brings man to “divine completeness and the glory of God.”  Finally, the prophet gets to the core of the issue when he says, “You may wonder why a son isn’t punished for the sins of his father. It is because the son does what is right and obeys my laws.  Only those who sin will be put to death. Children won’t suffer for the sins of their parents, and parents won’t suffer for the sins of their children. Good people will be rewarded for what they do, and evil people will be punished for what they do.  I will judge each of you for what you’ve done. So stop sinning, or else you will certainly be punished.  Give up your evil ways and start thinking pure thoughts. And be faithful to me! Do you really want to be put to death for your sins?  I, the Lord God, don’t want to see that happen to anyone. So stop sinning and live!” (Ezekiel 18:19-20, 30-32).

Matthew Henry, speaking on these seemingly contradictory ideas of genetically transmitted sin (or the proclivity to be tempted along the same genetic predispositions) and sin that the individual commits wholly of his/her own volition (without any genetic influence whatsoever), made these salient points:

God had often said that he would visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, especially the sin of idolatry...and the heavy punishments he would bring upon idolaters that parents might be restrained from sin by their affection to their children and that children might not be drawn to sin by their reverence for their parents.  God does not punish the children for the fathers’ sins unless they tread in their fathers’ steps and fill up the measure of their iniquity (Matthew 23:32), and then they have no reason to complain, for, whatever they suffer, it is less than their own sin has deserved.  And, when God speaks of visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, that is so far from putting any hardship upon the children, to whom he only renders according to their works, that it accounts for God’s patience with the parents, whom he therefore does not punish immediately, because he lays up their iniquity for their children (Job 21:19).  It is only in temporal calamities that children (and sometimes innocent ones) fare the worse for their parents’ wickedness, and God can alter the property of those calamities, and make them work for good to those that are visited with them; but as to spiritual and eternal misery (and that is the death here spoken of [Ezekiel 18]) the children shall by no means smart for the parents’ sins. This is here shown at large; and it is a wonderful piece of condescension that the great God is pleased to reason the case with such wicked and unreasonable men, that he did not immediately strike them dumb or dead, but vouchsafed to state the matter before them, that he may be clear when he is judged. 
                   
Now in the case of Rehoboam and his people, the primary subject of this writing, God gave them only SOME MEASURE OF DELIVERANCE; likewise, when we sin, deliverance is sometimes slow and partial.  The ultimate measure of deliverance is when this mortal puts on immortality, but until that happens in the hereafter, God in the here and now, and in His perfect wisdom, often deems it necessary that we pay the price for our sin in temporary but redemptive discomfort.  Even when we are not the sinner, we pay the price of others’ sins (most often our father’s and mother’s and relative’s), and thus we share in our Lord’s sufferings.  But not aimlessly without purpose.  Our ultimate goal, like Paul’s, needs to be “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10-11).  While full deliverance is the ideal and ultimate reality—and that which we will undoubtedly secure in the end—some measure of deliverance is most often our experience while we are pilgrims in a strange land.

But also in the case of Rehoboam, is the sin of his father Solomon in particular (and perhaps an evil proclivity also inherited through his Ammonite mother).  “Now king Solomon [defiantly] loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh: Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite, Sidonian, and Hittite women, from the very nations of whom the Lord said to the Israelites, ‘You shall not associate with them, nor shall they associate with you, for the result will be that they will turn away your hearts to follow their gods.’  Yet Solomon clung to these in love” (1 Kings 11:1-2).  “So the Lord became angry with Solomon because his heart was turned away from the Lord, the God of Israel,” and ultimately, “the Lord said to Solomon, ‘Because you have done this and have not kept My covenant and My statutes, which I have commanded you, I will certainly tear the kingdom away from you and give it to your servant.  However, I will not do it in your lifetime, for the sake of your father David, but I will tear it out of the hand of your son (Rehoboam).  However, I will not tear away all the kingdom; I will give one tribe (Judah) to your son for the sake of My servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem which I have chosen” (1 Kings 11:9, 11-13).  Though it is not Rehoboam’s fault that his father Solomon sinned and that his mother was a “foreign woman,” that commingled inheritance set him up for failure before he even began.  And such were some of us, born of incest and adultery, spiritual and natural.  But thanks be to God!  Indeed, “Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God?  Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate [by perversion], nor those who participate in homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers [whose words are used as weapons to abuse, insult, humiliate, intimidate, or slander], nor swindlers will inherit or have any share in the kingdom of God.  AND SUCH WERE SOME OF YOU [BEFORE YOU BELIEVED]. But you were washed [by the atoning sacrifice of Christ], you were sanctified [set apart for God, and made holy], you were justified [declared free of guilt] in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the [Holy] Spirit of our God [the source of the believer’s new life and changed behavior]” (1 Corinthians 6:9-11). 
        
Since “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), and I see in the story of King Rehoboam a lesson for us today regarding some measure of deliverance, I proffer this exegesis of 2 Chronicles 12 to elaborate my points.

2 Chronicles 12:1.  “When the kingdom of Rehoboam was established and strong, he and all Israel with him forsook the law of the Lord.”

The Lord had warned the children of Israel, and because “whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction” (Romans 15:4), so He warns us today likewise: “Beware that you do not forget the Lord your God by failing to keep His commandments and His judgments (precepts) and His statutes which I am commanding you today; otherwise, when you have eaten and are satisfied, and have built good houses and lived in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply, and your silver and gold multiply, and all that you have increases, then your heart will become lifted up [by self-conceit and arrogance] and you will forget the Lord your God who brought you from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Deuteronomy 8:11-14 Amp.).  It was not when Rehoboam was fledgling and weak that he and his fellow citizens of Judah forsook the law of the Lord, but it was when they were “established and strong.”  It is a perfect law of causation that always, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling” (Proverbs 16:18).

Just as time would fail listing all the champions of faith, “of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Hebrews 11:32-34), so time would also fail listing all the unfaithful missteps of many of the kings of Israel; of Amaziah who “sought the gods of Edom” (2 Chronicles 25:20); of Uzziah who, after being greatly helped by God, became “so proud that he acted corruptly, and ... was unfaithful to the Lord his God, [entering] ... the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar of incense [something only priests were allowed to do, not kings]” (2 Chronicles 26:16); of Hezekiah who “gave no return for the benefit he received [being healed of a mortal disease], because his heart was proud; therefore wrath came on him and on Judah and Jerusalem” (2 Chronicles 32:25); and of Josiah who interfered with God and was consequently killed by not listening “to the words of Neco from the mouth of God” (2 Chronicles 35:22).

2 Chronicles 12:2-4.  “And it came about in King Rehoboam’s fifth year, because they had been unfaithful to the Lord that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem with 1,200 chariots and 60,000 horsemen.  And the people who came with him from Egypt were without number: the Lubim, the Sukkiim and the Ethiopians.  He captured the fortified cities of Judah and came as far as Jerusalem.”

There are many precious nuggets of truth to be mined from these three verses, and though the mining is strenuous and the nuggets complex, it is worth the time and effort to unearth them and bring them to heavenly light.  Before I do this, however, we must first understand some place and name meanings and what certain numbers signify symbolically.  Rehoboam means “enlarges the people.”  Five (the “fifth year” of his reign) is the number of grace.  Shishak means “present of the bag; of the pot; of the thigh.”  Egypt has a complex etymology and means roughly, “a place where the projection of an attribute of divinity [an aspect of God] manifests via the physical projection of the soul.”  Lubim means “dwellers in a thirsty land.”  Sukkiim means “dwellers in tents.”  Ethiopian means “a black countenance” or “full of darkness” or “scorched countenance.”  Judah means “praise.”  Jerusalem means “dual peace,” or as Lonnie Lane elaborates, “The name Jerusalem is divided between two root words: Yara (pronounced as yahr-ah) and shalem. We already know what shalem means [“safe” or “peace”].  Yara means: dual, as related to the two hills on which Jerusalem sits. And it also means: founded peacefully, to flow as water (i.e. rain), to shoot as an arrow, to point out (as if by aiming a finger), to teach. It also means to cast, direct, inform, instruct, show, teacher, teaching and through (as in the way to go through).  Put Yara and Shalem together as the Hebrew word for Jerusalem and we have a picture of the intent of the Bible in its entirety, of God’s instructions and ‘teaching’ to mankind. The meaning of the name of Jerusalem reveals the very nature and character of the Kingdom of God. Put all this together and we see God’s motive or intention always for JERUSALEM TO BE THE PLACE WHERE HE INTERACTS WITH MEN IN THE WAYS THAT DEFINE ITS NAME [emphasis mine].”  Concerning the 1,200 chariots: Ten (“law and responsibility [intensified]” or “perfection of order”) times ten times twelve (governmental perfection) or one hundred and twenty (a divinely appointed period of probation) times ten equals twelve hundred.  Concerning the 60,000 horsemen: Six hundred (warfare) times one hundred (God’s election of grace) or ten times ten times six hundred equals sixty thousand.

Putting all this information together, we begin by seeing God’s response to unfaithfulness in His people.  In the fifth year of Rehoboam, in that year, grace is given to him and the children of Israel (in spite of faithlessness on their part), and God begins to enlarge them through sufferings, to feed them on the fruit of their own ways, on the dainties or presents of their real king (Shishak), the alien king of soul power (Egypt).  And God allows this to the extent that extinguishes praise (Shishak captures the fortified cities of Judah), but short of a complete desecration of all that is holy (Shishak came as far as Jerusalem, but not in and beyond what Jerusalem means).  But to the degree that thirst (Lubim) and displacement (Sukkiim) and darkness covers the glory of their countenance (Ethiopian), God allows Rehoboam and Israel to suffer.  To the degree of 1,200 chariots of force, a period of probation is enacted until spiritual Israel, the new creation man, is perfectly governed by the Holy Spirit.  Physical circumstances of constraint and material blows of punishments are for the lawless, for those not fully developed after His image, those not yet spiritually mature.  To the degree of 60,000 horsemen warring against God’s people, so God allows the enemy to come in like a flood in order to teach them that only God is able to deliver us from evil. “But the Lord is faithful, and He will strengthen and protect you from the evil one” (2 Thessalonians 3:3).  “It is [indeed] of the LORD'S mercies” and not because of our righteousness or strength “that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not” (Lamentations 3:22).  “You can only come this far and no further,” says God to the enemy.  Shishak/Satan can only plunder the outskirts of our persons; only the fortified cities of Judah, the strongholds of praise, can be overrun (and then only temporarily).  Only during the time of God’s punishment—during His spanking sessions—does joy flee.  But the peaceable fruit of righteousness, which is the direct result of that punishment, is never completely disturbed.  Shishak/Satan can only come as “far as Jerusalem,” as far as—but not completely into—that center of our beings where God lives and reigns in us as the King of Shalom (peace, harmony and wholeness/completeness).

Moreover, in King Rehoboam’s first year he set precedence by rejecting the sound and tried advice of the elders who served his father for the foolish and untried advice of the young men who had grown up with him and served him.  Consequently, he lost the ten northern tribes of Israel, retaining only the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin (see 1 Kings 12:1-17).  The fact that this was ordained by God, decreed to his father Solomon (perhaps before he was born), does not mean that he is not also complicitous.  The sovereignty of God and the free will of man coexist—how?—even human genius cannot figure.  Nonetheless, we are accountable to God for our behavior regardless of what sovereign context it occurs in.
                   
2 Chronicles 12:5-6.  “Then Shemaiah the prophet came to Rehoboam and the princes of Judah who had gathered at Jerusalem because of Shishak, and he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, “You have forsaken Me, so I also have forsaken you to Shishak.’”  So the princes of Israel and the king humbled themselves and said, ‘The Lord is righteous.’”

Shemaiah means “heard of the Lord,” and undoubtedly, he genuinely heard the Lord and obediently conveyed the Lord’s message to Rehoboam and “the princes of Judah.”  Thankfully, they listened to the word of the Lord from the mouth of the prophet Shemaiah and humbled themselves.  They admitted the Lord was right and responded properly.  “It is a trustworthy statement: for if we died with Him, we will also live with Him; if we endure, we will also reign with Him; IF WE DENY HIM, HE ALSO WILL DENY US [emphasis mine]; if we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:11-13).  When they forsook the Lord, they denied the Lord.  Thus God forsook them to Shishak/Satan, and denied their pleas for help until they humbled themselves sufficiently to reestablish the idea in their hearts that God alone is righteous and true.  And such He does with all His children!  The Lord says that when we are faithless, He remains faithful, BUT deny Him, and He denies us.  It is faithlessness unchecked that must eventually spawn denial, maybe not by external behavior or even by empty and idle words that we speak, but God reads our hearts and knows our secret thoughts (expressed and unexpressed).  Where can we go from His Spirit?  If we are faithless at our core, we deny Him His rightful place at the center of our being.  No matter how strong and mature we become in Christ, we remain dependent on Him for our continuance in strength and maturity.  Thus humility is always in order every step of the way, the truth, and the life if we are to remain strong and mature to the end.  As soon as we arrive and relax, we regress and agitate ourselves.

As Scripture teaches: “Brothers and sisters, if a person gets trapped by wrongdoing, those of you who are spiritual should help that person turn away from doing wrong. Do it in a gentle way. At the same time watch yourself so that you also are not tempted” (Galatians 6:1 GWT).  With even more emphasis, “Let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12 NASB); and the same verse explained more explicitly, “These are all warning markers—danger!—in our history books, written down so that we don’t repeat their mistakes. Our positions in the story are parallel—they at the beginning, we at the end—and we are just as capable of messing it up as they were. Don’t be so naive and self-confident. You’re not exempt. You could fall flat on your face as easily as anyone else. Forget about self-confidence; it’s useless. Cultivate God-confidence” (1 Corinthians 10:12 MSG).
           
2 Chronicles 12:7-8.  “When the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah, saying, ‘They have humbled themselves so I will not destroy them, but I will grant them SOME MEASURE OF DELIVERANCE [emphasis mine], and My wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by means of Shishak.  But they will become his slaves so that they may learn the difference between My service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries.’”

There is debate among theologians about whether Christians can ever be demon possessed.  The answer is no in the ultimate and spiritual sense, but yes in the temporary and body/soul sense.  When God granted “some measure of deliverance” to Rehoboam, and specifically withheld His wrath from Jerusalem, He basically did what the Apostle Paul did many years later when a member of the Corinthian church committed grievous sin.  Paul said, “It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.  You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst.  For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present.  In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I HAVE DECIDED TO DELIVER SUCH A ONE TO SATAN FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF HIS FLESH, SO THAT HIS SPIRIT MAY BE SAVED IN THE DAY OF THE LORD JESUS [emphasis mine]” (1 Corinthians 5:1-5).

To my point, demonic oppression pushes down upon the whole man, but it can never breach the inner sanctum of His Spirit living in our spirit and possess that holy of holies location at the center of our Christian heart.  “For God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thessalonians 5:9).  Thus no wrath will be poured out on [spiritual] Jerusalem (another name for that inner sanctum at our center).  But to teach us the difference between the holy and the profane, demons can gain access to us in SOME MEASURE; they can, and often do, make inroads into our persons.  Whereas Satan had no place in Jesus Christ—and therefore no place in the new creature/spirit in us—Satan does have access to us insofar as any inroad of sin reaches the depth of our misbehaving flesh/soul.  Satan and his demons can oppress to the point of possessing the Christian—if, and only if we sin and thereby give permission—and then only to the depth of our outer man’s extent (the body and soul aspects of us).  Just as Rehoboam had to learn to be “slaves so that [he might] learn the difference between [God’s] service and the service of the kingdoms of the countries [the world],” so do we!  Demonic oppression/possession is more near to us than we like to admit, but assuredly, the reason it does not lift from us FULLY is remedial in nature.  Just as a son is treated like a slave until the age of inheritance is fully arrived, so we are oppressed and possessed in varying degrees of bondage until God deems us responsible enough to handle the freedom that full deliverance brings.  
  
2 Chronicles 12:9-12.  “So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, and took the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s palace.  He took everything; he even took the golden shields which Solomon had made.  Then King Rehoboam made shields of bronze in their place and committed them to the care of the commanders of the guard who guarded the door of the king’s house.  As often as the king entered the house of the Lord, the guards came and carried them and then brought them back into the guards’ room.  And when he humbled himself, the anger of the Lord turned away from him, so as not to destroy him completely; and also conditions were good in Judah.”

God not destroying Rehoboam completely means God destroyed him partially, and the golden shields being replaced by bronze shields is significant to that point.  Gold is a single element metal, soft and compliant, precious and representing heavenly things; bronze/brass is a compound metal, hard and inflexible, common and representing earthly things.  God allowed Shishak/Satan to break into and remove the soft, precious and heavenly defense of the golden shields, not because golden shields are strong enough by its intrinsic material substance to physically ward off ransacking hordes of evil, but because God, in some measure, removed His protection.  The replacement shields of bronze, more suited to physically protect, was now Rehoboam’s only defense (God and His divine protection having, in large part, departed).  Bronze/brass speaks of judgment, and though the “conditions were good in Judah,” they were not the best, and certainly not as God intended.  It is noteworthy that several Israelite kings and judges, when they were judged, were bound by chains or shackles of bronze.  In no particular order, there was Sampson—who did not know that the Lord had departed from him—so insensitive had he become to spiritual reality.  “Then the Philistines seized him and gouged out his eyes; and they brought him down to Gaza and BOUND HIM WITH [TWO] BRONZE CHAINS; and he was forced to be a grinder [of grain into flour at the mill] in the prison” (Judges 16:21).  Then there was Manasseh.  “Now the Lord spoke to Manasseh and to his people, but they paid no attention.  So the Lord brought the commanders of the army of the king of Assyria against them, and they captured Manasseh with hooks [through his nose or cheeks] and BOUND HIM WITH BRONZE [CHAINS] and took him to Babylon” (2 Chronicles 33:10-11).  Finally, there was Zedekiah.  “Then the king of Babylon blinded Zedekiah, BOUND HIM WITH BRONZE SHACKLES and took him to Babylon and there he put him in prison [in a mill] until the day of his death” (Jeremiah 52:11).  It is also noteworthy that bronze, representing judgment, is nigh unto cursing; it is one of the metals that God calls the dross of silver (which symbolically represents redemption).  “I [the Lord] have set you as an assayer [O Jeremiah] and as a tester [of the ore] of My people, that you may know and analyze their acts.  They are all the worst [kind] of [stiff-necked, godless] rebels, going around spreading slander.  They are [not gold and silver ore, but] bronze and iron; they are all corrupt.  The bellows blow fiercely, the lead is consumed by the fire; in vain they continue refining, but the wicked are not separated and removed.  They call them rejected silver [only dross, without value], because the Lord has rejected them” (Jeremiah 6:27-30).  And Ezekiel agrees, “Son of man, the house of Israel has become dross (metallic waste) to Me.  All of them are (useless) bronze, tin, iron, and lead in the furnace; they are the dross of silver” (Ezekiel 22:18). 
     
A note of clarification: bronze/brass is used interchangeably across many versions/translations/transliterations of Scripture, but it is near certain that the correct rendering is “bronze,” a mix of copper and tin.  Brass, which is either a mix of copper and zinc, or, of copper, zinc and tin, was not used in biblical times.  This is important because bronze and brass are often confused, and therefore, for our purpose anyways, we must regard them as synonomous in symbolic meaning.  The reason for this explanation lies in the fact that Rehoboam used “bronze” and Wigglesworth “brass” (in the next paragraph), and because I want to demonstrate a parallel between their respective stories, we cannot afford to dilute or confuse types and/or symbols if we are to understand the deeper things of God aright.
         
Julian Wilson, in his book Wigglesworth: The Complete Story tells of a “remarkable supernatural manifestation [that] took place” in late May of 1922 in Wellington, New Zealand.  In Wellington’s Town Hall meeting house, Wigglesworth, related “to the audience the story of a young woman suffering from tuberculosis who was raised from the dead as he prayed.  During the night, the woman had died and Satan appeared at the foot of the bed and sniggered malevolently at him, saying ‘I’ve got her safely held.’  Recalled Wigglesworth, ‘I seemed to be in hell and everything in the room turned to brass.’”
“Then, according to Roberts [Harry V. Roberts, who wrote a book entitled “New Zealand’s Greatest Revivals”], an extraordinary phenomenon occurred:”

That Wellington audience witnessed the weirdest thing that ever happened in a public hall.  Everything in the Town Hall appeared to turn to brass.  What the Evangelist experienced in that death chamber was precipitated into the meeting by the power of the Spirit.  That vast crowd just felt it had been ushered into the portals of hell itself.  It was an ineffaceable and awful sensation.  The lights, chairs, walls, the people, the grand organ all looked like solid brass.  The tension [was] only broken when he [Wigglesworth] told how his own faith had fled away in the leering, faith-sapping presence of Satan himself.  But he cried to God for help and pleaded the blood, and as he cried, the faith of God filled his soul.

Ultimately, the alchemy of heaven turns brass/bronze to gold, but the alchemy of hell does the opposite, it turns gold to brass/bronze.  Perhaps nothing better illustrates this then one of the curses God promises to place on the disobedient: “The heaven which is over your head shall be bronze [giving no rain and blocking all prayers]” (Deuteronomy 28:23).  Also, the first time bronze is mentioned in Scripture is extraordinarily provocative.  “Zillah gave birth to Tubal-cain, the smith (craftsman) and teacher of every artisan in instruments of bronze and iron” (Genesis 4:22).  The name Tubal-cain means “flowing forth of Cain,” and Cain means “possession” or “acquisition”; so together, Tubal-cain means “flowing forth of possession or acquisition.”  Eve, in naming Cain (her firstborn son), supposed he was the promised Messiah, and therefore she declared, “I have gotten a manchild with the help of the Lord” (Genesis 4:1).  Cain of course was a tiller of the cursed earth, and a murderer; to flow forth from that stream is to flow forth rivers of bronze (judgment).  The fact that Tubal-cain was the originator and “teacher of every artisan” in—not only bronze but iron—speaks of someone expert in manipulating the Adamic nature to its logical and matured end.  But to propagate the curse is to propagate the evil behind it, no matter how beautiful or useful the instrument or implement is that is fashioned from it.  The fact that his mother’s name is Zillah, meaning “shadow,” suggests that he manifested his masteries from the shadows, not the substance.  This is not to suggest that working with bronze and iron are inherently sinful, but only in the symbolic sense.  As we see his name and nature and work in context within Scripture, we see a colossal root of error (all those who flow from the wrong stream, those who flow unimpeded from their Adamic nature). 
    
Next we read, and seemingly insignificantly, that “The sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah” (Genesis 4:22).  And if it were not that Rehoboam’s mother was also named Naamah—“And his mother’s name was Naamah the Ammonitess. He did evil because he did not set his heart to seek the Lord” (2 Chronicles 12:14)—I would not have commented on it.  But as it is, note how his mother being an Ammonite and he doing evil are mentioned in connection, as though he, being “born from incest” also (like his mother: the meaning of Ammon/Ammonite) causes him not to be inclined to seek God (not being a pure Israelite).  Hybrid people—Moabites and Ammonites—are people born of Lot’s daughters, of incest; they inverted the stream of progeny, polluted it, and produced unnecessary antagonism, commingling the righteous stream of spirit with the unrighteous stream of flesh.  Symbolically, carnal Christians today are Moabite and Ammonite people, eventually redeemed, but only after much decimation (the Ammonites and Moabites are completely, if not nearly, destroyed from off the face of the earth).  Apparently, the last vestige of hope concerning them is found in Rahab the Ammonitess and Ruth the Moabitess as they were both inserted into the lineage of Christ (see Matthew 1:5).  I think these carnal Christians are like that Corinthian Christian that Paul spoke of, the one that prompted him to say “I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 5:5).

Furthermore, “No one of illegitimate birth shall enter the assembly of the Lord; none of his descendants, even to the tenth generation, shall enter the assembly of the Lord.  No Ammonite or Moabite shall enter the assembly of the Lord; none of their descendants, even to the tenth generation, shall ever enter the assembly of the Lord, because they did not meet you with food and water on the way when you came out of Egypt, and because they hired against you Balaam the son of Beor from Pethor of Mesopotamia, to curse you.  Nevertheless, the Lord your God was not willing to listen to Balaam, but the Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you because the Lord your God loves you.  You shall never seek their peace or their prosperity all your days” (Deuteronomy 23:2-6).  Though this is scathing and seemingly inapplicable to us today in Christiandom, I see in it food for enlightenment, and more importantly, since “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16), a meaty lesson on spiritual truth.  Anyone only born of Adam is illegitimate to genuinely enter the assembly of the Lord; only spiritual Israel is born-again and therefore the only legitimate Christian.  The tenth generation removed hybrid man is still illegitimate, and can never, as constructed (without being born-again—or if born-again—backslidden and joined to idols), enter the household of faith.  The destruction of their flesh by Satan, as a last resort, is their only hope.  In varying degrees short of this extreme measure, is SOME MEASURE OF DELIVERANCE for the bulk of us.  But may we never, as Abraham did, birth Ishmael (“Why spill the water of your springs in the streets, having sex with just anyone?”—Proverbs 5:16)—streaming our life-force off on a tangent course and dispersing indiscriminately and foolishly; but even more so, may we never birth Ammon or Moab (children of incest)—streaming our life-force back in on itself and destroying its flow altogether.  If wisdom is justified of her children, no doubt, foolishness is justified of hers.  The ending verse, “You shall never seek their peace or their prosperity all your days,” flies in the face of tolerance and mushy mother love, that brand of love that most Christians today delusionally believe to be God’s love.  Carnal Christianity can never be coddled and/or embraced; to preach peace when war is coming and prosperity when condemnation is decreed, is both cruel, false and unrighteous.  Peace and prosperity is not helpful along the wrong line; in fact, to put flesh in a nursery and indulge its every whim is to spoil it without remedy.  Only in the vein of truth and spirit is lasting peace and prosperity obtained and maintained.

Mortality must put on immorality, not be redeemed like the new creature; we must mortify our flesh by the Holy Spirit, not embrace it or befriend it.  I am not speaking of harshly treating our bodies, but we must curb its appetite and control its impulses if we are to walk in the spirit and manifest Christ in our mortal flesh.  God threshes us, purifies us, refines us, and brings us to maturity, but assuredly, He never does this to flesh, only to spirit.  When Satan desired to sift Peter like wheat—and the Lord allowed it—it was because he doubted any useful part of the wheat existed in Peter; only the Lord’s prayers concerning Peter not losing his faith (not his substance) saved him from destruction.  Even with that, a monumental failure occurred.  As David conveyed in his last mortal song, “Truly is not my house so [blessed] with God?  For He has made an everlasting covenant with me, ordered in all things, and secured.  For will He not cause to grow and prosper all my salvation and my every wish?  Will He not make it grow and prosper?  But the wicked and worthless are all to be thrown away like thorns” (2 Samuel 23:5-6).  Thorns and thistles are always associated with the curse, and the curse is upon Adam/earth; God has thrown away that construction of man.  Only the plant of Christ in that cursed Adam, the true supplanter, is nourished and cared for by God.  God promises to punish to the third and fourth generation them that hate God; Amorites were given to the third and fourth generation to fill up the measure of their sins only to be removed from the Promised Land forever.  Amorites represent all of us to some degree or another (which YES, secretly hate God); it corresponds to that part of our natural mind which is high and lifted up and speaks its natural mind nature into the holy work instead of the mind of Christ into the holy faith.  It is refining flesh; it is threshing thorns.  It is worthless and not worthy of being refined of course, but alas, we often waste much time trying to extract the precious from the vile of something that is nothing but vile all the way through.  Why does the threshing never end?  Perhaps we’re threshing the wrong crop in the right field.  When God was displeased with His people He said to His prophet, “They have sown wheat and have reaped thorns; they have strained themselves to no profit” (Jeremiah 12:13).  In the parable of the sower, Jesus said that some of the Seed (the Word of God) fell among thorns, and when those thorns came up they choked the Seed out; next, and only to His disciples (those disciplined into the narrow way), He explained that “The one on whom seed was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the worries and distractions of the world and the deceitfulness [the superficial pleasures and delight] of riches choke the word, and it yields no fruit” (Matthew 13:22).  We can never thresh the thorn!  We cannot expect God to refine “worries” and “distractions of the world” and “deceitfulness [the superficial pleasures and delight] of riches”; no, they can only be, as David said, “thrown away like thorns.”  God does not redeem the works of the flesh, He destroys them!

“Ah, sinful nation, a people loaded down with wickedness [with sin, with injustice, with wrongdoing], offspring of evildoers, sons who behave corruptly!  They have abandoned (rejected) the Lord, they have despised the Holy One of Israel [provoking Him to anger], they have turned away from Him.  Why should you be stricken and punished again [since no change results from it]?  You [only] continue to rebel.  The whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint and sick.  From the sole of the foot even to the head there is nothing healthy in the nation’s body, only bruises, welts, and raw wounds, not pressed out or bandaged, nor softened with oil [as a remedy]” (Isaiah 1:4-6).  Whenever the air clears and our ways clarify—but without His presence—instead of joy, mourn, because He has left us to subsist on the fruit of our own ways.  Yes, there is much truth in these words, “Thorns and snares are in the way of the obstinate [for their lack of honor and their wrong-doing traps them]; he who guards himself [with godly wisdom] will be far from them and avoid the consequences they suffer” (Proverbs 22:5); also, “The way of the lazy is like a hedge of thorns [it pricks, lacerates, and entangles him], But the way [of life] of the upright is smooth and open like a highway” (Proverbs 15:19).  But there is a grieving of His Spirit away that mimics “the way [of life] of the upright”; it too “is smooth and open like a highway,” but it is deceitful.  There is, to be sure, pleasure in sin for a season, but afterwards it yields only bitter and putrid fruit.  When Moses chose “rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin” (Hebrews 11:25), he did so with his eyes on Christ and the reward in heaven that awaits all those who are patient and faithful while clothed in mortal flesh.

   
2 Chronicles 12:13-14.  “So King Rehoboam strengthened himself in Jerusalem and reigned. Now Rehoboam was forty-one years old when he began to reign, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city which the Lord had chosen from all the tribes of Israel, to put His name there. And his mother’s name was Naamah the Ammonitess.  He did evil because he did not set his heart to seek the Lord."
 
          Ah, but there is no other place but Jerusalem to really strengthen ourselves, because strengthening ourselves outside the scope of spiritual reality is not strengthening but weakening.  Whenever we fail to humble our soul with fasting (things of this world, not just food) we inflate our pride and enlarge ourselves by mere neglect of spiritual discipline, enough to allow our soul life to magnify itself and grow too large and strong, enough to eclipse our still and quiet spirit into relative obscurity and insignificance.  Though King Rehoboam gets kudos for making himself strong in Jerusalem, he nonetheless did evil there because “he did not set his heart to seek the Lord.”  It is clear that God only sovereignly, without Rehoboam’s help or genuine agreement from the heart, established Jerusalem as a praise throughout the earth.  When God punished Rehoboam’s father Solomon, he tore away much of Israel from Solomon’s house, but for Solomon’s father David’s sake, none of this occurred in Solomon’s lifetime.  Instead, Rehoboam took the brunt of punishment.  God’s last words of punishment to Solomon were, “However, I will not tear away all the kingdom; I will give one tribe (Judah) to your son for the sake of My servant David and for the sake of Jerusalem which I have chosen” (1 Kings 11:13).

          God’s purposes, in spite of our deflections and failures, are never abandoned, but are accomplished with or without our agreement and participation.  Rehoboam reigned powerfully in relative obscurity in the diminished scope of one prominent city surrounded by little but strong support.  “Rehoboam was forty-one years old when he began to reign” and forty-one, as a number, represents the sovereignty of unity made between a probationary period of testing (40) and the advents of the Lord (both His first and second comings)(42).  In the case of Rehoboam’s life, God sovereignly unified His concerns at the outset of Rehoboam’s reign as king; this, in spite of the failure on Rehoboam’s part to pass the probationary test of his first forty years of existence.  At the back end of everything, inclusive of Rehoboam’s entire life span, is the two-fold coming of Jesus Christ “to finish the transgression, to make an end of sin, to make atonement for iniquity, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the most holy place” (Daniel 9:24).

          Once Rehoboam gained the throne, he reigned seventeen years.  The number seventeen signifies victory or completeness of testimony.  It is not insignificant that attached to the pronouncement that Rehoboam “reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem” is this further elaboration, that Jerusalem is “the city which the Lord had chosen from all the tribes of Israel, to put His name there.”  Thus the completeness of testimony or victory attached to Rehoboam reigning strongly in Jerusalem was not so much about him, but about God’s interest in preserving Jerusalem as the place that “reveals the very nature and character of the Kingdom of God”; and also that “place where He interacts with men in the ways that define its name” (both quotes, Lonnie Lane). The advents of Christ are about establishing Jerusalem (the center of spiritual Israel; the center of our new creature beings) as a praise on the earth.  Indeed, “On your walls, O Jerusalem, I have appointed and stationed watchmen (prophets), who will never keep silent day or night; you who profess the Lord, take no rest for yourselves, and give Him no rest [from your prayers] until He establishes Jerusalem and makes her a praise on the earth” (Isaiah 62:6-7).  “If anyone does not love the Lord [does not obey and respect and believe in Jesus Christ and His message], he is to be accursed.  Maranatha (O our Lord, come)!” (1 Corinthians 16:22).

2 Chronicles 12:15-16.  “Now the acts of Rehoboam, from first to last, are they not written in the records of Shemaiah the prophet and of Iddo the seer, according to genealogical enrollment? And there were wars between Rehoboam and Jeroboam continually.  And Rehoboam slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David; and his son Abijah became king in his place.”   

The phrase “according to genealogical enrollment” is mostly lost to the western mind, but to the eastern mind (of which Israel obtains), it is of paramount significance.  Whereas westerners often think too individualistic, easterners often think too communal or tribalistic.  Nonetheless, God chose the communal thinking Israelite, and not the individualistic westerner to be the apple of His eye, so we westerners need to move closer to communal thinking to better understand God’s overarching intent with man.  Undoubtedly, however, Scripture teaches both communal and individual responsibility and openly rewards or punishes any discharge or negligence of duty enjoined to either type of responsibility.  Both types of responsibility are explicitly outlined in these words of Paul the Apostle:  “CARRY ONE ANOTHER’S BURDENS [communal] and in this way you will fulfill the requirements of the law of Christ [that is, the law of Christian love].  For if anyone thinks he is something [special] when [in fact] he is nothing [special except in his own eyes], he deceives himself.  But each one must carefully scrutinize his own work [examining his actions, attitudes, and behavior], and then he can have the personal satisfaction and inner joy of doing something commendable without comparing himself to another.  FOR EVERY PERSON WILL HAVE TO BEAR [WITH PATIENCE] HIS OWN BURDEN [individualistic]” (Galatians 6:2-5).  Rehoboam received both genealogical advantages and disadvantages, but in the end, just as the apostle taught us, we must each bear our own burden.  How fair and gracious is God concerning this matter?  Look at the disparity between the punishment length and severity of those who hate God and the reward length and graciousness extended to those who love Him.  “You shall have no other gods before Me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol [as an object to worship], or any likeness (form, manifestation) of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth.  You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous (impassioned) God [demanding what is rightfully and uniquely mine], visiting (avenging) the iniquity (sin, guilt) of the fathers on the children [that is, calling the children to account for the sins of their fathers], to the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing graciousness and lovingkindness to thousands [of generations] of those who love Me and keep My commandments” (Deuteronomy 5:7-10). 
     
   Finally, Shemaiah the prophet, as we learned earlier, means “heard of the Lord”; Iddo the seer means “timely.”  Together, they recorded “according to genealogical enrollment” things both heard and seen.  Thus they alternately either affirmed or condemned both genealogical and personal behaviors in Rehoboam as God either told them or showed them (or even both...maybe God told and showed them).  Anyways, Rehoboam, as we might recall, means “enlarges the people”; Jeroboam means “whose people are countless.”  The one enlarges a small contingent of committed disciples, while the other merely amasses masses.  The tension between those who enlarge people they already have and those who numerically increase the number of people they gather to themselves is a type of warring between spirit and flesh respectively.  Just as ten spies gave a bad and faithless report concerning the Promised Land, and two spies gave a good and faithful one, so ten tribes (the number of law and that which is only numerically superior [quantity]) attached themselves to Jeroboam, and two tribes (the number of true witness and that which is numerically inferior [quality]) attached themselves to Rehoboam.  This is of course only symbolically true and typed by God, not man, because in the final analysis neither Rehoboam nor Jeroboam were typecast by only their respective behaviors.  Behind their lives then, as ours now, is the wonderful and almighty sovereignty of God and the genealogical placement of our lives into a context that both undergirds and overwhelms us simultaneously.  Our free-will decides our narrow fate, but never outside the confines of the broad and sovereign will of God, a context that includes seemingly contradictory things (only because of our shortsightedness).  God wholeheartedly “desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3), but He will nonetheless “destroy all who have caused destruction on the earth” (Revelation 11:18).  If we are wise, we will accept SOME MEASURE OF DELIVERANCE above full deliverance temporarily—in the course of our life here on earth—if, by so doing, it restrains us from destroying the earth and ultimately ourselves.

           

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Avoiding the Cliff at the Edge of the Flat Earth

          In my local church service this morning (11/15/15) I had a vision.  In it I saw multitudes falling off a flat plain, and somehow I knew that that flat plain was the flat earth reality of those who were tumbling over the cliffs all along the edge of this delusional reality.  The thought that struck me while watching this horrific scene, was “How could they believe such medieval and/or dark ages science?”—especially in light of the advanced science of today.  At the back of the dark ages was the absence of Scriptural light and book learning, but at the back of today’s ignorance is the absence of a proper exegesis of Scripture and too much dependence on the light of science.

          There is an ignorance which means lack of knowledge, and an ignorance born of willful disregard of truth that is actually more akin to foolish stupidity than simple ignorance.  Sometime back I encountered the writings of James Sire and T. Austin-Sparks.  Both of them, in different but complimentary ways, wrote of phantom ghosts and horizonless horizons.  In response to their inspiration I wrote the following article:

The Vanished Jesus

“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?”—Friedrich Nietzsche

“When the foundations [a stable society] collapse, what can good [righteous] people do?”—Psalm 11:3

Our period of time in history, roughly from about the mid-1950s to today, has been labeled the postmodern era; it is that period of time immediately following the modern era which roughly spanned from the end of the Romantic era (late 1800s) to the mid-1950s.  In sequence, western society philosophy began in the flames of humanism and is today ending in ashes as charred remains in the holocaust-like ovens of atheism.  God is now really dead.

The optimism which followed the Dark Ages was all moonshine, light without heat, and it manifested itself as human ingenuity, autonomous thinking, unrestrained and uprooted imagination, and breaks from established ideas and traditions.  James W. Sire, in his book about worldviews, called postmodernism “The Vanished Horizon.” 

Sire got his idea about a vanished horizon from Nietzsche, who in his parable “The Madman” spoke of how modern humans killed God, and by so doing, eliminated the horizon.  Nietzsche wrote this more than 100 years ago, and he said then that it had not yet occurred (at least not yet within the “ears of man”).  But now, according to Sire (and I agree) it has occurred.  Indeed, Sire said this:

The acknowledgement of the death of God is the beginning of postmodern wisdom.  It is also the end of postmodern wisdom.  For, in the final analysis, postmodernism is not “post” anything; it is the last move of the modern. 
The horizon defining the limits of our world has been wiped away.  The center holding us in place has vanished.  Our age…postmodern, finds itself afloat in a pluralism of perspectives, a plethora of philosophical possibilities, but with no dominant notion of where to go or how to get there.  A near future of cultural anarchy seems inevitable.  (The Universe Next Door, 2004, pp. 211-212).

Scripture agrees.  The beginning of wisdom is the fear of God, and of course, the fool who says there is no God cannot then fear Him nor begin to have wisdom.  There is no past, present—and especially within the context of this writing—a future, when God is removed from our reality.  The horizon, which suggests a future ground upon which to build hopes and dreams, when removed (as it must be when God is removed) leaves us at least anarchy, and at most, an utter emptiness of purpose and annihilation of being.

Also, postmodernism is implicitly about another concept called deconstruction; its obvious meaning, to “un-construct something, to dismantle or destroy a constructed thing” is applicable.  For our purposes, it is about destroying today what was established yesterday (and especially in the moral, spiritual and cultural realms).  Long ago the psalmist asked, “If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11: 3).  The idea of deconstructing convention is based on a withering skepticism expressed as an overwrought scrutiny, and motivated by less than an honest search for truth.  To question convention, authority, or any established fact is not wrong except when done excessively and for reasons in support of impure motives couched in rebellion.

If we throw away established definitions—if we throw away absolute truth—we devolve or degenerate into chaos; if everyone is a truth unto themselves and all that matters are our own little private interpretations and/or narratives, we cannot communicate—and therefore—we cannot commune.  And if we cannot commune, we will cease to be a community, a society, and ultimately, we will cease to be a nation.  If the vanishing family unit and the breakdown from there outward into the classroom and then outward into work environments and neighborhoods, and reaching even further outward into cities and states and finally all the way outward into our multi-divided nation hasn’t convinced us yet about how utterly wrong we are to the core, how systemically wrong our assumptions and presuppositions are about what it takes to establish and grow a healthy society and nation, then we are stupid and foolish and blind beyond belief.

Ah, but there is hope!  As the late Paul Harvey used to say, “Now for the rest of the story!”

Of course, the real Jesus is not even remotely a vanished entity as though he were a mere breath, a mortal man; no, our everlasting King remains everlasting—and solidly so.  He could never be defined by the psalmist, for instance, as “nothing in [God’s] sight” (Psalm 39:5).  Though 100% man, He is also 100% God; He is an altogether other entity than those of us born of the first Adam.  He cannot be defined like us: “Surely every man at his best is a mere breath…Surely every man walks about as a phantom” (Psalm 39:5-6).  He “is the same yesterday and today and forever,” perfectly defined, clearly presented, and without even so much as a degree of shadowing or shading expressed at the margins of His being (Hebrews 13: 8).  In fact, there are no margins of being with Him whatsoever; He is infinite, and infinitely centered (inside and outside all boxes); and guess what?  He IS our horizon, God’s horizon.

T. Austin Sparks wrote a small book entitled “The Horizon of Christ.”  In it he explained how the Greek word for our English word “horizon” is used twice in Scripture, in two verses out of the book of Acts (10:42; 17:31).  But no English version actually uses the word horizon.  All the top or most popular versions use either “ordained” or “appointed.”  After establishing the validity of calling Christ “The Horizon,” Sparks went on to say this:

Therefore, we are going to be occupied with Christ as God’s Horizon, where everything is horizoned by Christ.  And everybody knows what the horizon is.  The horizon is the farthest limit of vision.  It is the ultimate range of things.  Wherever we may go in this world, on any of its sides, we are still confronted with the horizon which limits everything to itself and within which everything obtains.  And here we are told in precise language that what the horizon is to this earth as the ultimate limit and range and content of everything, God has made His Son in His eternal counsels.  Christ is God’s full range and ultimate limit and complete content of everything.  And although that word “ordained,” [or “appointed”], ‘horizo’ actually occurs only twice in the New Testament, what it means, what it conveys, is found everywhere.  One very inclusive and impressive fragment alone would indicate that to us from the Letter to the Colossians, chapter 1: 16 and 17, “For in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist—are held together” (A.S.V.; Amp.).  There is the horizon, the range, the scope, the sphere, and the fullness; and that is Christ.  (1961, pp. 5-6).

“Behold, is it not by appointment of the Lord of hosts that the nations toil only to satisfy the fire [that will consume their work], and the peoples weary themselves only for emptiness, falsity, and futility?” (Habakkuk 2:13, Amp.).

Yes indeed, in the end, all iron, clay, bronze, silver, and even gold (representing the different governing models of mankind) will be crushed, pulverized, and made like chaff to be blown away by the breath of the Almighty, as Jesus Christ, that stone which did all that crushing and pulverizing, becomes a mountain and fills the whole earth with a majestic and high government.  It is upon us, “the final removal and transformation of all [that can be] shaken—that is, of that which has been created—in order that what cannot be shaken may remain and continue.  Let us therefore, receiving a kingdom that is firm and stable and cannot be shaken” (Hebrews 12:27-28, Amp.). 
“The seventh angel then blew [his] trumpet, and there were mighty voices in heaven, shouting, The dominion (kingdom, sovereignty, rule) of the world has now come into the possession and become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ (the Messiah), and He shall reign forever and ever (for the eternities of the eternities)!” (Revelation 11:15, Amp.).

Our nation and our times is increasingly proving themselves as vaporous as what man is within himself without Christ; he and everything he conceives of and makes with his hands is ultimately horizonless.  But the good news is that Jesus Christ is not only on the horizon for all who cling to Him, but is Himself THE HORIZON.  “Therefore thus says the Lord God, Behold, I am laying in Zion for a foundation a Stone, a tested Stone, a precious Cornerstone of sure foundation; he who believes (trusts in, relies on, and adheres to that Stone) will not be ashamed or give way or hasten away [in sudden panic]” (Isaiah 28:16, Amp.).  Do not fear what is coming upon the earth, and do not fear the fact that Jesus Christ and God have been removed from our nation; God is greater than our nation, and He can never fade away except in delusional minds and hearts.  Place your future on solid ground; its good and righteous fulfillment is on the horizon, the HORIZON OF CHRIST.  To avoid the cliff at the edge of the flat earth you must first get off of linear (one-dimensional) thinking; there is no edge nor cliff to fall off of on spherical (multi-dimensional) thinking.  God is greater than your heart/mind and knows all things!  Trust Him and walk on solid ground from here to eternity.    
        


Monday, December 21, 2015

A Rally Cry to the Bible and its Testimony

“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them”—Isaiah 8:20 KJV.

About a year and one month ago, on November 18, 2014, in “SMALL STRAWS IN A SOFT WIND” by Marsha Burns, she said, “In a vision I saw a man clearing the rubble from a brick wall that had been destroyed, and when I looked beyond the wall I saw a city in ruins and a few people working to clear the rubble.  And, I heard the Lord say, ‘This is a picture of the church, which has been ravaged and lies in ruins.  I call to the remnant to clean up the mess and rebuild according to My plumb line and standards.  It will be a great and lasting work.’”

I agree, as the Lord has been speaking to me of late—November 2014 timeframe—(out of Psalm 74) a similar message.  First the problem: “Turn Your footsteps toward the perpetual ruins; the enemy has damaged everything within the sanctuary.  Your adversaries have roared in the midst of Your meeting place; they have set up their own standards for signs.  It seems as if one had lifted up his axe in a forest of trees.  And now all its carved work they smash with hatchet and hammers.  They have burned Your sanctuary to the ground; they have defiled the dwelling place of Your name.  They said in their heart, ‘Let us completely subdue them.’  They have burned all the meeting places of God in the land” (Psalm 74:3-8 NASB).

Then the solution:  As Marsha Burns quoted at the end of the above word of hers: “Come, and let us return to the LORD; for He has torn, but He will heal us; He has stricken, but He will bind us up”—Hosea 6:1.  Also, in Psalm 60, after Israel had suffered “very hard” things, and had been broken in upon deeply by the enemy (but at the Lord’s behest), the army of the Lord had to regroup.  And a retreat to a rally point—a military strategy that looks like surrender and defeat—but is really just a regrouping and re-strategizing to come at the war differently and more effectively (and usually with less numbers and supplies like a remnant with little resources).  Sound familiar?  Such is the case today.  The Lord accentuated this verse to me the other day: “But you have given us a banner to rally to; all who love truth will rally to it; THEN you can deliver your beloved people” (Psalm 60:4-5 TLB).

The banner to rally to is the unadulterated Word of God and its proper—and dare I say—its traditional and established interpretation.  Then...and only then...CAN God deliver His people.  He can’t now!  Not that God is powerless, but He cannot lie.  ONLY according to genuine Truth can He—and will He—deliver His people.  Arise army of God!  Set your ranks and files in line and column to the plumb-line of God’s Holy Word.  Returning to the Lord is returning to traditional Christianity.  He will heal us if we do.  If not, if we continue to consult the world and witches and rebellion (our own minds and heart’s desires), we are destined only to curse God in darkness.

But as for me and the remnant, “I will wait for the Lord to help us, though he is hiding now. My only hope is in him.  I and the children God has given me have symbolic names that reveal the plans of the Lord of heaven’s armies for his people: Isaiah means ‘Jehovah will save (his people),’ Shear-jashub means ‘A remnant shall return,’ and Maher-shalal-hash-baz means ‘Your enemies will soon be destroyed.’  So why are you trying to find out the future by consulting witches and mediums? Don’t listen to their whisperings and mutterings. Can the living find out the future from the dead? Why not ask your God?  ‘Check these witches’ words against the Word of God!’ he says. ‘If their messages are different than mine, it is because I have not sent them; for they have no light or truth in them.  My people will be led away captive, stumbling, weary and hungry. And because they are hungry, they will rave and shake their fists at heaven and curse their King and their God.  Wherever they look there will be trouble and anguish and dark despair. And they will be thrust out into the darkness’” (Isaiah 8:17-22 TLB).

***Update***

Today is December 21, 2015, and as Paul Harvey used to say, “Now for the rest of the story!”  God has, for some time now, at least from as far back as November 2014, been allowing the enemy to overrun His people.  But very recently (as of this past Sunday morning service [December 20, 2015]), I and a few others from the church group I meet with regularly, discerned a “change,” a “difference,” or a “turning point” in the spiritual atmosphere.  We are still trying to fully interpret exactly what God was/is saying, but in a nut shell, we believe it is about a restoration of the signs and wonders accompanying the truly apostolic expression of the gospel.  Only a true witness of the risen Christ can present the gospel in power, and assuredly, that same true witness is also someone perfectly aligned to the plumb line of God’s written word (in its 66 book Protestant format and in its inerrant form as originally written in the three languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek).

Like never before, I see an accentuation by God on Paul’s methodology.  Paul told the Corinthian church that “I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but IN DEMONSTRATION OF THE SPIRIT AND OF POWER [emphasis mine], so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God” (1 Corinthians 2:3-5).  Later, in the same letter, Paul says to them, “I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills, and I shall find out, not the words of those who are arrogant but their power.  For the kingdom of God does not consist in words but in power.  What do you desire? Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love and a spirit of gentleness?” (1 Corinthians 4:19-21).

The “demonstration of the Spirit and of power” is only achieved by the God given authority derived from an apostolic anointing approved of by God, “a workman [tested by trial] who has no reason to be ashamed, accurately handling and skillfully teaching the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15 Amp.).  Assuredly, “everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil” (Hebrews 5:13-14).

Sunday, December 13, 2015

My Vision of the Pencil

“The end of a matter is better than its beginning”—Ecclesiastes 7:8

During the worship portion of a church meeting I attended (12/6/2015), I saw an image of a brand new shiny pencil.  It was pristine, unsharpened, and with a full and unrubbed eraser.  It was made perfect for the task it was designed to do, but not in its native manufacture.  Potentially, this new pencil had much to say, and many problems to solve in its lifetime, but until it is circumcised down to a sharp and specific point for functional utility, it remains native and useless for spiritual testimony and story.

Then I saw another pencil sharpened to a useful point.  A loss of its mass, a shortening of its length, and a narrowing—progressively from its exterior through its intermediate substance all the way to the core—paved the way for function above fashion, and utility above beauty.  A pencil conformed to its purpose has at either end of its extent a job to do, to either write stories at one end, the point, or eliminate mistakes at the other end, the eraser.  And for all of us, both ends get used, and therefore both ends, because of their respective utilizations, also diminish with age.  Thus, this pencil begins to fade away, but as it shrinks—as it records many stories and solves numerous problems—its fame, in direct proportion to the extent it gives itself away, grows.

Finally, I saw a stubby little pencil whittled down to almost nothing.  Its eraser was gone, rubbed clear out of its socket.  But thankfully, this pencil was faithful and its ministry complete, so though it was now useless, it will never again be useless like its uncircumcised beginning.  Before it was sharpened for service it had only potential, but now, though it no longer holds a point, its full and mature story is told point by point from natural to supernatural wording and native to alien language.

And such it is for any and all of those who obey the Lord’s command to endure to the end.  By the time most of us finish the race, we are shells of our former selves.  And rightly so!  Did not the Lord declare to us that “Whosoever shall seek to save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it [?]” (Luke 17:33).  Moreover, we must lay down our lives for the family of God, not in theory, but in tangible reality.  We must, like Paul the Apostle, minister with zeal and commitment, enough to declare, “I will very gladly spend and be spent for you” (2 Corinthians 12:15).

In summation, God in man, solidarity in fragility, is the context of our story, the story of our life written by us by fragile pencil first written by the Spirit of the Lord in indelible ink upon our hearts.  Mercy triumphing over judgment is our story.  And because we are empowered, not by our splendid personality or our ingenious works, but by God’s mercy toward us, we faint not.  Indeed, our story is about renouncing “the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully; but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God ... For we preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord, and ourselves your servants ... But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Corinthians 4:2,5,7).

Thus, our story is His story with us graciously inserted into it.  The graphite or lead at the core of our person is infused with Christ and His blood.  The sharpening both shreds the exterior and exposes the interior, but even in that process, the interior loses mass and narrows focus to spiritual reality.  Our life, like our Lord’s, has a transcendent purpose, and therefore what we lose on earth temporarily (our pencil existence), we gain in heaven permanently (the story and testimony that our pencil wrote).  Spending and being spent is the modus operandi of our life’s work.

We would rejoice rather than cry if we only believed that “our light affliction [was] but a moment,” and that it worked “for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;” also we would do well to “look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18).  Ultimately, we write our own story, and the more that story flows from our heart—the more the blood of Christ bleeds into our expression—the more indelible and perfect it will read.  But to write in His blood is to write in our blood too, and to write in blood is to die to self all along the way.  Paul died daily, and his letters became indelible because of it.  We also must die daily if our book is to be immortalized.  Moreover, we must not faint until we have written our story to the last line of the last chapter of our mortal existence.  Only then, perhaps, can we genuinely appreciate how “our outward man perishes” while our “inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16).

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

The Whole Message of This Life

“But the high priest rose up, along with all his associates (that is the sect of the Sadducees), and they were filled with jealousy.  They laid hands on the apostles and put them in a public jail.  But during the night an angel of the Lord opened the gates of the prison, and taking them out he said, ‘Go, stand and speak to the people in the temple THE WHOLE MESSAGE OF THIS LIFE’” (Acts 5:17-20 NASB).

“Truth is more powerful than death, and persecution only scatters the seeds of truth over a greater distance”—Rick Joyner  

Apparently, the whole message of this life in Christ Jesus had not yet been fully proclaimed, “the seeds of truth” having not been scattered “over a greater distance” yet, thus this command issued to the apostles by an angel of the Lord.  Previous to the high priest and the Sanhedrin putting the apostles in prison, two extraordinary things occurred.  First, Ananias and Sapphira died at the Apostle Peter’s feet because they lied to the Holy Spirit; second, “at the hands of the apostles many sign sand wonders were taking place among the people,” and “they were all being healed” (Acts 5:12 & 16).  The extraordinary power of the evidence of God’s favor on the apostles and the influence that power had to convert people to the gospel truth filled the religious leaders of Judaism with jealously.

“But during the night” (Acts 5:19), that is, during those times of ignorance when everything we thought was going our way suddenly reverses, even implodes upon itself and is destroyed, when enlightenment is gone and we see no way out, “an angel of the Lord” comes and releases us from that which the devil interposed into our stream of life.  That which the devil meant for harm, that which had the intent of “to steal, kill, and destroy” behind it, is re-reversed by God, and now the whole message of our life in Christ Jesus is proclaimed.  As Joyner said, and I reiterate, “Truth is more powerful than death, and persecution only scatters the seeds of truth over a greater distance.” 
  
The holy atmosphere that the apostles of the Lord created in their day, an atmosphere in which it is not easy to lie to the Holy Spirit (but an atmosphere in which some did), is being created again in our end time day.  Those that are glib and divided, half-hearted and luke-warm, are about to be exposed and eliminated from the holy ground of truth.  Nonetheless, many signs and wonders will manifest from holy hands, hands only holy by extension of heart purity outward to the fingertips, manifesting Christ in mortal flesh from the innermost to the outermost parts of consecrated bodies.  Just as only 300 out of 32,000 made the cut to be in Gideon’s army of deliverance, so God is even now whittling down His forces for the same reason God whittled down Gideon’s, so we do not become proud and say in our hearts, “My own power has delivered me” (Judges 7:2).

A mighty lesson is contained in the story of Gideon, and in particular to the whole message of this life in Christ Jesus: God’s whittling way to large impact.  The war between flesh and spirit is both fierce and unending while we remain clothed in this body of death.  The Midianites of Gideon’s day represented flesh, the meaning of their name meaning “strife” (a work of the flesh).  And it is the constant strife of flesh exacerbated by the satanic energy behind flesh that tends to wear us out; Satan is always trying to worm his way or snake himself into our inner sanctums of first soul and ultimately spirit (his brass ring) through the weakness of our flesh.  It is commonly ascribed to the Antichrist, or if not, certainly to a satanically energized man that “will speak out against the Most High and wear down the saints of the Highest One” (Daniel 7:25) in the last days.

And such is the experience of many today.  First God looked at the 32,000 recruits that responded to Gideon’s call to arms, and said, “The people...are too many” (Judges 7:2); unless God reduces us, we become proud.  So God instructs Gideon to make a concession to all those who are “afraid and trembling”; the fearful leave and so too a huge part of God’s army.  This reduced Gideon’s arm of flesh tremendously, and likewise, God is today reducing our numbers drastically in spiritual preparation for the mighty signs and wonders that must soon break out.  Gideon lost nearly seventy percent of his support to fear and unbelief, but God was not done eliminating that which is contrary to spiritual progress.  Finally, God reduced Gideon’s army to a mere 300, less than 1% of his initial number of 32,000.  For God to receive the glory, flesh must be entirely removed, and we are always more flesh than we think.

Many years ago The Holy Spirit intimated to me a wonderful truth.  He basically caused me to know that Jesus’s parables were better than good; they were perfect!  And as an example God showed me that we are more than analogously related to a grain of wheat.  Though some grains of wheat are variant degrees different than this, essentially, wheat is about 3% germ, 14% bran, and 83% endosperm comprised by weight.  The germ corresponds to our spirit, the bran to our body, and the endosperm to our soul, and each of them in the same proportions as that of a grain of wheat.  The reason it is hard to hear God’s voice is that our spirit is small and deeply internal.  Our soul, being by far the largest part of us, dominates our attention; our mind, will, and emotions dominate us.  The flesh, our body, simply lies dead around us.  This is our condition prior to salvation, and even after our salvation experience (but before we die to ourselves to reproduce spiritually).  “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.  He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal” (John 12:24-25).
 

Gideon’s reduction to less than 1% of what he originally was, is an example of what it takes for us to reach spiritual maturity, the necessary condition to reproduce.  Either we become a single loaf of wonder bread, using only our endosperm (soul) to do so, and perhaps delighting a few with our splendidness, or we die to that singular and selfish ambition, perhaps disappointing a few with our seeming waste of soul life, and reproduce exponentially as our germ (spirit) enlarges enough to feed multitudes (with baskets of fragments remaining).  The whole message of this life is not about the whole message of our former life, and until it is nearly completely eradicated, to perhaps 1-3% of what it once was, we are not REALLY ready to proclaim the gospel message.  Not until liars drop dead at our feet, signs and wonders take place among the people through our hands, and after we incite jealousy in powerless religiosity leading to jail time, are we ready to have an angel of the Lord spring us free to proclaim the whole message of this life.