As we discover the King of wisdom, we are made comfortable with His domain being within us. Though all manner of Christian fellowships excommunicate us and their authorities anathematize us, nothing men do can stop God from blessing those who have come out of the babble of the church world’s maledictions and traditional falsehoods. We continue to scale the spiritual heights to God's city, the spiritual New Jerusalem order then seen and heard more clearly when called to higher ground. We know the calling by the spirit to become spiritual Mount Zion where the eternal verdicts shall be fulfilled.
“…and they that are with Him are called, and chosen, and faithful." Revelation 17:14
When Jesus came into the earth, He came into the former land of Israel, into a nation steeped under religious law. He came into a legalistic religious condition brought about by centuries of teaching the laws of Moses, along with the rites and the sacrifices of temple worship. Into Moses teaching had been woven the traditions of the elders, an accumulation of rules from those same centuries. It had come to include the washing of pots and cups, together with ceremonies like washing hands before eating and a multitude of other practices imposed upon the people by their leading elders.
The temple in the city of Jerusalem was the focus of all this worship for the people. Their whole life revolved around that building and the rites and sacrifices the priests offered in it. It was the sacred spot of the nation for all Israelites wherever they were in the world. Every son of Jacob had that one desire planted in them: to go to Jerusalem and worship.
A SYSTEMATIC religion was embedded in the lives of the people, and has been their religious imprint for long, long centuries. In a part of their life, however, they endured hope perennial that “some day” a Messiah would come and justly fulfill the promises of God given by prophets by removing the yoke to death, including the religious yokes that oppressed, and to lift the oppression of foreign empires as well. But when the Messiah came, after centuries of worshiping God this way, they did not have enough wisdom to recognize their Messiah.
They were a massive organization with divine laws, rituals and legalistic teachings about God, while this Jesus was but an unknown individual. Jesus has brought a new and revolutionary way to access God. It is a way of faith, believing in the spirit of sonship that recognizes anointed teaching of God’s Spirit and the presence of the King, to have RELATIONSHIP with the living God also. Jesus brought the way of spiritual life that keeps us alive body, soul, and spirit, rather than a religious way of scriptural head knowledge promoting religious works, trying to fulfill scriptural standards by ritual acts that are done to keep oneself clean by external observances.
The spirit of sonship, however, keeps us clean in the highest degree. Like Jesus, it keeps us outside of the organized order of worship found in the people who had been constantly taught to observe all the external things the priests told them as the way of holiness or they would perish. Jesus came saying to do the law but not in those legalistic religious ways that would amount to absolutely no good whatsoever.
If they wanted God's life, they were told to come to Him and drink in His words, HEAR what He is saying, and by merely believing in His words, BY FAITH, God would bless and make an abiding place within them that would thereafter be the center for worship. He promised this commitment of God outside of all the accumulated traditions of the Jewish nation. Jesus assured them that they would NOT LOSE A SINGLE THING by coming unto Him. By casting the former traditions aside and following Him they would gain yet more access to God's life. But who could hear such a thing in the day of Jesus? Who can hear it today?
In fact, Jesus Himself said that no man could come unto Him, except the Father who had sent Him would draw that man. That is just as true today. He still asks His people to give up the external religious formalities of worship, promising to exchange it for a closer INNER UNION WITH GOD. For many Christians it would become a reaping word to hear Him saying, "Cast aside all your formal programs of worship, all of your traditions, rituals, and ordinances, all of your cherished and myriad activities, all of your committees, and simply COME TO ME, hear my words and I will give you REST. You will be changed to continually be one with the spirit of truth.”
What a burden it is for the pride of some of His most cherished people to be REDUCED in the eyes of other people. GOD reduces us to nothing while we have found trying to reduce others a most impossible thing to accomplish! Truly, it is only our heavenly Father who alone draws each of us upward from the usurper’s grip by placing His wisdom inside us. He delivers His people from religious mindsets formed in the church age to behold the Lord’s presence above and beyond the established orders of this world.
The church, however, still builds in strife after the order of Cain, who left the presence of God to build and dwell in the city Nod after killing his brother. Some Christian ministers are reduced in their ability to keep their lips from speaking guile, from killing others with their words. They themselves have bloody hands that perform unrighteously to manipulate, struggling to cover up their lack and putting on a brave front to become, at least for a season, another religious fraud with an in-part possession of God's authority.
Thus accepting forms of worldly wisdom, the church has fallen and is full of “head knowledge” doctrines about God about what is good and and what is evil. Even now religious Christian men have been CHEATED out of the very thing they seek! Christians are supposed to have a spiritual Head, but when they are reduced in spiritual growth, they are robbed. The will of God cannot be accomplished by works done in the flesh!
Much mixture has been woven into the basic fiber of Christian people today that needs a special washing out of “spots,’ an ironing over “wrinkles”, to be made ready for a greater supper being provided by our Father Himself. He is feeding us the truth of a new day, of the Feast of Tabernacles, the third feast of Israel, where they celebrated gathering in ALL the fruit of the land. Those caught up to heavenly realms by the spirit have developed all the fruits that can be produced by Christ. They are understanding and subject to the King’s ways.
American laws do regulate our outer actions. We accept the thoughtful intent of the law to benefit the community and protect the innocent. We try to obey them — at least when anyone of authority is looking. But edicts of God's SPIRITUAL law are divinely IMPARTED by revelation. He quickens the inner spirit of a man in a way that the best of men following the totality of Moses's laws cannot attain. One can be made alive in the INNER MAN to escape spiritual slavery to death and its false image of religious good works, to be made aware of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus.
When the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus is imparted to our awakened spirit, we no longer have to try to know God, but are possessed by confident love in God and have able access to God's life. This opens the realities of spiritual love, joy, peace and righteousness to flow into us like a river from God's spirit into our inner spiritual being and out of our mouth as we express our true spiritual condition. God’s Life flowing from us as the promised provision of God, our Father, brings His people into an order of mercy and righteousness under our righteous and merciful King!
The external problems in men's nationalism, race, war, crime, poverty, oppression, sickness, and death are the external symptoms of man’s deep seated disease: death. Death in the mind of ignorant and shameful deeds has captured unregenerate hearts to be dominated by the carnal mind of man. The ONLY strategy that attacks this dark state of man's condition is when Christ awakens our inner spirit to teach us transforming truths of God. Being taught by God's Spirit will hold us still while our Father deeply etches His quickening Word into our being. What incredible wisdom Jesus revealed when he declared,
“Behold, the Kingdom is within you!” Luke 17:21
Religious leaders of Christianity error when they make godliness into a LAW to be done rather than a LIFE given by Spirit formed within our own spirit. “Do as God said!” they thunder from their pulpits as they lay more outward rules and observances upon the Lord's people. “Don’t wear makeup, don’t wear shorts, don’t wear jewelry, don’t cut your hair short, don’t eat this, don’t eat that, don’t go to movies, don’t dance, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t remarry if divorced, be in church every time the doors open, submit, pay tithes…” the list goes on and on.
Don’t, don’t, don’t, and do, do, do! Yet these regulations hold brethren in states of being “babes in Christ”. Those leaders threaten if you fail to keep the rules and regulations, you will suffer great loss in an eternal hell. Teachers of law, new and old testament, want to do good but use the methods of men and the wisdom of the world to entirely discount and miss God's ability to establish HIS Life in each and every person by the Spirit.
People are going to church hoping to find some mercy, some encouragement, some understanding, some answers and solutions, because they couldn’t find it in their lives at home or work. Yet religious leaders have had little real mercy, and very limited grace. With a scant measure of wisdom, they have provided much legal interpretation of God’s viewpoints of scripture to bring due order and regulation. What an enigma! What a travesty has been the history of the Christian church!
Yet, all of creation is destined to groan with unutterable longing for the full manifestation of God in his sons and daughters.
“Behold, I make all things new!” Revelation 21:5
"For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit; in which also He went and made proclamation to the spirits now in prison, who once were disobedient, when the patience of God kept waiting in the days of Noah," 1 Peter 3:18-20 NASB
Eventually all the spirits who are now imprisoned, even in the lowest unseen parts and places of hell, will clearly hear the voice of Jesus proclaiming with divine, heavenly authority, I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW! We are now holding this truth in our hearts, believing and hoping until we see ALL is newly accomplished according to his will. God’s Spirit within our spirit brings mighty change within our soul to burn up our selfish Adamic nature in reality, releasing the mature characteristics of God’s sonship reality within us.
God is delivering His spirit to remove any religious man that keeps the law lurking in our thoughts or behavior, pulling our hearts into religious efforts of law keeping again. God’s Spirit reveals to us a recognition of who the real ANTICHRIST is! It reveals that SOMETHING OTHER THAN CHRIST is hidden in men’s inner places of the heart. Among various Christian heavens. there are most certainly many antichrists. The legalistic teachings of religious goodness lurks in the Lord's house. What good, for example, can it possibly do to focus on the world's headlines in TV and newspapers as being the apocalypse expressed in the book of Revelation?
God promises to solve the problems of his people! All our sorrow begins to flee and all our dark thinking ceases to rule us once we are made alive to the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. God has already arranged this order in our spirit so we can recognize His Kingdom truth working now within us. Divine wisdom is springing up after taking root in our hearts. Wisdom removes our selfish motivations and raises our spiritual understanding into harmony and into full agreement with His Spirit.
God's judgments today are in His house, INWARD, in our spirit and absolutely leading us to peace within our spirit and soul. God gets into the hearts of His sons, dealing with sons in judgment to mature them. He will not change His mind about what his efforts are sent to accomplish. Judgment has come to His house, which we are, to expose our moral dilemmas with His daily light that ABIDES to change and deliver us. God’s word is spiritual and alive, dealing with our inner spirit to root out any bitterness toward other people.
God does not have to kill people with atomic bombs to eliminate their iniquity. What nonsense is taught the Lord's people about a ‘one man antichrist’ that is to rise to conquer the world! We are witnessing nonsense as an all-out attack against the truths taught by His Spirit. Twisting the truth into a lie is the root cause of all iniquity within Christians. If the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is DWELLING within us, it will cause our God, a consuming fire, to purge our soul's carnal religious thinking and quicken our mortal bodies!
Our Father’s great plans and purposes for sons and daughters takes effect as He judges them mature enough to take their turn at the seat of authority. He commences to teach that wisdom which destroys the good efforts and religious works of man, reducing the authority of death by shining the brightness of his Word within our spirit:
"Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear. For our God is a consuming fire." Hebrews 12:28-29
There have been many varieties of religious insanity. The wisdom of the world has been used in church history in vain and religious ways, giving way for great religious delusions, such as picking dates for the second coming. The mind of man has mental illness beyond comprehension! Adding religion to that carnal minded nature spares it not from the classification of insanity in our world today. The vast majority of people are like the inmates of a vast asylum called ‘modern society' that are equally disturbed and in disrupted patterns of diseased delusion.
There is a universal foolishness or ‘insanity’ in the selfish mindset of the natural man in this world. Man is stuck in a worldly wisdom that is foolishness with God. The mortal, sick, warring, confused, sorrowing, imperfect, troubled children of the world are unsound of mind, no matter how educated. A man’s spirit must be awakened and renewed to recognize the authority of God’s Spirit in his inner man. To be spiritually minded is health and peace, with soundness from communion with the precious mind of our Father.
The wise man, Solomon, said,
‘For the Lord gives wisdom: out of his mouth comes knowledge and understanding. He lays up sound wisdom for the righteous: he is a buckler to them that walk uprightly. He is in the way of life that keep instruction: but he that refuses reproof erreth.’ Proverbs 2:6-7 and 10:17
‘Happy is the man that finds wisdom, and the man that gets understanding. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retains her.’” Proverbs 3:13, 18
“Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth. Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.’ Proverbs 4:5-7
The wisdom that is from above is in direct opposition to the wisdom of man. Let go of the shorelines of contentions and launch out again seeking the deep things of God. It is time we be partakers of the wonders reserved for those who love Him enough to follow on to know Him. The Lord does not call us out of religious Babylon so we might build and maintain another religious status-quo, afterward continuing to build within the in-part realm of Pentecost. He called us out to keep the Feast of Tabernacles, to feed us hidden manna from the throne in homeland heights of the New Jerusalem, spiritual Mount Zion:
"After these things I perceived, and lo! a door open in heaven, and lo! the first sound which I hear is as a trumpet speaking with me, saying, ‘Come up here! and I will be showing you what must be occurring after these things.’" Revelation 4:1 concordant
God is calling us up hither to a city that is spiritual. We need be one spirit with the inhabitants of the city of God so we might even now receive portion from the true fountain that leads us to a satisfying fullness of His Life.