Now let’s consider that second, man-devised pattern in light of what God’s written Word requires of all fallen human flesh. It is clear in Scripture that God requires wholehearted obedience to His living and written Word. Psalm 119 is just one example among many. God required obedience in His original Covenant with Israel as revealed through Moses in Deuteronomy, and He still requires it in the New Covenant that He made with the very same people (E.g. Mt. 5:17-20; 7:13-26; 12:46-50). In fact, God gives even more commands in the New Testament apostolic writings (1050) than He did in the Law of Moses (613)! The New Covenant unpacks, explains and fulfills what was contained in the so-called ‘Old Covenant’. So obedience to God’s living and written Word is here to stay. What is ‘Old’ or, ‘Original’, will be fulfilled to perfection in the era of the ‘New Covenant’ that God makes with the very same people…Israel and those that are grafted into her.
God didn’t receive the obedience He required of Israel in the Old Covenant. But He promises that He will receive what He requires of her in the new or restored Covenant. Ponder what God’s prophets, Jeremiah and Ezekiel wrote concerning the New Covenant era. This is what Jeremiah wrote:
Jeremiah 31:31-34
“‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,’ declares the LORD.
“‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ declares the LORD, ‘I will put My law (Torah) within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,’ declares the LORD, ‘for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.’ (Emphasis added.)
And through Ezekiel, God added these promises to Israel about the way it is going to be when the fulfillment of the New Covenant comes to pass:
Ezekiel 36:22-27
“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD, ‘It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for My holy name, which you have profaned among the nations (Gentiles) where you went. I will vindicate the holiness of My great name which has been profaned among the nations which you have profaned in their midst. Then the nations (Gentiles) will know that I am the LORD,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘when I prove Myself holy among you (Israel) in their sight. For I will take you from the nations, gather you from all the lands and bring you into your own land.
“Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. I will put My Spirit within you and cause you to walk in My statutes, and you will be careful to observe My ordinances.” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
Notice how closely interactive and intimate God promises to be with His Word’s New Covenant Jewish disciples. Is He not restoring them back to the original ‘image and likeness’ interaction with His Word from which Adam and Eve had severed themselves? Notice also that the non-Jewish disciples that will believe and repent, are also going to be grafted into Israel and included in her New Covenant with God.
This is what they can expect for themselves. God will fuse Himself into each believer, Spirit to spirit, and His Spirit will move them, by the Divine Love with which He will fill them, to obey the commands of God’s Word from within. Obedience will come willingly, from their changed, love-filled hearts, rather than by fear-inducing external pressure exerted by legalistic rules and man-made systems and terroristic threats and extortion. True obedience to God’s Word will be Spirit-empowered and Love-motivated. It will not be legislated by the regulations imposed by professional religious go-betweens. It will not be imposed by punishing emperors, kings, tyrants, governors and state religions and their hired lackeys and inquisitors and terrorists.
This is what Paul’s letter to the Ephesians described in chapters 2 and 3 and in chapter 4:14-21 and 17-25. The New Covenant allows no separation or division to exist between God, His living Word, and His obedient, Spirit-empowered Jewish and non-Jewish people (Cf. Mt. 5:17-20; Jn. 17; Rom. 2; Eph. 2). Jeremiah had prophesied the demise of the man-made system whereby a special caste of religious go-betweens would stand between God and His New Covenant Jewish people. Does this not imply that there also will be no special caste coming between God and His New Covenant non-Jewish Christian people?
The Word of God is Yeshua, (Jesus), the Messiah. Beyond a doubt, He is the most famous Jew in all of world history! He is the most renowned Rabbi of all rabbis. But He goes deeper than that. He is the living Word of God that created and sustains the entire universe! No one fulfills the Scriptural Messianic prophecies and requirements as He does. And He warns us all that the current status quo structures we all consider to be so ‘normal’ and essential…are actually temporary things that will be shaken in due time. In the future, things will not be controlled and manipulated by men, nor will they be confused and divided as we are now. The prophets have warned and told us how God is going to ‘pull the string’ and draw all those that are His, together, as one, under the absolute authority of His living Word! When we become one, there can be no strife or division! Thus when they enter the Fullness of their God-given Salvation, believing Gentiles will depend on the identification, oneness and solidarity they have with their Messiah and with the Israelites that are also identified and one with Him (Cf. Mt. 25:31-46). In the end, you will know the saved, by their oneness with Him and with each other! And that will be the True Israel that God has always intended and desired to have.
John 3:30
“He must increase, but I must decrease.”
It helps to remember that there is a huge difference between the Hebrew, Biblical mentality through which God chose to reveal Himself, and that of our modern Western, Hellenized, Greco-Roman world. For example, in our world, a man and woman are not considered to be one in marriage until after the wedding ceremony and the physical consummation of their union have taken place. But in the Biblical Hebrew world, betrothal is what makes a man and woman one. As they become engaged, they enter into a blood covenant bond and that unites them – even before their union is physically consummated! The betrothal makes them husband and wife.
Even before the second coming of our Messiah and the wedding feast of The Lamb take place, we are already one with Him because we are sealed into the New (renewed Eternal) Covenant by the Holy Spirit, and because the Son of Man is our Eternal Covenant Representative before God. So we are ‘betrothed’ to God’s living Word! That’s why Jesus said ( according to the Jewish custom in which the betrothed man leaves his intended to begin constructing living quarters for them on his father’s property, and returns for her when his father approves of his work) that He was going to prepare a place for us in His Father’s House (See Jn. 14:1-3) And since, through our oneness with His Word and Holy Spirit, we are one with God, we are also one with the Jews and non-Jews that also are one with God. This is what Eph. 2:11-16 is telling Gentile believers:
Ephesians 2:11-16
“Therefore remember that formerly you, the Gentiles in the flesh, who are called “Uncircumcision” by the so-called “Circumcision,” which is performed in the flesh by human hands – remember that you were at that time separate from Christ, excluded from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
“But now in Christ Jesus you who formerly were far off (from Israel and her commonwealth and covenants) have been brought near (to Israel and her commonwealth and covenants) by the blood of Christ. For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity, which is the Law of commandments contained in (man-made rabbinical) ordinances, so that in Himself He might make the two into One New Man, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the (man-made sectarian and ethnic) enmity.” (Emphasis and amplification added.)
In the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit is here to equip all disciples without exception, to obey and fulfill what fallen flesh ignored and violated in the Original Covenant. God Himself will equip us to respond to and interact with His Word in the ‘image and likeness’ perfection of what He originally intended us to be. Now there will be no separation or opposition between God and His royal, New Covenant priesthood. The living Word and His Jewish and non-Jewish New Covenant disciples (New Covenant ‘Jewtiles’) will mediate, as one Body – between God and the pagan Gentile world! (1 Pet. 2:9). Christ and His crucified, Spirit-filled disciple Body will minister to God personally…face to face with no division whatsoever between them (Cf. Heb 4:14-16).
But such supernatural New Covenant union is only possible if each one of us believes in and is intimately connected to the Reality of the Resurrection Presence of the Son of Man. Once we’re truly united with Him, His perfect, God-obeying Human character and disposition should begin to appear within and among us. But as long as we remain mentally and emotionally separated from our Head, nothing else can work properly; there can be no real, authentic, integrated and synchronized Body, as long as the members remain severed from the Head, they cannot truly be His members! In that case, the Life, Nature, Character and Disposition of our Head cannot abide and work from within them and reveal Him through their actions, reactions and interactions.
Therefore, there can be no substitute for God’s living Word Himself! No church organization, no group of men, no created go-between and no man-devised theology can take the place of the risen Lord’s Perfect Presence. Without their Head, the intended members will continue to succumb to the genetic defect inherent in fallen, Sin-corrupted human nature. Thus, just like the self-adoring people of Babel that God separated from one another, self-adoring religious people also continue to fragment and separate from one another in disobedience to God’s Blood Covenant commandments.
We All Suffer From That ‘Genetic Defect’
This chronic tendency to separate is a symptom of that original ‘decapitation’ the human race suffered when Adam and Eve rejected God’s living Word and became radically independent agents. That decapitation killed us spiritually, as well as physically. So, to say the least, that state of decapitation creates a ‘genetic defect’ in fallen Sin-corrupted human nature. The decapitation killed us. Thus whatever we try to originate in that state will also be dead and fruitless.
Decapitated fallen flesh strives to maintain distance from God. It craves radical independence, autonomy and a self-actualizing existence apart from its Creator. Decapitated men create myriads of false, substitute gods and religions of their own liking. They devise them in their imaginations, making such gods in their own image and likeness. And that is why even after men intend to surrender to God’s real Word, but have not yet renewed their minds, they remain rebellious, worldly, carnal and chronically at odds with God’s commands and with each other. And that is what they call their, ‘walk with God’. But notice the logic by which they operate: If it’s okay to live at a distance from God’s Word, it’s okay to pull away from everything else as well. The radically independent, ‘I’ll do it my way’ maverick mentality remains intact within them. And so that is the cause of their underlying trait, the train of chronic strife and divisiveness so prevalent in this fallen, humanistic, Sin-filled world. Even after such people decide to become ‘religious’, they cannot change. Thus they continue to pursue their sectarian ways and divide and split and divide some more (Cf. 1 Cor. 1-4).
True citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven remain united by nature, by the nature of the Life of God’s Word that is free to live and operate within them all. And because they believe and submit to God and His ways, they honor and preserve their God-made union, rather than preserve the things that they formerly allowed to divide them. The life of God’s Word unites people to God, and to one another. Because they are one with the Word, they can abide as one with each other, naturally and easily, just as the members of any healthy living body do. They can love and serve their Lord and Master, not merely in theory, or through religious ritualism… but as He actually abides and operates from within each one of their Blood Covenant brothers and sisters! That’s why the Holy Spirit says this to all New Covenant disciples in training:
Colossians 3:1-4
“Therefore if you have been raised up with Christ, keep seeking the things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then you also will be revealed with Him in glory!”
And in 1 Timothy 2:5-6, the Holy Spirit teaches:
“For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all, the testimony given at the proper time.”
And He commands His disciples to follow these orders:
Romans 12:1-5
“Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove (actually demonstrate) what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. For through the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think more highly of himself than he ought to think; but to think so as to have sound judgment, as God has allotted to each a measure of faith. For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. ” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
The Word of God made flesh, is our ALL in All
What God required in the Original Covenant with Israel, concerning the living Word of God, can only be properly observed and fulfilled in the New Covenant by our Messiah (Christ), the living Word of God, living and working as one with His disciples, through the Power of God’s Holy Spirit. We’ll have true oneness with God…if we identify and bond with our Master and come as close to Him mentally and emotionally, as He has already identified and bonded with us spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. If we allow the Authority of God’s Word and the Power of His Spirit to move us and change us, it will happen. He will form the Living Messiah in us!
Galatians 4:18-19
“But it is good always to be eagerly sought in a commendable manner, and not only when I am present with you. My children, with whom I am again in labor until Christ is formed in you…” (Emphasis added.)
1 Peter 2:24
“…He Himself bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.”
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at the alternate pattern that Adam and Eve came up with in the Garden when they fell into the state of Sin. What did they do? They created separation between themselves and the authority of God’s living Word. The lie of the Serpent that they believed caused them to pull away from God’s Word. Thus the Serpent decapitated them. After that they felt compelled to try to hide from Him behind something created that they devised for themselves…fig leaves. But God rejected what they tried to do, and supplied a true and proper Heavenly covering for them…His own living Word!
As God attempted to reunite Israel with His living Word, some of them refused to believe, trust and obey. When God’s Word revealed Himself to them at Mt. Sinai, His awesome Majesty proved to be too much. So they went back to the alternate substitute pattern of Adam and Eve. They too created distance and shunned the original image and likeness bonding and intimacy God originally envisioned and created us to share with Him. God intended to bring His original ‘Follow Me’ pattern forward and restore it to the human race through His Servant, Israel. Ponder what He said to them just before appearing to the nation at Mt. Sinai:
Exodus 19:5-6
“Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice (My Word) and keep My Covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel.” (Emphasis added.)
God was ‘proposing marriage’ to the entire nation! All of Israel was to become one with His Word. Thereafter, they would mediate before Him on behalf of the rest of the world! But their obedience to this revelation and the commandments that came with it, would determine whether or not they would be willing to carry out this awesome commission.
So now, let’s see what actually happened in Exodus 20:18-20. Israel came up with an alternate plan of its own. They resorted to the plan Adam and Eve used as a substitute for what God has always desired:
“All the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance. Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die!’
“Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin.’” (Emphasis added.)
This inherited tendency to back away from God’s living Word, is in all Sin-corrupted, fallen human flesh. At the heart of it is a rebellious spirit of disobedience to God’s Word. The disobedience in us drives us to love and desire Sin! Thus we create distance between ourselves and our Creator and Life Source. And that is what drives our religious flesh to devise systems that insert all manner of created things, books, events, music, rituals, organizations, and professional human go-betweens that continually stand between us and God Himself. But religious or not, that radically independent behavior is a symptom of the original Sin into which Eve and Adam fell. It is fallen flesh, operating in a religious disguise. It is the same thing that prevented Israel from fulfilling her original God-given purpose…that same fear and mistrust of God that drove Adam and Eve in the Garden. It is still in us and it persists to this day.
After Sinai, that original reaction became a permanent habit and mindset. The former slaves of the Exodus developed it into what we might call, the ‘go to synagogue’ pattern. God’s living Word is meant to be our one and only Head. But disobedient sons of Adam keep rejecting Him. Instead of submitting to His direct interactive authority over us, we ignore the entreaties of Moses and insist on having other fallen, Sin-corrupted men just like ourselves, to stand between us and God’s living Word, serving as ‘substitute heads’.
But God never gives up on us. He kept sending His living Word after the Israelites and the rest of the world. The Word keeps trying to reconnect with us and live among us. He did it with Abraham, Joseph, Daniel and other true, Word-obedient Israelites mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures. And He sent His living Word back to His chosen people as an infant, born to a Jewish virgin. And after His death on the cross He came again…through the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit on what Christians call the Feast of Pentecost. Many assume that the feast mentioned in Acts was a radical new departure, a cut-off point that ushered in a brand new ‘genesis’. So they call it, ‘The Birthday of the Church.’
But that is certainly not how the Messiah of Israel and His first century Jewish disciples were seeing it. To them, it was an ancient Israelite anniversary day that Scripture commanded them to observe. It was the celebration of God’s Biblically-mandated festival of Shavuot (Weeks). They had been celebrating it for centuries. It was the anniversary of Israel’s national encounter with God’s living Word at Sinai in the time of Moses (Cf. Ex. 20). On that day God revealed His living Word to the entire nation and gave disciple-training commandments meant to teach them to abide with and to obediently interact with His living Word! But because Israel grossly violated their Covenant with God, through idolatry with the ‘golden calf’, Moses shattered the tablets on which God had written His Law and three thousand rebellious Israelites were struck dead!
Then God wrote His commanements on a second set of tablets (Deuteronomy…second law). And Moses recorded God’s teaching, instructions and laws in the book of the Torah that he called, ‘Devarim’ (Words). So the Acts 2 happenings were taking place on the Israelite anniversary of Shavuot, that came a few weeks after the Messiah’s Death, Resurrection and Ascension. And that was believed by Israel to be the anniversary of the day that God gave the Torah to them at Mt. Sinai, centuries before.
The First Fruits of the New Covenant
On this anniversary feast, the Holy Spirit brought forward the dismal failure that took place between God and Israel in the Original Covenant…and applied Yeshua’s redemption to that awful event in Israel’s sinful past. He transformed it into God’s glorious New Covenant union fulfillment that He had always wanted to have with His Bride, Israel. On the first Shavuot, God, through His living Word (living Torah) gave the written Torah to His people. But, like Adam, they put something created, in place of God’s living Word and chose to remain ‘decapitated’.
But on this post-Ascension Shavuot, God’s living Torah came to Israel once more…in Fire…through the Holy Spirit! Once more, God restored His long-desired oneness with Israel through the 120 Spirit-filled Jewish disciples. So, through these Israelite believers, God’s betrothed was reconnected to her true ‘Head’…to God’s living Torah…in spirit and in truth! His life came alive within their flesh, by the power of the Holy Spirit! Now, after dying to their former decapitated lives, these 120 Jewish disciples became brand new creations…the ‘first fruits’ of Israel’s New Covenant fulfillment era. They began to transform into the image and likeness of God’s living Word, for in truth, His risen Presence was alive and working within them! And through the obedience-testimony they began to give to their risen Lord before their amazed Jewish brethren, God regenerated three thousand other believing Israelites that had gathered in Jerusalem from around the whole Mediterranean region to celebrate the feast! They heard the testimonies of the 120, and joined them in believing and recognizing and embracing Yeshua…their long-awaited Messiah! So, what was lost to Israel’s unbelief and rebellion at Sinai, was restored through her faith at this anniversary feast in the first century.
On that awesome day of Israel’s New Covenant fulfillment, the betrothed Israelite Bride of God’s living Word…started to come back to Him. He who is the Source of Life ‘breathed’ His Spirit into those 3,000 obedient Israelites and non-Jewish proselytes. God’s Chosen People started to enter their New Covenant with God, and God was bringing them out of Death, and into His Eternal Life. Thus it can be said that Israel started to be ‘born again’, spiritually regenerated, thanks to the fulfillment of the New Covenant promises God had made to them earlier and was now fulfilling for them.
Thus…to the Messiah and His original Jewish disciples, that day was not the birthday of a strange new ‘Gentile Church’! It was the dawn of the long-awaited, ‘New Covenant Fulfillment of Israel’! And from that day and for some time to come, this ‘coming back to life’ was an almost entirely Jewish phenomenon. Through these Jewish disciples of God’s living Word, Israel began to re-connect with God – Spirit to spirit, by the thousands! Throughout the first 9 chapters of Acts, God’s New Covenant interaction was with the Jews first. And only several years after that awesome beginning, did God begin to allow Gentile believers to be grafted into the spiritual commonwealth of His New Covenant Israel in great numbers (Cf. Acts 10; Eph. 2).
Nevertheless, that old human genetic defect of creating separation from God’s living Word, was, and still is, embedded within all human flesh. So it continued to reappear among the early New Covenant believers. By the third and fourth centuries CE, after the influence of the original Jewish apostles and the non-Jewish New Covenant disciples that believed their testimonies had faded, non-Jewish Christendom grew to be an overwhelming majority. And, thanks to the pagan emperor Constantine, who in his later life ‘converted’ to ‘Christianity’, as he understood it in its Roman Catholic form, enormous changes began to take place. To consolidate and better control his newly-won empire, Constantine declared the entire Roman Empire to be ‘Christian’, and so he forced enormous changes upon believers and non-believers alike. What had originally been a work of the Holy Spirit, transformed into a man-made structure that was modeled after the Roman Imperial government with all of its pomp and worldly glory. Constantine then created a new, ‘Jewless’ ecclesiastical infrastructure that was backed and enforced by his military might. And that shortly developed a brand new, alien spirit and lifestyle that was government sanctioned and imposed by the man-appointed ecclesiastical authorities.
Non-Jewish Church leaders, who were now fully under Constantine’s control. No longer were they to be led by the Sword of the Spirit; now they were kept in submission and governed by the military swords of Constantine. And thanks to his deep spirit of Anti-Semitism, believers were separated from the Jewish people and from the Jewish Messianic believers that were their own brothers. And they began to forsake the Hebrew, Torah-based Biblical roots of the Faith. Thus Christendom devised its own version of the ‘go to synagogue’ pattern and the Western, Greco-Roman ‘go to church’ pattern emerged.
But after many centuries of that, God still refuses to change. He is still intent on bringing the original, pre-fall image and likeness intimacy forward, to restore it. He continues to insist on having that intimate closeness with His Word’s disciples and He won’t back off until He gets what He wants!
But why is God so adamant? Why is the ‘Follow and Abide with Me’ pattern of His living Word so important? It is important because only Yeshua can be our Righteousness. Only this intensely intimate level of abiding union and personal interaction with Him will be able to cleanse and purify fallen human flesh enough to make us righteous and worthy to stand in God’s awesome Presence without being struck dead! Only the life of the risen Messiah flowing into us and through us, is pure and righteous enough to equip us to function as God’s royal New Covenant priesthood! And that precious Life can only be imparted to us by the Power of God’s own Holy Spirit! Nothing that is created, nothing human, can substitute for this. God is not content with just the Israelite tribe of Levi serving as His priesthood. All of Israel is called to be His priesthood! And His Living Word is to be our Eternal High Priest and Messiah King. And, in the end, that is exactly how it is going to be!
1 Peter 2:9
“But you are (all) a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of Darkness into his wonderful Light (to the entire world).” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
So when the Lord summons Jews and Gentiles of today to ‘Follow’ Him, He puts us all into a crisis situation just like He did Israel’s first Exodus generation. (Cf. Heb. 4) They were first; now it’s our turn. Now we must choose. Will we allow God’s Word to get very, very close to us, until we are one with our Lord and Master, or…will we also decide to back away and create space between Him and us? Ultimately, backing away ends in a total eternal separation from God. But if we submit to the Word’s Authority, He will burn the sinful dross of radical independence out of us and absolutely sanctify and prepare us for what is coming by becoming our new and eternal Life, HIMSELF!
So what happens after He calls you, will depend on how you respond to His summons. You will transform into His image and likeness, or, you will pull away and hide in the Darkness (Cf. Jn. 3:19-21). If you surrender completely, you will experience the needed depths of repentance and sanctification. Our Master will redeem and deliver you from the coils of the Serpent. And He will make you His own possession, His image and likeness, and create astounding transformational changes in your mind, will, affections and behavior.
If the Holy Spirit can penetrate you and abide and begin to work or ‘knead’ the life, nature, character and disposition of God’s living word into you, He will make you worthy and able to stand in God’s holy Presence. Then God will regard you…and when He does He will see…His Living Word’s image and likeness! When we’re one with God’s living Word, Yeshua, He serves as our true, one and only God-given Mediator and High Priest who, with the Holy Spirit, intercedes on our behalf before the Father. And as He does that in us, and then…through us…He melts away our hard-heartedness. Our radically independent tendencies die as He merges and bonds us into one New Man in Messiah. Then our eternal Head is able to reach out to the people around us and produce His fruit of salvation…to His Father’s eternal Glory.
The Status Quo Is Temporary
God will keep His Covenant with us…as much as our distance from Him will allow. Distance is what made it necessary for Him to deal with ancient Israel almost exclusively through human go-betweens… prophets, priests, kings, sages and rabbis. And distance made it necessary for Him to deal with Christians through professional ecclesiastics… popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, ministers and various denominational organizations, functionaries and para-church ministries.
But any man or woman that would dare put himself or herself across as a representative of God had better be an authentic disciple of God’s Word! Such people must be true servants of God as required by Ezek. 34. They dare not presume to stand before the people of God…in His place! They must not dare to add to or subtract from, God’s written Word. Nor should they dare make a self-serving ego-boosting business enterprise empire for themselves out of the Gospel, profiting from the Lord’s agony and the Redemption that He paid for in full and gave freely to the whole world. True servants of God’s Word strive always to lead people back to God by connecting their minds and hearts personally to His living Word. Never do they exploit God’s people, or make them dependent upon themselves or their man-made systems. True servants obey their Master’s ‘Follow Me’ pattern themselves and allow the others to watch them do it. In that way the others can learn the pattern and begin to follow it as well. True servants strive to reconnect everyone that God entrusts to their care…directly to God’s Word and Holy Spirit. They demonstrate by their personal example, how to live and interact and ‘walk before’ God as personally, intimately and wholeheartedly as Moses described in Genesis through Deuteronomy.
When our Master returns to Earth in the splendor of His glorious risen Humanity and awesome Holy Righteousness, the entire world will experience enormous, gut-wrenching, shocking changes (See Rev. 1:12-20). The false, divisive, clergy vs. laity, Nicolaitan caste system will vanish in the fulfillment era of the New Covenant. But at present, many are brainwashed and conditioned to think that the clergy/laity system is ‘normal’. But separation from God’s Word is what makes such a thing ‘normal’. That system forces us to maintain a lifestyle of personal and corporate division and separation from our Head and from each other! So we keep training and forcing new generations of clerical go-betweens to shoulder the responsibility of standing before us in God’s place so we won’t have to deal directly with God ourselves. We tolerate hearing professional go-betweens ramble on before us, talking about God…so we won’t have to allow God to get close enough to pierce, penetrate and impregnate our hearts Himself…and examine and go over every inch of us with His Word, revealing Himself to us, and in us, and through us, as He really is! That would require is to forsake our pet preferences and crucify our sectarian tendencies and divisive attitudes. And it would cause enormously deep, radical changes to take place within our hearts. And that is something that goes much deeper and further than most decapitated humans are willing to dare to go.
Please do not underestimate the ‘genetic defect’ that is in all fallen human flesh. Our DNA contains the virus of ‘radical independence’ within it. And as we have mentioned, that genetic ‘distance from God’s Word’ defect wounded the Church and clearly manifested itself during the second, third and fourth centuries. An unholy ‘marriage’ took place between Constantine’s government that controlled the Roman Empire, and the leadership of the Church. Constantine’s Roman government absorbed and began to dominate the leaders of the Lord’s Body on Earth. That power-grabbing emperor took effective control of the organized, clergy-driven Church. And people were kept separated from God’s living and written Word by the dominant clergy. For centuries, the common people were kept illiterate and deprived of having the Light that comes from God’s written Word. Christendom lost its awareness of and dependence on, God’s Holy Spirit who had been given to us to make God’s living and written Word real and alive and present and active within us.
Separation from the Written Word Ushered in Dark Ages
So Christians slipped back into doing what most of their Jewish elder brothers had done. They too maintained distance from the Living God. Just as the rabbinical system dominated Judaism, so too did the clergy system begin to dominate Christianity. So naturally, the manifest Presence and Power of the risen Lord diminished greatly over the earth. Due to that gruesome ‘Decapitation’, the Serpent’s Darkness engulfed the world to such an extent, that even secular historians call that era, ‘The Dark Ages’.
So today, people that are born into and inherit that clergy-dominated system are habitual strangers to the living Word of God. They do not know Him and He does not know (pierce, penetrate and impregnate) them. In place of living by and from His indwelling, Spirit-imparted Life, they become intimately attached to and and try to feed and dependent upon human functionaries, religious movements, theologies, man-made organizations, and even digitalized devices that tell them many things ABOUT God, that may or may not come from God’s written Word. But these practices serve to keep people separated from God’s Holy Spirit, and therefore the Spirit is not able to make His Living Word real and alive and fruitful in the midst of His people. This is why very few of us ever learn to abide with and interact with our risen Lord Himself. Thus, God’s living Word can’t teach and train us to interact with Him as His personal disciples. And therefore, He cannot transform us from within…by becoming our new and eternal Life, Himself!
Instead of being willing to come into His perfectly Righteous Life, decapitated people by the millions expect Him to drop what He was sent to do, and come into their Sin-corrupted, dormant, organized religious lives and agendas, instead. For centuries we have relied on our inherited ‘go to synagogue’ and ‘go to church’ patterns, thinking this is what God wants from us. And billions of people do not even do that! And because we have not been trained to be walking temples that contain and reveal the Presence of God, the unbelieving world around us has become extremely jaded and conditioned to total unbelief and God-lessness, thanks to the self-centered demeanor and spiritual powerlessness of the so-called ‘believers’. The unbelievers watch us and naturally assume that at most, God must be some kind of impersonal force…something so vague, distant, ethereal and unattainable as to be utterly irrelevant!
People that do not know Scripture assume God’s people are supposed to be this way. So, amid the world’s spiritual starvation, myriads of religious people remain content, self-satisfied and comfortable. If they pay casual occasional visits to God in a designated religious building, or perform some perfunctory rituals, they feel ‘spiritual’ and assume that their responsibility to God is fulfilled. But how can those things ever take the place of communing with the indwelling risen Lord Himself…and learning to live as one with HIM, and derive everything FROM Him?
Are You Keeping God at Arm’s Length?
God is Almighty. But He will not force Himself upon you. He will only interact with you as you allow Him entry. If you allow the Authority of God’s Word and the Power of His Holy Spirit to rule and preside over your heart and home, He will transform your marriage and family. He will govern and guide your imaginations, choices, decisions and relational interactions. He will guide your steps and personally see you through every challenge and difficulty of life. And if He really becomes your indwelling Life, you will no longer be the selfish, self-centered, rebellious, manipulative, predatory and self-destructive independent agent you started out to be. Your children will see His Reality in you…and will tend to follow in your footsteps. They will begin to follow Him, even as they see you following Him.
So beloved, what should we do? Should we dare to allow God to deal with our ‘genetic defect’? Or should we react the way most Israelites did at Mt. Sinai and create and maintain distance for Him? Many millions are perfectly content with the time-honored system of hiding from God behind a wall of rabbis, priests, ministers, imams and swamis and lapping up all the ‘head knowledge’ they can get from this or that created intermediate source. But very few are actually hungry and eager to follow the Ultimate Rabbi of all rabbis – to connect personally with the Word of God Himself, the way Peter, James, John, Martha, Mary, Phillip, Stephen, Paul, Barnabas, Silas, Cornelius and many other original New Covenant disciples were taught to do!
Must We Be Forced to Choose?
What about you; will you allow Him to get as close to you as He wants? Will you allow Him to pierce, penetrate and impregnate you so deeply that it will be normal for you to hear His voice and feel His ‘nudges’ for yourself…and bear His supernatural fruit as He produces it in and through your life?
Beloved, our Master has come to bring us into His Abrahamic Blood Covenant Family! He is not here to ‘come into your life’. We are required to come into His eternal Life and learn His ways and walk in them. So we must learn to remain connected to Him and to each other on a corporate, Blood Covenant basis. To be His is not merely an individualistic matter. It is a Blood Covenant Corporate Family matter! We need to learn to live and operate as a Body… HIS BODY! We must allow Him to teach us to be one with every one of our brothers and sisters, for His sake. He must have a Body on Earth. And we need to learn to be that Body, under His Headship! It will not do for us to remain as the rabble of religious individualists that most of us currently are. We need to learn to worship God as a family and enjoy ongoing to the death loyalty and Spirit-empowered fellowship with our brothers and sisters in the Faith. And so, we desperately need to ask God to raise up and develop faithful, Christ-embodying apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers in our midst. Spiritual ‘parents’ that will keep us all continually plugged into our Master’s risen, indwelling Presence (Cf. 2 Cor. 4; Eph. 4), so He can show us and teach us how He wants us to embody Him to the world around us.
But none of that will ever happen unless we are all first truly, authentically, permanently united spiritually, mentally and emotionally, with our Head! So if you are placed in a position where you must choose between the Lord (your Head) and some kind of man-controlled religious system that keeps getting in the way of and preventing your union with Him, choose Him! Remove anything that keeps trying to separate you from Him. Our Lord must have a Body that is really His, and not someone else’s. He must be our personal Head and we must learn to become directly connected to Him and learn to draw from His Life so that we can embody Him as one of His personal living members with no gap or separation between us.
We can’t afford to hide from Him behind ‘fig leaves’. We can’t afford to be separated from Him by walls of distraction and hyper religious activities and bondage to created gadgets and programs and human go-between gurus in highly orchestrated, soulish, manipulative, Word-ignoring, man-made institutions. To do that is to abide and lurk in ‘The Darkness’. If we ignore or try to change the Word’s ‘Follow Me’ pattern, we will not be His image and likeness. Instead, we will be, as the Lord Himself warned some so-called ‘believers’ in Rev. 3:17, ‘wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked’. In that case, what good will our religiosity do us, or anyone else?
The original thousands of Jewish and non-Jewish New Covenant disciples mentioned in the Book of Acts had a lifestyle with the indwelling presence of their Master that predated and was unlike all the religious stuff we’re so used to relying on today. Their lifestyle with the Lord was ‘home-based’. It followed closely, the pattern Moses gave in Deuteronomy 6:4-9. They didn’t limit their interaction with Him to occasional visits in special designated synagogue buildings. And they most certainly didn’t have designated ‘church’ buildings! (Such things did not emerge until somewhere in the third century A.D!) The Lord lived in the hearts and daily lives and interactions of His disciples. The people were His Temple! Wherever they went, He went with them. They were not ‘God-Seekers’; they were ‘God-Bringers’! And thus they were always subject to His close scrutiny and supervision. (To see a very sobering instance of this level of intimacy, read the first 11 verses of Acts 5 and you’ll see what we mean.) And, no matter how numerous they became in any one region, no matter how large of a city they were in, there was always only one Church, only one Family, the one Body of Christ… in each city!
The more you open yourself up to God’s living Word and Holy Spirit, the more will God test, correct, discipline and transform the inner workings of your heart. Remember: we are designed and intended to be His image and likeness! We are commissioned to be God’s holy nation on Earth and the New Covenant royal priesthood that ministers directly to His awesome Presence (Cf. Ex. 19:5-6; Deut. 10:8-9; Col. 3:1-4; 2 Pet. 2:9)! Our risen Lord is here to restore us to true image and likeness of God humanity…to make us into His own Living Temple! So we must never allow anything into our hearts that would create separation or blockage and division between us and our Messiah! He is our Eternal High Priest. Only He is our true, God-given Mediator! And we must learn to stand with Him before God and mediate with Him on behalf of the unbelieving world. So the time for our disciple-training ‘Boot Camp’ has arrived.
There Are No ‘Exempt Civilians’ in the New Covenant
The ‘go-between’ system we’re so used to, unconsciously programs ‘laymen’ to see themselves and think about themselves as ‘exempt civilians’. The ‘spiritual stuff’ is for the ‘clergy progessionals’. But the laymen are supposed to be ‘practical-minded’ and handle the affairs of ‘the world’. But that’s a far cry from what the Word of God tells us:
1 John 2:15-17
“Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.”
Maintaining distance from God in our minds, wills and affections creates a spiritual vacuum that is quickly filled by alien, ungodly things. Distance from His Word keeps us spiritually dim and weak and mentally and emotionally hardened toward God and what is His. In that state, instead of shining the blazing Light of our Master’s Truth and Reality into the Serpent’s Darkness, we allow the world to suck us into its Darkness! And we begin more and more to resemble the world, instead of transforming it. We settle for thinking, acting, reacting and interacting in worldly ways, like the people around us. Thus we think and act as if we were, ‘exempt civilians’, shunning the responsibility of wearing our Messiah’s ‘uniform’ and carrying out His orders in the midst of the spiritual combat that goes on everywhere on Earth. We refuse to admit that we are directly ‘under God’s orders’. Instead we think of that as being the job of the religious ‘professionals’ and that we have no direct, personal responsibility to stand before God, as His priests, and speak and bless others in His Name. In this system, laymen don’t do such things, the clergy is supposed to do handle all of that. And so, nothing of any true world-transforming substance takes place.
So realize this: if the Lord has called you to follow Him as His disciple, you are most definitely not called to be a ‘lay man’ or ‘lay woman’. Realize that as long as God, in His mercy, allows the world to ‘ride high’ and enjoy ‘perfect 10’ standing, materialistic ‘perks’ and Law-less sensual pleasures with apparent impunity, the Lord’s disciples will come across as fools and thorns in everyone’s flesh. (Cf. 2 Cor. 4) But when God begins to test, judge and separate people amid enormous Psalm 91 type disasters and catastrophes, the world will see disciples in an altogether different light. The enormous edge that their closeness to the Master of the Universe gives them will become very apparent. And people around them will suddenly recognize this and strive to benefit from their supernatural status, authority, wisdom and ability. People will realize that the Lord and Master of all Creation is leading them safely through the demonic mine fields. So they will cluster around the disciples, like frightened, desperate and very teachable children.
Ponder what the Gospels of Mark, chapter 4:33-34, and Matthew 13:10-17 have to say about the difference in the way the Word of God related to the distant, ‘go to synagogue’ multitudes of His day, and those precious disciples that lived and interacted with Him, day and night:
Mark 4:33-34
“With many such parables He was speaking the word to them (the multitudes that kept their distance), so far as they were able to hear it; and He did not speak to them without a parable; but He was explaining everything privately to His own disciples.” (Emphasis added.)
Matthew 13:10-17
“And the disciples came and said to Him, ‘Why do You speak to them in parables?’
“Jesus answered them, ‘To you (who live with Me as My image and likeness) it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them (that keep their distance) it has not been granted. For whoever has (Me), to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have (Me), even what he has shall be taken away from him.
“Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,
“You will keep on hearing, but will not understand; you will keep on seeing but will not perceive; for the heart of this people has become dull; with their ears they scarcely hear, and they have closed their eyes, otherwise they would see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and return, and I would heal them!’ [Cf. Isa. 6]
“But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
If we allow distance from God’s Word to be normal, it will cost us and our children dearly. The nearer we get to the turbulent, chaotic Last Days fulfillment of God’s prophecies and promises, the less equipped and prepared will we be to deal with the tsunami of troubles the world will surely face. And when it’s time to give an accounting to God, this is what He will ask:
“How much of My Son (My Living Word made flesh) is in you? Is He revealing Himself from within your flesh? Have you allowed Him to pierce, penetrate and impregnate your innermost being with His Perfect Life and Righteousness? Are you bearing the Fruit that only He, living in you, can produce? Did you allow Him to connect you to Me and apply His perfect finished redemptive work to your spirit, soul and body…IN PERSON?
If My living Word knows you intimately, I know you…for I and My Word are one. But if My Son does not know you…then neither do I!”
Rabbi Yeshua (Jesus) gave the following warning to His fellow Israelites. But it is also a warning that the Lord of Creation gives to all men, of all time:
Matthew 7:13-29
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits.
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’
“And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; DEPART FROM ME, YOU WHO PRACTICE LAWLESSNESS (Torah-lessness).’
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell – and great was its fall.’
“When Jesus had finished these words, the crowds were amazed at His teaching; for He was teaching them as one having authority, and not as their scribes.” (Emphasis added.)
Beloved, if you are called to be His disciple, don’t be afraid of suffering the displeasure of men; fear the displeasure of God! Don’t cower in morbid self-centered isolation. This is not going to be about you and what you think you can and cannot do. Everything God requires of us poor fallen humans is so far beyond us that it’s ludicrous to imagine we should try to meet His standards or be ‘like Jesus’. This is all about the living Word of God being Himself from within us! Only the Son of Man can obey Father’s commands and meet His standards of righteousness properly. So don’t wallow in self-pity or false humility. Declare bankruptcy once and for all! Stop creating distance. Present yourself to the Lord Jesus and open yourself up to Him and submit to whatever He has been sent to be for you and do to you, in you and through you. He will be and do whatever His Father sent Him to do, no more, no less. So allow God’s precious living Word to penetrate and exert His awesome authority and the infinite Power of His Holy Spirit to work in you and through you!
And REJOICE! For you have the privilege of abiding with and ‘marinating’ yourself in His awesome Righteous Perfection. Rest in His All-Sufficient Eternal Perfection. Draw from His Eternal Triumph. He crushed the Serpent’s head once and for all, and He has blasted the powers of Darkness into total submission. He is here to transmit His utterly perfect Righteousness into you to deliver you from yourself and your abysmal weakness and inadequacies. He’ll take you safely around every satanic trap you encounter in this poor, sad, dying world. Abide with Him…under the shadow of His wings! (Mt. 23:37-39) He will cleanse and purify you with His precious atoning, redeeming Blood. And He will personally teach you how to…Follow Him! Remember what He said to His Father:
Matthew 11:25-30
“At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants. Yes, Father, for this way was well-pleasing in Your sight. All things have been handed over to Me by My Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.
“‘Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.
“Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For (when you learn to draw from the Perfection of My Finished Work, & allow Me to reveal it to you and through you) My yoke is easy and My burden is light!” (Amplification and emphasis added.)