The Prophetic Call pt 2

I think the best place to start searching out the character of these men would be to start with priestliness. We aren’t talking about Levites. We read in a few places in our New Testaments that God has called us to be a kingdom of priests. But what exactly is a priest? Many times we have the false idea that to be priestly we need to be dressed in robes and administering sacrifices. Jesus is our High Priest.

If we take Christ as the example, some of the logical implications that we can conclude with would be: we are to be the sacrifice, we are to intercede, we are to be (in some sense) the mediator between God and men, and we are to display to the people the difference between the clean and the profane.

We’ll begin with “we are to be the sacrifice.” You can look into the lives of others and see that it wasn’t only Jesus who laid down his life willingly. Stephen also laid down his life. Moses laid down his life. Paul laid down his life. The people Israel killed many of the prophets. But many times lying down your life isn’t necessarily dying. Lets take Moses as an example.

Moses led the people Israel through the wilderness. Before this, he lived in that same wilderness. Before that he was the prince of Egypt. There was something about the man Moses that caused all of these stages. First, he couldn’t allow his fellow kinsmen be mistreated by the Egyptians. It is true that he acted rashly, but understand the characteristic within him. There was something in the very fibers of his being that demanded there should be justice. Something within him could not stand by and allow cruelty to take place. He was willing to cast aside his place of honor for the sake of his brothers who were being persecuted.

This is critical. This is why the man in himself must be the prophet or apostle. There was something in Moses that could see past that it was wrong. That isn’t what bothered him. What bothered Moses wasn’t that this was a brother either. What bothered Moses, though he couldn’t quite explain it yet, was that an entire system had been made that degrades and robs people of their humanity. He couldn’t stand and watch that kind of mentality and action continue to propagate.

This must be our character as well if we desire to be an apostolic and prophetic Church and voice in the last days. We must be willing to even lose our lives by standing up to systems (whether businesses or governments or anything else) that get their power by oppressing. Moses didn’t know the way to do it. He started with one of the Egyptian slave drivers. God later sent him to Pharaoh.

Moses spent 40 years on the backside of the desert because of his impulse. While there he found a wife and made a family. I’m sure after 40 years Moses was feeling comfortable as a shepherd. Which, notice this detail. Moses was a shepherd. It says at the end of Genesis that Israel was given the land of Goshen because shepherds were a stench to the Egyptians. Do you see the humiliation? Moses was humbled.

As we continue through the story of Moses, we see that there is this burning bush experience. Moses turned aside to see. Many times the burning bush is used as a metaphor. It has many implications for Moses, and there is a lot to see in the context of Moses’ story. I’m also going to use it as a metaphor, for I have written elsewhere about the burning bush and the theological implications that it has. The burning bush is a symbol of anything in life that burns but is not consumed. For example, my grandfather passed away. In the death and in the circumstances of death, we find our fires. It is hard to view. It is hard to reflect and think back on it. But if we are willing to turn aside and view that bush that is burning, we will find that God can and will bring us to more depth of character.

Another example would be the Holocaust. Where was God? If we are willing to plumb those depths of all of the cruelty that the Jewish people faced, and we can find God in the midst of it, and we don’t attack God’s character, then we have come to a place where we can call that a burning bush. It takes stamina and trust that God is good. It takes a certain kind of person to probe the depths of darkness to search for the light. And indeed, when we find God (specifically the tetragrammaton) in the Old Testament, we find him in the darkness.  In the beginning, His Spirit hovers over the darkness. In Exodus he comes upon Sinai in clouds and thick darkness. In Psalm 97, clouds and thick darkness are His wardrobe. God is light, but He is found within the darkness.

If we are weak stomached and cannot turn aside to look at these dark moments, then we will never be the kind of people who are able to stomach apostolic or prophetic callings. Moses needed that kind of a characteristic already present within him before he could be sent to Pharaoh. Pharaoh is Satan. If you will be sent into the heart of hell to wrestle with those principalities and powers, then you need something more than glib clichés and Bible truths. It takes a character and stamina to wade those waters.

And this is the beginning of priestliness. That kind of character to wade those waters when others are unable is the sacrifice. Jesus was the firstborn from the dead. He was the first to taste of the resurrection because He was the first to fight the principalities and powers at their hometown. Jesus did more than take away sin on the cross. This was the full expression of Satan against God. It wasn’t the Jews who killed Jesus. It wasn’t the Romans who crucified the King of Glory. Satan poured out everything he had. Jesus laid down his life like a lamb before the slaughter – silent.

That is why we see the full expression of God in the cross. Both sides are completely in full view. You have the kingdom of darkness using force, manipulation, hate, violence, fear, intimidation, etc while God is using love, patience, grace, silence, forgiveness, and willingness. Our sacrifice isn’t necessarily that we die. We’ve already died when we accepted Christ. We live because we’ve died. Our lives should be lived as people of the resurrection. Yes I’ve failed in walking absolutely pure. That isn’t the point. The point is character. When we can stand up to those principalities and powers, though they intimidate and try to put fear in us, we continue to press onward. Though they deceive and manipulate, we do not bow our knees to their voice. Though they pour out violence (even if it is emotional or verbal violence) we give them the other cheek.

This is what it means to be priestly. We are the sacrifice, and we willingly lay down our lives. We are willing to die a thousand deaths for the sake of others. We aren’t fighting flesh and blood. Our warfare is much deeper than that. This brings me to my next place: we intercede.

If we think that intercession is prayer, we are sadly mistaken. Our spiritual warfare is our characters. We live in a way that we resemble God. That is how we fight against the principalities and powers. If prayer and worship were not the warfare, but only tools, then why would they be intercession in itself? Intercession is hearing from heaven and knowing God’s heart and manifesting it here on Earth. Intercession is displaying God to the world in a different way than spiritual warfare.

It is true to say that when we intercede we use prayer. Prayer is not excluded. The prayer must come from an obedience, though. We must first know the divine will of God. We must first hear God speak to us. If God does not speak, we do not pray. If God does not speak, we do not do anything. When God speaks, we live in the reality that it has already come to pass, even if it has not. An example of this is from the book of Nehemiah. The prophets told them that they need to rebuild the Temple. But when you read the prophets books, you find that they speak of the destruction of the Temple. So the very prophets who said to rebuild the Temple knew that there had to be something more than just the bringing back that they saw. They knew that there must still be a Messiah to build the Temple. Yet they encouraged Israel to build.

Am I making sense here? The intercession of the prophets in Nehemiah’s time was for that Heavenly Temple. They prayed for what was to come later, but encouraged and helped to build now. So they knew that God was going to send another persecution. They knew that Israel would be uprooted from the Land again. Yet they urged the building to continue. This was intercession. They heard from heaven and they did it. They prayed for the absolute fulfillment, which is to say, they prayed for the consummation of the ages. They prayed for the second coming. They prayed for the Messiah to rule and reign and set up His Temple here on Earth. This is why the book of Zechariah ends with the Feast of Tabernacles: God has “tabernacled” with man.

Intercession goes hand in hand with being mediators with men. That isn’t to say that we take the role of Jesus. We all know that there is only one mediator between mankind and God. For anyone wanting to find God we point them to Jesus. But for those who reject God, we speak on God’s behalf. Once again, this takes hearing from heaven.

The biggest role of the priest is to display the difference between the sacred and the profane – clean from unclean. It takes a certain kind of devotion for this. We need to be deep in the Word of God. We need to know it and Him better than we know our closest friends and family. We need to be able to discern the Spirit of God from other spirits. This takes devotion. The devil will quote the Bible. If we don’t know what the Bible says, we will fall under deception.

Of course, there is a difference between knowing what the Bible says and having the Bible memorized. There are people who read the Bible all the way through every month or two. They might have a lot of that Scripture memorized, but so did the Pharisees. I don’t care how much you do or don’t have memorized. What is more important is that you know God. You know His character. You know the point of what is being said. You can recognize when someone is misusing the Scripture to validate their own opinions. This is what really matters.

We need to be able to separate the precious from the vile. If we cannot discern the Spirit of God from the Khundalini spirit, then we have already failed as priests. If we cannot separate man’s opinion from what the Bible actually says (because there are a lot of evangelical crap theology opinions), then we have already failed. It’s easy to point to people like Joel Osteen or Benny Hinn or Rob Bell or anyone else that has been put on the “heretic list.” What about our own theology? Is it sound? Does it line up with everything we read in the Bible? If we read a verse or passage that disagrees with our theology, do we interpret the verse according to our theology or change our theology?

We must separate the precious from the vile, for God told Jeremiah that until he did that, he would not be God’s mouth. If God would tell someone like Jeremiah who had a better theology, understanding of God’s heart, and character than we do to separate the precious from the vile, then what shall be said of us? Shall we do less than Jeremiah and expect to get more blessed? The fact that we have comfort and he had imprisonment is in itself a testimony that we are not living as the people of God. We are something in the middle of people of the world and people of God. We have mixed far too much that we can no longer separate culture and Christianity.

This is the indictment against us. I mentioned earlier about the cross of Christ. How about I go ahead and end with it. If we think that the sin of the Jews was the death of Jesus, then we have a completely wrong mentality of what happened. It is the same thing with the Romans. If we think they crucified Christ, we have a wrong understanding. The perpetrators were the demons that have rebelled since the Garden.

That doesn’t get Israel or Rome off of the hook. Their part in it was not the sin in itself. It was only a display of the sin. Their sin is one in the same: they have rejected God. They so rejected God that when He came and walked in their midst, they found no other use for Him but to kill Him. That is their sin. We share it too. We have made an entire Christian culture around a Sunday service and sometimes a picnic or potluck afterward. We don’t have Christianity; we have Church-ianity.

Our sin that has yet to be confessed and repented for is that we take God lightly. When He says that He desires the inward parts, we think that means that we just have to “love Him with all of our heart.” We never for a moment think that it really means He does expect us to call people out on their sin. We never for a moment think that God really requires us to lay down our lives.

Our lives are too important. God requires that we should see each other daily. But how can I do that when my job requires I’m there 40 hours a week (or more), and that I need to take care of my family, and it really just makes more sense to have it on Sunday? Find another job, then. Maybe you can be a fast food worker part time. Then you’ll have more time available to give to God and His Church.

The area I live doesn’t accommodate me being able to drive and see people daily. Then move. Find another place to live. Rent an apartment where other believers are also renting and go from room to room daily. Share your things with one another. Give your money away to those who need it. “Oh, but I’ve worked hard for that money! Am I really expected to give it away? What about my retirement?”

In all things we are far too carnal. None of us have even looked up to see the bar is in Heaven, not on Earth. If we are unwilling to work less hours to spend more time with the Body of Christ, then we really aren’t Christians. And if we aren’t willing to live with less modern conveniences (like cable, smart phones, multiple cars, television, internet, etc), then we really aren’t Christian. Our devotion has gone so far, but no further. Another way to put it: we have let the part stand for the whole. Just like Ananias and Saphira brought part of the money the made for selling their home and called it the whole, we have brought some of our lives to the altar and called it the whole. God will not be mocked; a man reaps what he sows.

If our very spiritual birth was sowed in being dishonest and deceptive to hold back parts for ourselves and claim we gave God our all, then we will reap hellfire in the age to come. This is so very serious. At the very heart of being a Christian is being priestly. And at the heart o being priestly is separating the holy from the common. If we have not even begun to do that in our own lives, we cannot direct others to do so, and thus we make two-fold sons of hell.