17 Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.
18 No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power (exousia) to lay it down, and I have power (exousia) to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.
(KJV)
In our previous articles on the subject of Empowerment we have endeavored to stress the difference between the two main Greek words used in the scriptures for “power”, Dunamis and Exousia. Dunamis is defined as raw power or force. Exousia is defined as invested authority or the right to act. This study is dealing mainly with the Greek word exousia, since our articles are not only about power but how we are to be empowered by the Lord Jesus to call upon the dunamis of God with delegated exousia.
We have stated in our study that there is only one true, supreme power and that is the power of God. Rom. 13:1. All other powers were created by Him and for Him. There are many, many delegated powers. Just as in earth we see many levels of authority and rule, so it is in heaven.
Col 1:16-17
16 For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers (exousia): all things were created by him, and for him:
17 And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (KJV)
As this verse so wonderfully states it, the structure of the powers and authorities in both heaven and earth is diverse and complex and each has been set in their place by God Almighty. He alone has given them their place in the heavens and earth, both good and evil, dark and light, death and life. All have been created by and for God and indeed, they still consist and have their dominion by His divine will and purpose.
God uses everything for His purpose. There is nothing that stands by it’s own design. All things are subject to the ultimate authority of the universe. God alone crowns dominions with invested authority and God alone strips them of that authority. They rise and fall at His command and nothing will deny Him of His will to be done. He is the potter and all else is clay. There would be no death if God did not create it and give it power. Neither would there be evil, or darkness, or an evil one if God did not specifically design it and clothe it with an invested authority.
Having said this, let me say that all power that is invested power is limited and subject to God’s will and, in the ages to come, will be brought under His government and will do homage to His dominion. This final, conquering act is stated in the scriptures as “the times of restitution of all things”.
Acts 3:19-21
19 Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord;
20 And he shall send Jesus Christ, which before was preached unto you:
21 Whom the heaven must receive until the times of restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began.(KJV)
For those of us that have heard the word of reconciliation we have become familiar with the concept that all men will be saved.
1 Tim 2:3-6
3 For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour;
4 Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.
5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
6 Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time. (KJV)
There is a further step to be acknowledged in this redemption, one that is seldom mentioned because of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that arises from those that cannot bear the thought. This thought is that God will not only limit Himself to the power to save all men, but He will ultimately redeem all things. Let me try to explain my position on this. To reconcile something means to make up the lack of the object to be reconciled. We do this all the time in our check books. If our balance in our check book does not match the balance of our bank statement then we must either add or subtract from the checkbook to match the bank statement. The most important part of this analogy is that it doesn’t matter how far off I am in my own summation of my worth, my actual worth is what my bank shows.
In this light, it doesn’t matter what we think of ourselves in our worthiness of God’s grace and salvation, His statement of reconciliation is final and true. Our thinking must be changed to match His thinking. He thinks we are perfect. He thinks we deserve the gift of His Son’s life to make up our lack, and He has deposited into our account the funds to pay our debt to death. As I am sure you know, some one else besides myself can deposit monies into my account much easier than they can write a check of withdrawal. No identification is required to deposit cash into my account, just my account number. In fact, we had this very thing happen to us one time. Charlotte told me that the bank had made a mistake and had listed a sizable deposit to our account that we did not make. Since we did not want to count on that amount and have the wrong balance when they found the error later on, I went to the bank and told them that we did not have that money in our account. “Oh yes you do” was their answer! I tried to tell them that I did not deposit that money and I had no idea where it came from. They said it doesn’t matter, it is there and it will be there from this point on. I went home and related this to Charlotte. We still didn’t spend any of that excess money for a long time thinking that someone made a mistake and they would remove that amount and we would have written bad checks! They never did. All that mattered to them was that the account on their ledger showed that amount. We used to sing an old hymn years ago that proclaimed that Jesus settled our account long ago. This is exactly what reconciliation means. We were in debt to sin and the consequences of sin, but Jesus paid our debt. Another more recent song states, “He paid a debt He did not owe, I owed a debt I could not pay, I needed someone to wash my sins away; And now I sing a brand new song, Amazing Grace; For Jesus paid a debt that I could never pay”. Can you see how this is exactly what happened at Calvary? Our account with God was in the red and Jesus reconciled our account with God. He made up our lack and became our redeemer. He purchased us with His own life, not asking us to ever again make up that amount but to rest in His redemptive act. This is the act of reconciliation.
We still don’t believe it though! Why do I know this to be true? Because we are still living off the beggarly amount of self-righteousness that we had before that marvelous deposit of grace. Some of us still think that God made a mistake in His word and that we are going to be found writing bad checks concerning His grace. Some ministry come into this revelation and then, finding it too good to be true to their natural mind, quit preaching the whole truth and find themselves compromising with the unbelieving, unregenerated, religious crowd. Well, they say, maybe it doesn’t mean all men, maybe it means all christian men. Then, after it is pointed out that Christ died for us while we were yet sinners they try to add more qualifying terms. Pretty soon they sound a lot like a commercial I have seen on TV about an Australian bloke who announces that he is going to buy a steak dinner at The Outback Steakhouse for anybody that can throw a dart and hit the center of the board. Typically, everybody in the place hits the center. He then tries to backtrack and continues to correct his challenge each time it is met with the phrase, “Did I say ____, I meant ____”. At the end of the commercial he looks very sweaty and worried and by this time he has everyone throwing blindfolded, still hitting the mark. This reminds me of those that try to add their own qualifying statements to the word ALL in the scriptures. Soon they will be saying, “Did I say only christian people would be saved? I meant only christian men that speak in tongues and were baptized on the 4th of July and are right handed and have blue eyes and have middle names of Percy. Sorry friend, everybody in the house is going to get a steak! There are certain things in this life you should never do. Spit into the wind, pull on Superman’s cape, yank the mask off the old Lone Ranger, and don’t mess around with God’s grace!
Now, I want us to take a deep breath and get ready to take a small step for God, but one gigantic leap for our natural mind. Maybe God is not going to just redeem mankind, but maybe He is going to redeem all Things! Why am I saying such things? Because God wants to empower you! We must look beyond where we are and look into the things behind the veil. We become empowered by vision and understanding concerning God’s plan for the ages. The more we see and understand, the more God is made the true ruler of heaven and earth in our midst. He is only to us what we can believe Him to be.
God has created a magnificent infrastructure of thrones and dominions and principalities and powers. They all consist and exist by God’s dunamis. Present in the midst of this infrastructure is a perfect balance of powers that be. Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall at God’s whim and desire. He rules with complete sovereignty. Nothing changes unless He desires it to. The moon rules the night and the sun rules the day. As long as there are times and seasons, the sunlight will give way to the darkness and let it have it’s allotted time. God set the earth on it’s axis and set it in orbital motion around the sun, thus creating night and day. A chance gigantic explosion of a planetary birthing billions of years ago did not create this heavenly order, God ordained it so. Men are expecting to look through the lens of the Hubble telescope and view the beginning of the universe and how the planets came about. I can save the taxpayers a bunch of money. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. It wasn’t random, it wasn’t chaos, it was beautiful and perfect. It had order and design and was accomplished by a mind boggling exousia. The planets were all set on their axis and orbit by God. Each galaxy abides in ordered balance, with each heavenly body subject to the gravitational pull of its neighboring sphere. The earth itself was created subject to the exousia of the sun and to the connected planetary orbits. Each body influences one another. The moon influences the tides of the earth’s oceans, the sun influences our seasons and temperatures. This heavenly influence doesn’t stop with just the physical earth. Through many studies involving massive data files sociologists have found that there are patterns of behavior exhibited by mankind that imply that we are affected by these heavenly influences. A search through the crime statistics in major cities has turned up an interesting statistic that people act more homicidal during a full moon than at other times. It is a fact that we can go only so long without contact with sunlight before it affects our mind and causes mood swings. Many doctors have come to the conclusion that sunlight can have a healing effect on the sick and restore their health quicker than in a room without the rays of sunshine.
There is little doubt that all of these powers and dominions operate thus in the natural, and if so, how much more so do heavenly, spiritual powers affect us in ways that we don’t understand in the spirit? How many times have we been feeling tugs and pulls upon our spiritual life and thought that it was the same old forces that we have always identified as the enemy, i.e. the devil. We know so little about these other “thrones”, “dominions” and “powers”. Man himself is a creative being. God made us in His image and likeness. Science is just now entering a new frontier of gaining a knowledge of how gravity affects us and those things around us by experimenting in the environment of space and the absence of gravity. For the first time in the history of man on the planet earth, we are being given the power to take things beyond the gravitational kingdom into a heavenly kingdom that gravity cannot rule in. Gravity is an earthly power and has no dominion or exousia in space. The perfect ball bearing can be created in space for the first time. On earth the power of gravity has an invisible influence on everything in the domain of it’s kingdom, which is the planet earth. No matter how sensitive the instruments are that shape the ball bearing, gravity will pull and exert it’s influence upon the bearing and the metal will distort because of the pull of the earth. Now they will be able to create the perfect sphere of steel by taking the metal beyond the gravitational pull into space and produce this perfect bearing in the shuttle laboratory. They have been empowered by breaking through to a heavenly dominion that has been there all along but only in the 20th century did God allow man to come into the kingdom of space. Make no mistake about it, only God gives knowledge. Man would still be making fire by rubbing two sticks together if God didn’t desire him to come to further knowledge.
We also are on the verge of a new frontier of ministry! Oh praise His holy name! We are crossing over into a new dimension of heavenly power that will cause us to know power such as never dreamed of in our religious minds. A ministry is leaving the earth realm and they are speaking from Heaven! They are being set free from the pulls of corruption and are sitting down in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. The world has never seen a ministry like this. Heaven and earth obey them! They are free from the influence of their earthly lineage and they are being changed from the earthly to the heavenly. They are returning to their former state of being in God. There is a restitution taking place in them and around them. The following definition is for the word restitution in the Greek.
605 apokatastasis (ap-ok-at-as'-tas-is);
from 600; reconstitution:
KJV-- restitution.
600 apokathistemi (ap-ok-ath-is'-tay-mee);
from 575 and 2525; to reconstitute (in health, home or organization):
KJV-- restore (again).
We are being reconstituted, reinstated into our former base reality of who we are. Before this house of clay was wrapped upon us, we were as God is, made up of God-stuff. We are being changed from this temporal state of corruption and are returning back to our beginnings in God. This new creature is in us right now and has been bade by God to remain concealed until a time appointed by His divine purpose at which juncture He will cause our new man to manifest, or be revealed, to the world.
We will not be revealed or manifested until all of the many layers of dominion and power in us has been restructured into a perfect harmony. We have been in a state of chaos, as Genesis relates in the period between Gen. 1:1 and 1:2. What we are now is the result of a God ordained chaos that caused us to be lowered into a state of soulish confusion. We have had a fallen order of powers over us and we are now at the precipice of gaining back our rightful place in God. A great shaking is taking place inside of our being. A rearrangement of heaven and earth is taking place. Thrones are toppling and thrones are being re-established. Powers are losing their exousia to keep us in corruption. These dark powers have been given power by God to keep us outside of the inner core of God’s life and we are experiencing the overthrow of these dominions and a new kingdom is rising out of the ashes of our fallen nature. This kingdom has been buried in our earth and will not be denied it’s entrance into our existence and eventually it will be made real to the entire creation.
Elwin Roach, a wonderful writer of the message of the Kingdom of God from Alamogordo, NM and publisher of the monthly letter, “The Pathfinder”, has been writing upon a marvelous subject concerning the purpose of the Cherubim in God’s plan of the ages. He makes it clear in his study that the Cherubim are commissioned by God to keep hidden the sacred things that are not to be revealed until an appointed time. They are found standing at the gate of Eden keeping the way of the tree of life, within the veil of the tabernacle to keep the holiest place hidden from flesh, and so on. Even in the present time they are present in our heavens (mind) keeping us from further revelation until the Father removes them. I have always declared that the greatest miracle of all has been the absence of this message of the kingdom from the ranks of nominal religion. God has taken every measure to hide it from the wise and the strong and has seen fit to reveal it to babes and the weak and foolish. Thank God for the faithful cherubims in our life that have saved the fine and precious things of God for the times of our life when they would be the most honored and treasured.
Are we ready now for the “greater things” of this word and walk? I pray so. If not, you can be sure of one thing, the Lord will be faithful to hide them from us until such a time as they will be a blessing in our life and not a curse. I believe it to be vital that we leave the rudimentary basics of this word and shove away from the shore to the deepness of the waters. We have only dealt with the surface things thus far. We have strived to be happier than we were yesterday, be more prosperous than we were last year, try not to cuss so much and love our families like we should. Excuse me for being so blunt, but shouldn’t we be doing these things by now? I may be wrong, (I know, it’s hard for me to accept too. Ha!) but it seems to me that there are too many people connected with this revelation that are constantly having to attend self-help meetings and seminars on “How to Keep Your Marriage” and “Have You Talked To Your Kids Today?”. Those are first and second day problems. Surely somebody is ready to venture into the things beyond the keeping of the basic rules necessary to live in a civilized world. The ten commandments should suffice to keep us from killing each other. If we can’t even love our own mate or friends, how in the world can we expect to come into a word that says we must love our enemies? We need to be EMPOWERED!!
All I hear about from the community of Kingdom folk is how much revelation we have and we are in the third day and we have arrived into the holiest of all and just any moment now we are going to walk on water and glow in the dark. But look around you! Ministry are still playing a game of politics and preying on feeble-minded people, and the body of Christ can’t even forgive one another of wrongs or say an apology if they have wronged someone else. There has to be a people that are ready to go on into the things that God has prepared for this new dimension of ministry regardless of whether their friends are ready to go or not. We’ll just have to pick them up on the next go around. Visit them in the next visitation and leave them our forwarding address. We must go on! If we stay here we will die. The only hope for those that refuse to pay the price of this next transition is for you to leave them in the hands of the first and second day ministries and go through the door and believe that God will send you back to them at another time.
Today, I find many kingdom ministry think they are supposed to be around the former day ministries because these ministries have something to teach the kingdom ministries. Is it just me, or does this not sound a little backwards? On the contrary, I have heard from my Father, and He isn’t telling me to get shallower, He’s telling me to get deeper and bolder with the truths that cause the carnal man to cringe. If I was to listen to my bank account I would get shallower, if I was to go by my popularity meter I would get shallower, if I was to have a great desire to get into the inner circle of big time ministries I would get shallower, but since I crucified all of those things long ago, I’m going to the mountain to see what God has planned for us in this great and terrible day of His appearing! One thing I can promise you is that there will be nothing on that mountain for my carnal man. Like Papa Pratt used to say, “The serpent’s food was the dust of the earth, which is our carnal man, and God is getting ready to put that serpent on a fast!”. Don’t you want to get to the place where he finds no place in us for him? Empower us Lord!
The word “empowerment” is a word that I am sure you have read quite a bit in your newspapers or heard it mentioned on TV or on Radio. It is a term that is used quite a bit by the women advocate groups that endeavor to protect the women of the world from rape, spousal abuse, wage discrimination, etc. Many women are trapped in abusive relationships because they feel powerless to get out of them. This is a hard concept for many people to grasp, since they ask, “why don’t you just walk out?”. Those that ask this question have obviously never been in a situation where you are completely dominated by someone and made to feel helpless against them even in flight. Some of these unfortunate women have fled many times only to be found again by their abuser and made to pay the price for their act of escape. The laws of the land have helped to keep this type of abuse immune from prosecution and only recently have there been attempts to empower these imprisoned souls against their tormentors. Shelters are full of women that stay awake at night praying that their man will not find them. As a result, more and more agencies are devoting their time to lobby the courts to protect the abused and give them protection.
I speak from experience since my sister was in an abusive relationship when I was in my teens. I saw her many times go to the hospital with broken bones and lie to the doctors about how she received them. They offered to help her leave the man, but all of the doctors and police could do was to help her leave. They couldn’t sit with her in the dark each night, her eyes shut tight, fists clenched, knuckles white, shaking from head to toe, waiting for this man to kick the door down and raise his level of abusive to new horrific levels. I did. I also witnessed how my sister’s will and resolve dwindled with each threatening phone call, until, after receiving promises from the abuser that if she would only come back there would be no more violence, as he had done many times before, she went back. I’ve never told any one, not even my sister, how I, at age 14, waited outside a bar for this man in a dark alley with a baseball bat, intending to beat him to death if necessary, to break him from hurting her. He never showed up. The reason why is that she had gone home with him from the hospital that he had put her into. I have no doubt that if I would have fulfilled my dark intentions that night she would have hated me for it. He had poisoned her mind to the point that she thought she deserved what he gave her and that he was doing it because he was the only one that could love her and put up with her. She is still with the man.
The Lord is wanting to show us how to get power over those things in our lives that have abused us and we have not been able to get free of. I touched on this in the last articles. An alcoholic is not just an alcoholic in the earth, he is also an alcoholic in the heavens of his being. The earth and the heavens are connected in such a way that nothing happens in one without having a mirror action in the other. I would like you to look at a familiar verse of scripture.
Matt 6:10
10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. (KJV)
In this portion of the prayer that Jesus taught to His disciples there is a plain connection between earth and heaven. This verse deals with the will that IS in heaven and the prayer is that this will be DONE in earth. The mirror image between earth and heaven is one that has a true image, that image in heaven, and a distorted image, that image in earth. The view that Paul said was disappearing was the view through “the glass darkly”. The view that we strive for is “face to face”, a true likeness, without distortion and free from guesswork, such as “men as trees”. The important thing to focus on is that the true is in heaven and the earth is being changed into that true image.
Matt 16:19
19 And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (KJV)
A holy priesthood is being prepared by God to be His express image in the earth and to become His vehicle of redemption to the whole of creation. In the next issue we will look into the powers that lie within us and how God is rearranging our heavens and earth to complete our evolution from an earth man into a heaven man. (To Be Continued)
