Empowerment
(Part 3)
John
10:17-18
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)
By Bob Torango