Oh but man, oh manna

Well, it's official. When my visit home ends and I return to work Saturday, I will have a new physical regimen to follow (finally--I've gained 20 pounds since the beginning of the year and my mom could not be more disappointed to see it!) that includes giving up dairy, white flour, sugar and red meat. No coffee--only water, veggie juice and herbal teas to drink.

When I think of dieting, a Bible passage that always comes to mind is Numbers 11. In it, the children of Israel weep to Moses about the manna they're limited to for meals, rattling off for him a grocery list of foods they miss, specifically fish, cucumbers, melon, leeks, onions and garlic.

Knowing those are all perfectly good health-nut foods that any diet doc, from Dr. Atkins to Dr. Fuhrman, would recommend, makes the account that much more memorable--and amusing.

*****

 

The Israelites bitterly complain that their “soul is dried away: there is nothing at all, beside this manna, before our eyes,” causing Moses to just completely lose it. He prayed to God, in essence, “JUST KILL ME NOW!”

 

The classic chapter reads in part, “And when the dew fell upon the camp in the night, the manna fell upon it.
[10] Then Moses heard the people weep throughout their families, every man in the door of his tent: and the anger of the LORD was kindled greatly; Moses also was displeased.
[11] And Moses said unto the LORD, Wherefore hast thou afflicted thy servant? and wherefore have I not found favour in thy sight, that thou layest the burden of all this people upon me?
[12] Have I conceived all this people? have I begotten them, that thou shouldest say unto me, Carry them in thy bosom, as a nursing father beareth the sucking child, unto the land which thou swarest unto their fathers?
[13] Whence should I have flesh to give unto all this people? for they weep unto me, saying, Give us flesh, that we may eat.
[14] I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.
[15] And if thou deal thus with me, kill me, I pray thee, out of hand, if I have found favour in thy sight; and let me not see my wretchedness.”

 

*****

 

As Jordan explains the scene, “Moses parts the Red Sea and God delivers Israel from a violent, terrible death. What He did for them is He literally delivered them from satanic activity. The reason there were 10 plagues is there were 10 false Gods that Egypt worshipped that held the (people) in captivity.

 

“So when they complain, ‘We had all that wonderful diet back there and now our soul’s dried away from all the manna,’ you see how this is a heart issue?

 

“They say they’re bored with the stuff. Well, the passage tells us ‘manna was as coriander seed, and the colour thereof as the colour of bdellium.’ It says, ‘And the people went about, and gathered it, and ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it: and the taste of it was as the taste of fresh oil.’

 

“Bdellium is a white crystal that really is translucent. It’s sort of like mother-of-pearl color and every way you look at it you can see another depth or dimension to it like it’s three-dimensional. Now is that boring?!

 

“It says they ground it and beat it. You see why it’s a type of Christ? Exodus says it was sweet. Oil is a type of the Holy Spirit. This was not a monotonous type of food. You could make lots of different (entrees) from it. Go to Deuteronomy 32 and you see they were able to make lots of different recipes. This was a wonderful stuff to eat.

*****

 

“It says the manna fell upon the dew. It was so precious that God wouldn’t make it land on the earth. He made it land on the dew.

 

“From Psalm 133 we know dew is a symbol. It’s like the precious ointment. Verse 3 says, ‘As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the LORD commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.’

 

“Dew represents that blessing that God gave to Israel for the world. And the manna rested on God’s plan and purpose for the nation Israel. That’s why He gave the manna TO Israel. It was so the life could be given to Israel as a nation and they could then go be in the earth God’s nation and take His blessings to the world through them.”

 

*****

 

While manna is mentioned in nine different books in the Bible, there are two Old Testament chapters—Exodus 16 and Numbers 11--where manna is set forth for its enduring “bread of life” message, serving as both a picture and type of the Lord Jesus Christ in His incarnation and the Word of God.

 

In John 6, for example, when the skeptical Jews ask Christ to give them a sign that they might believe, reasoning that “our fathers did eat manna in the desert; as it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat,” Jesus responds, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven; but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven . . . I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.”

 

Jordan explains, “Just like they weren’t going to hunger back there (in Exodus) if they ate the manna, the message was whatever they needed, the provision was going to fulfill the need. Christ said, ‘I am the bread of life. He that believeth on me shall never hunger, never thirst.’ It won’t be the temporary provision the manna was—this is going to be the power for them to become the sons of God . . .

 

“You see, what God’s telling them (in the wilderness) is, ‘Whatever you need, I’m going to provide it for you. I got this thing planned out ahead of time; you just trust me and go where I take you, and when you go where I take you, and do what I tell you to do, you’ll find that the provision for Israel, for you, is already there.’

 

“Now, had they learned that they would have been far better off. You get to Exodus 19, though, and you learn they didn’t learn anything about it! But what God’s demonstrating is His grace to them.”

 

*****

 

Exodus 16: 1-2 reports, “And they took their journey from Elim, and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after their departing out of the land of Egypt. And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness:”

 

Jordan says, “Notice they took their journey and all the congregation ‘came unto the wilderness of Sin.’ Now how about that for a name?! Does that sound like that’s going to be a good place to be?! Well, a wilderness is a homeless place and it’s a wilderness of sin.

 

“So, the setting in which God’s going to give the manna is a rather dark background of man’s rebellion. When God brings them out of Egypt, He provides the healing for the water at Marah, takes them to Elim where there’s all kind of special provisions for them and then when God picks them up and moves them what do you think faith should have said?

 

“ ‘Wherever He leads me I’ll go; wherever He wants me to go I can trust Him!’ Because why? ‘Because He can take care of me!’ He just took care of the thirst issue, the water issue, the healing issue.

 

“But they didn’t learn that. They murmured, and they said, ‘You brought us out here to starve us to death! We remember being in Egypt. Where we had the flesh pots. And we could eat ’til we were full!’ (Exodus 16:3)

*****

 

“Now, when they were in Egypt they were slaves. So they had a slave’s diet. Well, maybe that’s better than having nothing to eat at all. That is what they’re saying. Right then the Lord could have smote them, but watch what God does: ‘Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.’ (Exodus 16:4)

 

“God’s saying, ‘Look what I’m going to do for you, Moses. I’m going to rain it down from heaven, but I’m not going to rain fire and brimstone and wrath and judgment.’ You remember Genesis 18 and 19? Sodom and Gomorrah? He rained fire and brimstone from heaven? He could do it—they knew He could do it—but he said, ‘I’m going to rain bread from heaven.’ He didn’t call it manna here.

 

“He said, ‘I’m going to send you some food that will satisfy your hunger that’s good for everybody, that anybody can eat, and you can go out and get it.’ When He says there that it’s food from heaven, that means it’s of divine origin: ‘God’s going to send this.’

 

“It’s not something man’s going to produce; God’s going to do it. And by the way, when He says it’s going to rain . . . When something rains, it rains on the just and the unjust alike. When something rains, it’s a visible thing and it’s abundant—everybody gets some of it.

 

“And boy, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen statistics but, in a good rain storm, there are literally millions of gallons of water that fall out of the sky. It’s staggering. There’s this abundance that’s going to be given Israel!

*****

 

“You see in verse 5 where it says you can gather the manna at a certain rate? The rate you gather at is in verse 16: ‘According to the number of your persons . . .’

 

“In other words, they were to go out and whatever—one was how many ever people you had in your house and two was whatever your appetite was. Some people have big appetites; they need more. Some people have little appetites; they don’t need so much. No matter what your appetite was, or how many people you had, what you gathered was exactly what you needed to satisfy the appetite that you had. The rate was according to the eating.

 

“It says there was ‘an omer for every man’ and an omer is a tenth part of an ephod. The Scofield Reference Bible tells us an ephod is a bushel and three pints, and an omer is 6.7 pints.

 

“Now, the estimate here is there are about two million Israelis at this time. You get that because Numbers 1 says that when they numbered them, there were 600,000 men ready to go to war. So, if you’ve conservatively got 2 million people and they’re all going to pick up six pints, that’s 12 million pints, which would translate into 9 million pounds!

 

“Every day they went out and collected four and a half tons of this manna! Can you imagine how many box cars that is? How many 18-wheelers it would take to load that four and a half tons of stuff? I mean, this is a humongous supply and it showed up every day!

 

“And if they didn’t go out and get it, verse 20 says ‘it bred worms and stank.’ I mean, if you leave the stuff out and don’t pick it up, ‘P-U, what a mess!’ And, by the way, when it landed, wherever the people were they could just go outside of their house and there it was! They didn’t have to go to six blocks away to find it—it was there available for them immediately. The provision was there every morning.

 

“They went out in the morning to get it but it showed up at night. Again, they’re asleep; they’re not doing anything. God sends it. The end of verse 15 says, ‘This is the bread which the Lord hath given you.’ Manna was a gift from God. He rained it down from heaven. It’s everywhere and it was abundant. And it satisfied any of their needs.

 

“All they had to do was go out and gather it. By the way, they had to go out each person and gather it for themselves, but if it’s on the ground, what did they have to do to get it? You had to stoop over. You had to bow down. A stiff-necked person who wouldn’t bow down wound up hungry.”

 

 

Friends of the mammon

An op-ed piece posted to the website of London’s The Guardian newspaper pondered, “In the England census few, if any, people list their religion as worship of mammon. What might it be like if this were a major national faith?”

The article by financial writer Savitri Hensman continued, “Religions vary in their characteristics. Many have sacred places, such as Canterbury or Stonehenge, to which pilgrims come. They are often associated with ritual.

“Sometimes sacred mysteries are open only to the initiated – rather like the inner workings of the City of London. In the case of a world religion, there may be linked spaces with names that also resonate among believers, not dissimilar to Wall Street.

“If mammon-worship were a dominant religion, just as political leaders in ancient Rome sought the gods' blessings for their endeavours, those of today might turn to the financial sector. Even rivals for public office might be expected to share this faith.

“Likewise top bankers, because of their supposed access to esoteric knowledge, might be put in charge of areas of policy, such as welfare reform, of which they know nothing. Even when it seemed that the high priesthood had failed, and indeed brought ruin upon the nation, the faithful might continue to turn to them for salvation.

“Sometimes religions compete openly for converts and influence, but other faiths may expand by assimilating potential rivals. If this were the main strategy of mammon's priests, they might tolerate and even embrace other belief systems but seek subtly (maybe even unconsciously) to steer them towards the true path. Christian, New Age, humanist or whatever, all would be welcomed, provided they played down aspects of their faith that might pose a challenge to mammon's dominance.”

*****

An old axiom says, “All it takes is ignorance to start serving evil. Ignorance is the first step towards becoming an employee of dark forces.”

As ‘the god of this world,’ Satan has a religion he seeks to propagate. The core of it surrounds  the issue of a person’s relationship with his Creator or lack thereof. Religion is designed to substitute confidence in the flesh for trust in Christ.

“When Paul says ‘have no confidence in the flesh,’ your flesh is a way the Bible, especially with the Apostle Paul, describes you, yourself and your self life independent of God,” says Jordan. “Romans 7:18 says, ‘For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing.’

“Your flesh is about much more than just the meat on your bones. In I Corinthians 2, he talks about how the ‘natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him.’

“Our resources are not God’s resources; our identity is not the identity and purpose He gives us. Paul’s talking about trusting and valuing and treasuring who you are in yourself and your ability to perform. He’s talking about pride and self-satisfaction in yourself.

“Proverbs says, ‘Every man does that which is right in his own eyes.’ Can you relate to that? We do what WE think is right. It says, ‘There’s a way that seemeth right to a man; the end thereof is death.’

“Man says, ‘Makes no difference, I’m doin’ what’s right in my mind . . .’ and there’s a pride in that! There’s a self-satisfaction in that and that’s what religion is all about!

*****

“If you look down in Philippians 3:7, he says, ‘But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ.’

“There are all these things in verses 4-6 he says were valuable to him. Gain is the idea of wealth, treasure.

“Notice he says, ‘I wasted it and profited in the Jews’ religion above many mine equals in my own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of traditions of my fathers.’

“You see he profited? He’s saying, ‘Those things that brought profit to me in my thinking. Those things I treasured and adored and thought were the most wonderful, solid, enriching things in my life.’

*****

“What were they? There are a number of things but they divide into two categories. He’s going to list some ethnic and racial things—some pride of race and pride of place kinds of things. And then he’s going to list some religious things. Distinctions. Some performance things.

“Can I tell you those are the two things most people . . . those are the two things your flesh wants to glory in. It wants to glory in your race, which is another way of saying the place that you have, and then it wants to glory in religion—the performance; the achievements that it can make.

“Your flesh has a tendency toward the lascivious, the earthy; the lust and the pull to be run by the desires that drag you downward into the earth.

“But you also have a bent toward aestheticism, toward the human good; toward the ability to pride yourself and satisfy yourself in doing what you think is right.

*****

“It’s to do good and feel good about doing it. Your flesh is such a deceiver. ‘The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.’

“And the moment you think you’ve done something good, and the moment you sit in relaxation and your satisfaction about what you’ve performed, ‘Let him who thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall.’

“Saved or lost, that’s where your flesh is. That’s religion and that’s why I said this is the most dangerous battle you’ll ever face. This is where the real big game is. People like to argue about prophecy and politics and all the rest of the stuff, but this is the BIG stuff.”

Feelings, nothing more than feelings

When asked about his Catholic faith once, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry spoke of a long time of searching after losing his childhood faith and how a “spiritual revelation” brought him back some years ago.

“It was tangible,” Kerry remembered. “I mean, you could really sense a kind of input that really surprised me. I don't know where it came from. You know, people can describe how those things come.”

The reality is God doesn’t relate to humans through inner impressions, feelings, hunches, etc. He works through the reading/hearing of His Word and internalizing it.

“You have a spirit, soul and body, and your spirit is the mechanism whereby light from God’s Word can come into your inner man,” says Jordan. “Light isn’t going to come in through your emotions. It isn’t going to come in through your feelings and your physical praying.

“You ever hear anyone say, ‘We just feel the presence of God here tonight’? No, you didn’t. You didn’t feel God’s presence.

“The Spirit of God doesn’t walk up and down the aisles; the Spirit of God lives within those who believe. And He is the resident agent of the Godhead who indwells you, and one of his functions is to work with your spirit.”

*****

A person’s inward man is made up of two parts—spirit and soul. Information from God’s Word comes into the mind through the spirit and God’s Spirit, through the Word, actually contacts your spirit.

Other spirits can come into a person’s mind, too, which are most definitely not from God. Paul tells us there’s the “spirit of the world” and there’s the “spirit that works in the children of disobedience.” (Eph. 2:2)

A critical passage in Paul’s epistles to fully grasp is I Cor. 2:12-16, which says, “Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.

“Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

“But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

“But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.

“For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.”

*****

Jordan says, “Think about how that other spirit effects people. People go to church and swear they’ve had an encounter with God. That’s what they’ve been taught all their lives, and when they bow down to the idols of their church they feel a sense of the presence of God. Why? Because they’ve been taught that’s how you sense God.

“Then you have what’s called the ‘spirit of camaraderie.’ It’s like at a hockey game. You can create a spirit in a crowd and a feeling, but that isn’t how you get in touch with God. Those spirits are created in your emotions and in your senses. They’re real; they’re just not from God.

“You didn’t contact God; you contacted your senses, your feelings, your flesh. To contact God, it comes through the Word of God. God’s Spirit through His w-o-r-d-s go into your mind, into your thinking, when you know the things that are freely given to you of God.

 
“It’s at that point that you can make a choice of faith. Faith is just a positive volition toward sound doctrine. Not just Bible doctrine, but the Word of God ‘rightly divided.’

“You can’t by faith be water baptized in today’s dispensation of grace. You can’t by faith speak in tongues in the dispensation of grace. You can’t by faith ask God to heal you of your cancer. You can’t by faith ask God to give you a job. That isn’t what God’s doing today—none of that.

“You can’t do it by faith in God’s Word, but you can do it by error. So if you have error in your mind, and your faith transfers it out of your mind into your soul, that information’s going to stick. If you’ve transferred it into your heart bad doctrine, what’s that going to do for you? You’re not going to be very stable.”

*****

“A person’s soul has four components or functions—heart, conscience, will and emotions. The heart is the mentality of the soul, or the thinking process of the inner man. It’s the will that, through a positive volition, chooses to say, ‘This information is true and I’ll depend it. I’ll believe it and trust it; I will commit myself to it.’

“You take it out of what you know and you make it a part of you; you transfer it out of your spirit.

“Now, your spirit is not just located in your head like your mind is. Your spirit’s all over you. Your spirit is not a physical entity you can bottle up and put in one location. But it is a true entity. It’s what gives you and me the ability to rationally, and thoughtfully, and perceptibly communicate back and forth.

“You’ve got a lot of things in your mind you never make a part of yourself. That’s why people can know a lot about the Bible, a lot about doctrine, a lot about this and that.

“You know how you say to your kids, ‘You know better than that!’? You say to yourself, ‘I know better than to do that!’ But, you see, to make doctrine operate—to make anything operate in your life—it has to be in your soul. And then you have to access it, and by faith choose to operate on it.

“Now, once you move it out of your spirit into your heart (‘For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,’ Proverbs 23 says), that’s the mentality of your inner man. It’s, ‘Here’s not just what I know, here’s my frame of reference. Here’s the way I evaluate life. Here are the things I believe are true.’

“Paul says in Romans 12, ‘God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.’ We’re to store this information up in our inner man. We’re building up a house of sound doctrine. It’s called education. As I put that information into my inner man, in my heart, I take out the old corrupt files and put the new files in.

“With the old corrupt information, I say that’s error, throw it away and put truth in its place.

“In Romans 2:15, Paul talks about the ‘law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.’

*****

“In your inner man, your conscience is a function. It’s a neutral thing. It functions on the information you have there, but it’s an involuntary function of your inner man.

“Humans have two types of actions they take. Cognitive actions are the ones you do on purpose. You make a choice to move your hand. You don’t sit there and say, ‘Beat heart, beat heart, beat heart.” Your heart just beats. That’s an involuntary motion. You can’t think about it and make it happen. Breathing is another one.

“Your will functions when you choose; you make a conscious choice. But your conscience doesn’t ask your permission. It takes your conduct, and takes what you’re doing, and evaluates it on the basis of the information you’ve stored in your inner man.

“It either says, ‘Okay, looks pretty consistent,” or it says, ‘Uh-huh, wait, wait, wait—that isn’t what you think about that. You’re not doing what you really think.’ So it accuses or excuses. It’s a function.

*****

“I Corinthians 8 talks about a defiled conscience. Some other verses, like in Romans 14, talk about a weak conscience. The Believer’s conscience functions based on the level of maturity a person has and the level of positive volition. If it doesn’t have a lot of the Word rightly divided, it’s weak.

“A lot of folks feel guilty about things they ought not be feeling guilty about, all because they don’t have sound doctrine in their inner man.

“Now, a defiled conscience is a conscience with error in it. It works perfectly, it’s just that the information is bad. It’s the lie program.”

In I Tim 4:2, Paul warns about people “speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron.” In Eph. 4:17-19, he refers to Believers operating as lost men even though they’re saved.

He writes in admonishment, “This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind,

“Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart:

“Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But ye have not so learned Christ.”

*****

Jordan explains, “When he talks about people walking in the ‘vanity of their mind,’ vanity is nothing. It’s empty. The piece of furniture in the bedroom is called the vanity. It’s the makeup table.

“Now, if you have the vanity of your mind, that means that in between your ears there’s nothing. It’s empty. That’s how unsaved people walk. They have nothing of any value in their thinking. Because of that, there's nothing for God to work with!

“Think of a ball with nothing in it but air. So what happens—human viewpoint comes by, error goes by—and that stuff is sucked right in. What error does is it compounds the problem.

“Paul says, ‘Don’t walk in the vanity of your mind as other Gentiles do, drawing in human viewpoint, self-absorption, mental-attitude sins—just being negative toward sound doctrine.’

“You know what being positive toward sound doctrine does? It keeps your mind from being full of that mush—full of that nothingness. You want to get some victory in your life?

“The first thing you need to do is get some verses in your mind that you can use to deal with what you’re facing. And if you don’t know anything yet about what you’re facing, just get in some verses and deal with not knowing what you’re facing. Just get in some verses about who you are in Christ.

“Give yourself some information your faith can latch a hold on and that you can put in your soul and, when you do, that information brings life.

*****

“Paul’s saying to Believers, 'Don’t walk around like a bunch of lost people who don’t know anything about truth, having their understanding darkened.' For them, it’s a complete blackout, ‘being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is them because of the blindness of their heart.’

“They’re cut off from the plan of God. Just a blackout in their inner man, in their soul, and that’s what Luke 11 is talking about. Blindness and darkness inside because the light’s not on.

“They’re completely negative toward sound doctrine to the point that they’ve developed a cataract on their eye so that the light can’t come in, and now they’re blind. The blindness of their hearts. They get that callous.

“They’re past feeling. They’re past being touched by an understanding of sound doctrine, of who they are in Christ. They ‘give themselves over’--completely and totally betray themselves.

“In II Timothy, Paul says, ‘They oppose themselves.’ They completely live their life the opposite of who they really are. There’s just a frantic search for happiness on their own. They have all of it in Christ but they’re out there still looking for it. They’re past having the truth of God’s Word reach up and impact them.

“That term ‘past feeling’ describes the result of a seared conscience. To sear something is to burn it, and when you burn something, you get scar tissue. The characteristic of scar tissue is that it has no feeling to it.

“How did they get there? You listened to the world's words; you listened to those doctrines of devils. You chose to believe those doctrines and take them out of your mind and your will and place them down into your heart. And when you chose to believe the Lie, it's there in your inner man.

“It sears your conscience, it takes your conscience—that thing in Ephesians 6 talks about ‘the fiery darts of the wicked one.’ What do you think that is? That isn’t launching Scud missiles at somebody. That’s aiming the darts of the wicked one—the bad doctrine, the doctrines of devils.

“That Lie program gets inside and you begin to take it to heart. You begin to take your frame of reference, your worldview, the attitudes you have toward your situations and the details of your life, and you have this edifice of human viewpoint, and the wisdom of the world, and that wisdom of the world controls your thinking, controls your heart.

*****

“When you have a computer, and you’ve got all this information on your hard drive, every now and then you have to ‘defrag it.’ Your hard drive gets so fragmented that it slows down and it just won’t work. If you want to speed it up, defrag it. Get it all together. Well, you Christian life can happen that way.

“Paul says ‘learn Him.’ Learn who God has made you in Him and stand in that and say, ‘That’s what’s true about me. That’s who I really am, not all this other stuff.’ II Corinthians talks about ‘perfecting holiness.’ II Timothy 3 talks about how the Word of God ‘makes you perfect, throughly furnished unto every good work.’

“Paul talks about renewing your mind, re-educating your mind. You take the old information out and puts new information into your files. Then you develop a new frame of reference.

*****

“The buzz word today is a ‘new worldview.’ You get a new perspective on life, a divine perspective. And now when you’re looking at the details of your life, you begin to learn to look at it through a new way of evaluating.

“Just like growing roses, you water, trim and fertilize the rose bush before you ever see a rose. It’s a process—a growing process. How do you know? You read the instructions.

“God has structured you in your spiritual makeup in such a way that light is designed to come from His Word through your spirit into your soul by your faith. You will by a positive choice believe that truth.

“It says you are to be ‘filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom, all understanding.’ Not just have a form of godliness, but have the power of that life living in you and as you grow in that maturity.

“When Paul uses the word ‘perfect’ in Philippians 3:15, he’s not talking about, ‘Don’t ever commit a sin.’ He’s talking about those of us who are mature; those of us who have an occupation with the mind of Christ and the things of God. Those of us who have reached a level of spiritual maturity, applying God’s Word to the details of life.

“You know what happens as a result? You never quit growing. You need to be fat on the inside. Have a big fat soul. As you grow in the fruits of righteousness, you master the details of life.

“In being able to handle the details of life as Christ would, there’s the peace and the joy and the real true happiness. It’s being filled with the love of Christ.”

Transactions

In journalism school at The Ohio State University, I was taught there are two types of people in the world: those who want the truth and those who don’t. The latter prefer to live in a comfortable reality that is perceived by them to promote their best personal interest, etc.

The Bible says the truth of God’s Word will commend itself to a man’s conscience that wants the truth. When it doesn’t commend itself to someone, it’s simply because what the person’s looking for is something different.

The reason God uses words to communicate and do His work is because there’s a spirit transaction that takes place through the sharing of words, ideas and concepts.

“If God is a Spirit, you can understand why He gave you a spirit, because essence needs a point of contact,” explains Jordan. “Your spirit has intelligence; it has intellect. Just like you and I communicate with words and we know things because of the words that we communicate, we know the things of God because God has communicated them to us by words.

“People look for the Spirit of God to be working out in the physical realm, but the Spirit of God, if He’s a Spirit, is going to work with your spirit. The spirit is what gives humans the capacity to communicate with each other and with God.

“Now, lost people can’t communicate with God, but their spirit still works; they can communicate with other humans with their spirit as well as ‘the spirit that now works in the children of disobedience.’ ”

The spirit is connected to the soul, which represents each person’s own personal identity. The soul has a bodily shape and the capacity to animate the body and use the body as a vehicle.

This is something people don’t grasp the reality of: It’s your soul that goes to hell and there’s a spiritual fire in the spiritual realm that will torment the soul the same as a fire in the physical realm will torment the flesh.

*****

One of the key things you learn as a Bible student is that the Bible contains God’s own built-in dictionary.

Here’s an example: If you look at Acts 4:25-26, it says, “Who by the mouth of thy servant David hast said, Why did the heathen rage, and the people imagine vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the rulers were gathered together against the Lord, and against his Christ.”

Part of this passage is a near-direct quotation from Psalm 2, which says, “Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed.”

Immediately you realize that the title “Christ,” which is a Greek word, compares with the Hebrew word “anointed.”

So the term “Christ” means “anointed” and when you read in the Bible about an “anointed one,” you’re reading about a Christ.

But notice in Acts 4 it describes “the Lord” and “his Christ.” That’s because there’s more than one.

In Ezekiel 28:15, referring to Satan in his original position as Lucifer, it says “thou art the anointed.” Satan’s counterfeit M.O. hinges on him as a Christ and an anointed one.

*****

In Bible scholar Gail Riplinger’s 1994 book, Which Bible is God’s Word?, detailing the promotion of the Antichrist system through New Age bible versions, she writes, “How can Satan deceive the various religions of the world to join together and worship him? ‘Deceiveth’ implies the true identity of the dragon may be hidden.

“The book called, Toward a World Religion for a New Age, tells us his plan. It says: ‘When an appropriate, common vocabulary [and those are the key words, ‘common vocabulary’] is developed, each group can help toward a world religion.’

“To this end, New Age literature has changed the names Buddha, Krishna, Lucifer, and all the national and occult gods, to ‘the Christ,’ ‘the Lord,’ ‘the One,’ and ‘the Spirit.’

“All the new bible versions, with the exception of the King James Version, are unknowingly making changes and gradually evolving to conform to this One World religion.

“So we see Jesus Christ, Jehovah, and the Holy Ghost, disappearing and becoming ‘the Christ,’ ‘the Lord,’ ‘the One’ (capital ‘O’), and ‘the Spirit’. . .

“When you read New Age books like, The Bhagavad-Gita, or The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or the Luciferian The Secret Doctrine, you will see that ‘the One’ is the god of the pagans and the New Age. . .

“Even in Isaiah 14:12, in the NIV and the new versions, Jesus Christ and Lucifer are being confused. Instead of putting Lucifer in Isaiah 14, they have the ‘morning star’ there. We know the ‘morning star’ is Jesus Christ.

“It is the New Age doctrine to believe that ‘Christ is the same force as Lucifer’ (Spangler). The new versions continually replace ‘Jesus,’ ‘Christ,’ or ‘God,’ with the generic ‘him.’

“In Philippians 4:13 where the King James Version says, ‘I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me,’ some new versions say, ‘I can do everything through him who gives me strength.’

“Who is this ‘him’? It can be a sort of fill-in-the-blank deity. If you are a Buddhist, you can fill in ‘Buddha’; you can fill in any name there.”

The love of money . . .

At the Bible conference last week in St. Charles, Ill., Jordan informed the crowd that a benevolent saint had recently given a $1 million donation to a fellow grace church somewhere in the country. I thought, “Whoa, that’s MAJOR!”

*****

Arriving here in Akron, Ohio this afternoon after a seven-hour drive from Chicago, I stopped in at my mom’s local library branch to use the bathroom and decided spur-of-the-moment to stretch my legs a few minutes in the magazine section.  I picked up a random copy of Christianity Today.

A quote from an article on Christian wealth, attributed to theologian Ron Sider, author of “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger,” read, "For Christians in the richest nation in history to be giving only 2.43 percent of their income to their churches is not just stinginess, it is biblical disobedience—blatant sin . . . Over the last 40 years, American Christians (as we have grown progressively richer) have given a smaller and smaller percent of our growing income to the ministries of our churches. Such behavior flatly contradicts what the Bible teaches about God, justice, and wealth.”

*****

While in the Old Testament economy under Moses it was a good thing to be rich and actually a sign of God’s prosperity, being rich was NOT a good thing at all during the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ.

 

Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

In the same passage from Luke 18, Christ urges, “Sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me.”

We’re told in Matthew 19 that when the rich young ruler heard these things from Christ, “he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions.”

Jordan reasons, “I would suggest that the ‘great possessions’ had the young man, too, because it says ‘he was very sorrowful’ (Luke 18:23). And when Jesus saw that he was very sorrowful, He said to His disciples, ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God!’

“I have never yet heard one prosperity preacher—I don’t care who it is—quote Luke 18. They’ll quote that verse from III John 1:2 (‘Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth’) and tell you God will give you wealth, and make you prosper in your finances just like your spirit prospers in Christ, but there’s none of them who quotes that passage.

“Now you tell me, from Luke 18, does it sound like a good thing or a bad thing to be rich? Sounds kind of tough to be rich, doesn’t it? ‘It’s easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye’? That’s an impossibility, isn’t it?

“That’s why all the new Bibles re-translate that to ‘the gate of the city’ and all that kind of stuff. . . so the guy can wiggle through. But, no, Christ is saying it’s impossible. It’s as impossible for a camel to go through a needle’s eye as it is for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of god.

“Well, if that’s true, and He said that to the Apostle John—John was one of the people who was standing there when Christ taught that—then do you think III John 1:2 is talking about money? Being rich in material things?”

“The doctrine in the verse says that your soul would prosper in Christ, does it not? In Christ, all spiritual blessings are yours upfront, and John says, ‘I pray that you would prosper in the material realm and in health, just like your soul prospers spiritually.’

*****

In I Corinthians 16:2, Paul says the standard for a Believer’s giving is “as God hath prospered him,” meaning, “As God has given us material wealth, therefore we should give on that proportion; on that basis.”

The first thing a reader of III John must recognize is that it was the Apostle John who wrote it. In Galatians 2:9, we’re told that John, along with Peter and James, came to understand that Christ had given Paul a new and advanced revelation over what He’d given the apostles, and they, in turn, extended to Paul “the right hand of fellowship,” recognizing the further disclosures in God’s plans revealed through him.

Jordan says, “If John stood here today, on the basis of Galatians 2:9, he’d tell you III John was written to the circumcision about Israel’s program, and God’s plan and purpose for the nation Israel, and that you shouldn’t try to steal their mail.

“Every piece of mail that comes into the post office doesn’t belong to you; only what’s delivered to your box with your name on it. And when you come along and treat God’s Word as though you can just go in there and dip your hand in and pull out anything you want because it says something you like, that’s nothing but spiritual larceny!

“You wouldn’t go down to the bank and run in and try to grab money that wasn’t yours and go out with it thinking you could get away with it. Well, you’re not going to get away with it spiritually and it will break your spiritual neck! It will bring disaster to your Christian life if you treat God’s Word that way.”

*****

In I Corinthians 16:2, Paul is instructing the Corinthians about their giving to the “poor saints who were in Jerusalem,” and told them they were to give systematically—“as a man purposeth in his heart, let him give.”

Jordan explains, “They were to have understood what the (financial) need was and then systematically, on the first day of the week—not just when Paul came and found out what they had—but systematically each week, lay aside an amount so that when Paul came there wouldn’t be a panic to figure out how much they should give.

“They were to purpose in their heart what their giving was to be. It was not to be a lackadaisical thing. It was not supposed to be, ‘Well, let’s just see what kind of disposable income I have next month and how much of that I’m willing to give to the ministry.’

“It was to be a thoughtful, determined kind of a thing, systematically. They were to give sacrificially. But they were also to give proportionately as God hath prospered them. That is, according to their sense of God’s goodness toward them.”

*****

While people usually think about the word “prosperity” in the sense of money, in the Bible it has more the context of being successful.

When Joshua’s taking the nation Israel into the Promised Land in Joshua 1:8, for example, the word “prosperous” is referring to a prosperous journey for the successful outcome of taking over the land. So in their case, prosperity, or success, was to go in and take the land of Canaan and live in it, dwell in it and possess it.

In Genesis 24:21 is another example of this same type of thing: “And the man wondering at her held his peace, to wit whether the LORD had made his journey prosperous or not.”

Jordan explains, “It’s a journey where he found the wife for the boy. It didn’t have anything to do with money. In fact, it’s going to cost him money. You know, it’s like Barney Google said, ‘When I was single my pockets did jingle.’ It wasn’t a matter of making money; it was a matter of fulfilling the job that he had.”

In the same context, the Apostle Paul talks about hoping for a prosperous journey in Romans 1:10.

“Now people say based upon that verse that when you’re traveling you should pray for traveling mercies,” says Jordan. “I had never heard that term until I moved to the Midwest.

“What did Paul think a prosperous journey was? Not getting run over by a bus or having the airplane fall out of the air? No, he thought a prosperous journey was to have some fruit among the people he’s ministering to. So, for Paul, to have a successful journey had nothing to do with getting there on schedule and not losing his baggage.”

*****

Paul expands on the issue of giving in II Corinthians 8:2, lecturing the wealthy Corinthians, “Notice these people from the churches in Macedonia are giving a large amount even though they’re in deep poverty? You guys are in financial abundance, so you ought to be able to out-give them because you’ve got more, and it will allow for more equality.”

“Paul’s saying, ‘You know what, the circumstances could get reversed; there’s going to come a time when you won’t have so much and they’ve got a lot,’ " explains Jordan. “And notice he doesn’t say God’s going to change that?

“In I Timothy 6:17, Paul says, ‘Charge them that are rich in this world, that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.’

“When he says ‘charge them that are rich,’ that’s not talking about MasterCard, Visa, American Express or Discover. That’s, ‘Put them under orders, those who are rich—those who abound, those who have financial prosperity and are rich in this world with physical things—that they be not high-minded,’ meaning they don’t look down at people who don’t have it, nor trust in uncertain riches.

“Can I tell you, friends, riches don’t satisfy. That’s why he says in verse six that ‘godliness with contentment is great gain’. . . I don’t care how many material possessions you gather to yourself, contentment is a spiritual heart attitude, and if you don’t have it with a little, you won’t have it with a lot, because riches don’t give you contentment. That only comes from ‘the peace of God which passeth all understanding.’

*****

“You remember Deuteronomy 28 when God said, ‘I’m going to make you the head of the nations and not the tail. I’m going to make you prosper and everything you touch is going to turn to gold. You’re going to have the Midas touch and you’ll have more than you can spend.’

“God said, ‘I’m going to give you that money,’ and yet to the same people later on, in Jesus Christ’s ministry, He says, ‘It won’t be good for you to have any money because if you do, you’re going to miss the kingdom.’

“Do you understand why if you don’t ‘rightly divide the word of God’ you’re never going to get that straight? That’s God promise to Israel about the future abundance in her kingdom, but He said, ‘Right now, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.’

“Israel had to find God’s righteousness before they were going to get the things God was going to give to them. You better be careful about quoting Matthew 6:33 yourself because, while it’s a good thing to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you’ve got no guarantee that those things are going to be added unto you.

“In fact, the instructions to us in the dispensation of grace is, ‘Don’t expect them to be added—get a job!’ Go back to Matthew 6 and see that He told those people, ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.’

“There’s going to be a time in the future of the nation Israel, where in order to be a child of God you won’t take the ‘mark of the beast,’ and, as a result, you won’t be able to buy, sell, have a job, do anything.

“And God said, ‘When that time comes, Israel, I’ll take care of you; you don’t worry about it. You just trust me, and if you’ll seek me and my righteousness, you won’t need to worry; all that other stuff will be added to you.’

*****

“As far as God’s concerned, your financial situation today is not an issue in your spiritual life. It’s not a gauge whereby you gauge God’s love for you and God’s blessings in your life. The love of God is tied to one thing for you and that’s the Crosswork.

“It’s not tied to how much money you make or how much money you give. That proves something about you, but nothing about God’s attitude. That demonstrates something about your attitude, not God’s.

“God’s attitude toward you is consistent, and it’s always one where His love is commended toward you. And if you need God to physically intervene in your life to demonstrate His grace and goodness and welfare, He already has! You don’t need to wait for Him to do it tomorrow; He already did it 2,000 years ago on a rugged Cross! You couldn’t ask for more of an intervention in your life in human history!

“Every time you look for something else to demonstrate God’s love and working in your life, you’re saying, ‘That’s not enough Lord; I want that plus something else.’ And you know what you do? You do what that verse in Galatians says—you frustrate the grace of God and make it as though Christ is dead in vain; that His Cross wasn’t enough.

“The answer’s in resting in the goodness of God’s grace to you in Christ and relaxing so you aren’t holding on to these material things in the world that you try to get your security from.

*****

“Now, how does God prosper us? How does He make us successful in material ways? There’s two ways. One is what I call the natural things. We read in I Timothy that He’s ‘given us all things to richly enjoy.’ God gave you creation, folks, to make you rich so that you can richly enjoy the bounty of creation.

“God has fixed a creation out here that provides for your needs whether you’re a believer or an unbeliever. Jesus said in Matthew 5 that He ‘causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.’

“That’s what Paul’s saying in Acts 14:15 when he says to the pagans in Lystra, ‘We also are men of like passions with you, and preach unto you that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein.’

“You know what, the planet works. The creation works and it provides for your necessities; it provides for what you need in life to live and be successful.”

“In talking to the Greeks in Athens—the cultural elite of the world at that time—Paul informs them that neither is God ‘worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.’

“Paul’s telling these ‘sophisticated’ pagans, ‘Creation is dependent on God, and you know what, creation is providing for you. God’s given you creation to make you rich so you can richly enjoy the bounty of it.’ ”

 

(New article tomorrow)