Post-Christian tribal living

The world is dissolving, crumbling, divided in every way imaginable.

“America is sort of a mirror to much of what the world is; the idea that our country would somehow be immune to the disintegration is nonsense,” says Richard Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org). “Look at the stuff happening on our southern borders, for example.

“A nation without a border--a clearly defined and defendable border--is no longer a nation. They’ll get some of that stuff solved eventually, but when they do it’s going to be so different than what you’re expecting it to be.

“You have to understand something, folks, after the Cold War was over, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union, what happened to them? They dissolved and broke up into warring tribal groups.

“Culturally, socially, the thing that was always the cohesive thing in America, the 'melting pot' it was always called . . . by the way, did you know that in American history, from 1924 to 1960, immigration was largely outlawed?

“People have not always just been able to come here. It was strictly regulated, and the kind of thing you see today where just anybody comes; there were only two periods back in the 1800s when that was really the case.

“And the reason for that is we had a culture that understood you needed to be a melting pot where people would come and assimilate into the culture that’s here. Now they don’t do that. They do what they do in the Middle East. It’s the tribal culture. In fact, that’s now the big sociological term; the ‘tribalism.’

*****

“America’s turned into groups of tribes. People like you and me, Bible-believing Christians, we have little tribal culture areas where we live and we’re totally unaware of what’s going on in the other guy’s tribe. Sociologically, that’s a recent phenomenon in the last couple of decades.

“Years ago, when the fundamentalist Christians abandoned the cities . . . what happens is people solve the problems where they are, but now they’re going to try to solve them without truth, and you see that tribal warfare going on all over the planet and it happens here.

“The only place on the planet that CAN be different is in the Body of Christ. In a local assembly, manifesting what the Body of Christ is, you’re not oblivious to it all when you’re out in the world, but among us you’re reconciled in one body, because who I am and who you are in our own resources isn’t the issue. Who we are in Christ is the issue.

“If there’s ever going to be a testimony to that, and you know the heart of the world longs for that, they strive for it, but it’s that Genesis 1 thing. In the beginning, who created? Are you going to create your own world or is God going to create it?

"Most of us want to create our own, and the world you create is going to be one of division and strife because you carry that seed in your heart. But when it’s one God created, then you live in His resources; He reconciled us to God in one body.

*****

“When a culture rejects God’s Word and turns away from it, it winds up with things in its culture that are the antithesis of the way God created it; the opposite of the natural. There was a day when our culture understood that.

“How many of you know what a McGuffey Reader is? It was the standard textbook of the one-room schoolhouse in the 1800s. In 1854, the first McGuffey reader published, had as a text in it—this is what was taught to children:

“ ‘If you can induce a community to doubt the genuineness and authenticity of the Scripture, to hesitate undecided whether there be any such thing as virtue or vice, whether there be an external state of retribution beyond the grave; or whether there exists any such being as God, you have broken down the barriers of moral virtue, and hoisted the flood gates of immorality and crime.’

“That didn’t say you needed to be a Christian, that just said you don’t need to be a part of Romans 1. Isaiah 5:20 says, ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’

“You know what that is; it’s foolishness. You can’t even identify reality. Paul writes in Romans 1:28, ‘And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient.’

“There’s the problem. They didn’t want God: ‘I don’t want to think about Him, I don’t want Him around. Don’t talk about Him. We’re going to do it ourselves. Just remove any thought about Him from the culture.’

“They’ve done that in our day. If you’re under 40 years old, you were educated in a system that taught you fundamentally different than the system your parents were educated in.

“That which I read to you a minute ago was a fundamental understanding, and has been one of the fundamental principles of what we call western civilization, but about the time you younger people got into school, the prevailing wisdom of the education system was ‘multiculturalism, egalitarianism, every culture is equal; there’s no right, there’s no wrong.’

“People say, ‘Well, that’s the post-Christian.' You know what that is? That’s ancient paganism! That’s Romans 1. That ain’t nothing new. Everybody talks about modernity and post-modernity and I say, ‘Agh, phft! That’s Romans 1, man. Go back and look at it.’

“You see, to understand what’s going on in the world where we are, there’s the Body of Christ and not Israel’s (time past) program, but the world’s still the world. And when you deal with the world, you’re dealing with Romans 1.

“The result of that, as the end of the chapter reads, ‘Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,
[30] Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,
[31] Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:
[32] Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.’

“That’s a neighborhood I’d like to live in?! The coarseness, and the cruelty, and the corruption and the violence, and the abominable sinfulness of that culture didn’t just happen. It came as the direct result of, ‘I don’t want to retain God in my knowledge and I’m going to substitute the lie program, and I’m going to sit down and figure out a way to make my thinking the common thinking.’

“So when you come to the end of Romans 1, you’re at the depths of sin. You don’t only do the things, but you have pleasure in them that do them too. You’re not only a sadist, torturing others; you’re a masochist, torturing yourself, and you’ve reached the depths of sin. Revelation 2 calls it ‘the depths of Satan.’ ”

*****

“If the moment you got saved God gave you your resurrection body, where would you have to be?” Jordan reasons. “You’d have to be in heaven! Because II Corinthians 5 says you’re going to get a body eternal in the heavens. So when you get that body, you’re going to be up there.

“So if the moment you got saved He gave you that and you’re up there, what would happen to the ministry the Body of Christ down here? Well, you wouldn’t have gotten saved because the guy who gave you the gospel wouldn’t have been there to give you the gospel because he’d be in heaven!

“That’s why we suffer and travaileth in pain together with all of creation. Not because God doesn’t love us.

“You are His purchased possession, but He just hasn’t finished the work on you, so you’re in that little limbo period in there. That's why He says ‘as those alive from the dead.’ If you are a LIVING sacrifice, wouldn’t you be the walking dead?

“It’s an understanding of this identity God has given you and you ‘present your body’; you take the life that’s in you and say, ‘Lord, I’m going to use my body in the reality of who I really am. I’m a living sacrifice.’

*****

When Jesus was 12 years old and had just returned with His parents to Nazareth following His visit to the temple, Luke 2:52 says He “increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.”

Jordan observes, “If He increased in wisdom there must have been some wisdom He didn’t have before then. That’s kind of shocking. The answer is in Hebrews 5:8-9: ‘Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered. And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him.’

“How was He perfected? Well, He learned in His experience what obedience was. You see that contrast? ‘Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience.’ He’s God but He’s also man and it’s His humanity that had to be educated, not His deity.”

*****

In Philippians 2, Paul tells us that while Christ “thought it not robbery to be equal with God,” He “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”

“There’s no question about the deity of Christ, but there’s something in this passage that allows you and me to come in contact with deity in a way we couldn’t otherwise do.

“It says, ‘But he made himself of no reputation.’ I love that. The first way you think like God thinks is you don’t make yourself of any reputation.

“Jesus was right; He was never wrong. He never did anything to offend anyone but when people were offensive to Him He could have stood and said, ‘You got no right!’ but He never did that. He never defended Himself against evil accusations. It says, ‘As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’

“He didn’t take His reputation and say, ‘I’ve got to be proven right.’ He said, ‘I didn’t come for that.’ He made himself of no reputation but took upon Him the form of a servant.

“Notice the verbs. He MADE himself and TOOK upon Him. Nobody forced Him to do this. Jesus Christ—now get this terminology in your mind—voluntarily of His own free will laid aside the free and independent exercise of all of His attributes as God.

“He purposely chose to live as ‘the man Christ Jesus’ in absolutely complete total dependence on what His Father told Him.

“He doesn’t know everything. Here’s God the Son, who has all the infinite knowledge of God—knows everything God the Father knows, everything God the Holy Spirit knows, everything they planned—but in order to be your Savior, in order for that Word . . . that expression of God to become flesh, He made a choice. He made himself of no reputation. He said, ‘I’ll not use my personal attributes.’

“He willingly chose to be a servant and one of the characteristics of a servant is He does not know everything there is to know about the master’s plan. He’s going to live in total dependence on what the master tells Him.”

(new article tomorrow)

Times Square Baal drop

You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Next month, April 2016, the “Temple of Baal” will be placed in Times Square, New York City. The reported plan is to have the same structure erected in 1,000 cities.

“Reproductions of the 50-foot arch that formed the temple’s entrance are to be installed in New York and in London (Trafalgar Square), a tribute to the 2,000-year-old structure that the Islamic State destroyed last year in the Syrian town of Palmyra,” reports Thursday’s New York Times. “It will be uncanny and thrilling to see this arch from an ancient desert civilization set against the bright lights of New York. Unfortunately, facsimiles can achieve only so much. Denuded of people, stripped of the rich social contexts in which they were once embedded, antiquities appear just as evidence of the grandeur of the past, the accomplishments of another place in another time.”

In the temple, human sacrifice was conducted alongside sexual orgies.

An article posted to the website The Daily Sheeple by author Michael Snyder argues, "Is anyone buying the excuse for this? Because of ISIS America has to erect a life-size replica of a temple where child sacrifice and orgies took place to worship an ancient diety? Really?

"Needless to say, a lot of people are quite disturbed by this.  In ancient times, child sacrifice and bisexual orgies were common practices at the altars of Baal, and now we are putting up a monument of worship to this false god in the heart of our most important city.

"When I first came across this story, I could hardly believe it.  But this is not just some Internet rumor." 

*****

Food for thought on the establishment of Baal worship, looking at the Old Testament:

“You read some of this stuff in the Book of Micah, especially in chapter 6, and my blood runs cold when I watch what goes on in the news around us today,” says Richard Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org). “I’m so grateful to know my citizenship is in heaven, not on Planet Earth.

“Micah 6:16 says, ‘For the statutes of Omri are kept, and all the works of the house of Ahab, and ye walk in their counsels; that I should make thee desolation and the inhabitants thereof an hissing: therefore ye shall bear the reproach of my people.’

“After he’s talked to them about the bogus currency and all the other things that are happening, he says, ‘For the statutes of Omri.’

“Notice their walking in the statutes. When it says in Hosea that they ‘willingly walk after the commandments,’ it’s the commandments and statutes of Omri in the house of Ahab.

“Omri’s dynasty with Ahab and Jezebel made Baal worship the official religion of Israel. That nation’s in the complete and total grip of the Adversary and God destroys them from that internal destruction. This is this multi-generational problem; it didn’t just come up in one generation.

“What’s happened now is Israel is completely taken away into that apostate system and they willingly walk in these statutes, and they willingly give their allegiance to the Baal worship system, and there’s a dynasty of it.

“It’s not one generation; it’s a long-term infection and the only answer for it is to destroy the nation; the corrupt government established by it so they could establish a new government.

*****

“Hosea 5:12 says, ‘Therefore will I be unto Ephraim as a moth, and to the house of Judah as rottenness.’

“God says, 'Because they’re in complete apostasy, I’m going to eat away; I’m going to destroy them.'

“A moth and rottenness. That’s stuff that corrupts you from inside. It’s not like somebody just comes along with a blowtorch and burns up your clothes. That moth is in your closet and you go to take something out of the closet and what happens? Now it’s all holes.

“When Ephraim saw his sickness and Judah saw his wound, we read that passage in Isaiah 1 about how the whole body is sick from the top of the head down to the bottom of the feet. There’s a spiritual sickness that’s overtaken them and when Ephraim saw his sickness and Judah saw his wound, they wept.

Hosea 5:13-15 says, ‘When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah saw his wound, then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to king Jareb: yet could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound.

[14] For I will be unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the house of Judah: I, even I, will tear and go away; I will take away, and none shall rescue him.

[15] I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me early.’

******

“Bible commentaries say that that name Jareb, if you count it out in numerics, it comes out to be 666. Who would that be? The Assyrian (Isaiah 10, Micah 5) is identified as the Antichrist.

“So what does Israel do to solve their problem? They turn to Satan’s program. They turn to the wrong guy. The false messiah. ‘Yet could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound.’

“They’re going to look to the Antichrist for help and you know what they’re going to find? There’s no help there. Verse 14 mentions the lion. When Nebuchadnezzar comes against Judah, he’s described in the Book of Jeremiah 50 as a lion. I Peter 5 describes Satan as a ‘roaring lion.’

“The lion is the Antichrist and that’s what God’s going to bring against Israel to tear them; to devour them. He says, ‘I’m going to tear and go away.’ Now, that’s the point here. Verse15: ‘I will go and return to my place till they acknowledge their offence.’ You can circle that word ‘till’ because there’s the ‘nevertheless.’ There’s the hope.

“Notice what God’s going to do. He’s going to go away; ‘return to my place.’ II Chronicles 36:23 says, ‘Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, All the kingdoms of the earth hath the LORD God of heaven given me; and he hath charged me to build him an house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people? The LORD his God be with him, and let him go up.’

“God had said to Israel, ‘I’m going to give you a place where you can meet with me.’ That was the door of the tabernacle. Then when they built the permanent temple, it was at the temple.

“And God placed His name in Jerusalem; the place where He chose to put His dwelling. Now He says, ‘I’m going to leave and I’m going to change my place of residence from here to ‘my place,’ meaning heaven.

“He’s no longer ‘the Lord God of all the earth’; now He’s ‘the Lord God of heaven.’ The reason for that is explained in Hosea 5:14-15. He’s forsaken the earth and He’s gone on exile.

“Where was God supposed to be? Jerusalem. Where was He? He’s in heaven. He told the disciples, ‘When you pray, say ‘Our father which art in heaven.’ That isn’t a good thing. He was supposed to be Emmanuel—‘God with us.’

“And when he says ‘hallowed be thy name.’ Ezekiel 36 says his name was to be hallowed in the earth. That’s why it says, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ ”

*****

In Judges 18, the children of the tribe of Dan show up, “And the priest said unto them, Go in peace: before the LORD is your way wherein ye go.”

Jordan explains, “You know, one of the major marks of this crowd is they’re always talking about peace. ‘Go in peace, my brother.’ ‘Go in peace, my son.’ That’s a hallmark of their message and the Danites say, ‘Why don’t you come and be a priest and a father to us?’

“They’re saying, ‘Hey man, we’ll give you a bigger parish. We’ll give you a bigger congregation. We’ll get you out of that little small church there and you can head up the whole tribe.’

“Now right here is where Baal worship got its foothold in Israel. Micah’s just got his family, but now the whole tribe of Dan is going to be converted to Baal worship.

“Verse 20: ‘And the priest's heart was glad, and he took the ephod, and the teraphim, and the graven image, and went in the midst of the people.

[21] So they turned and departed, and put the little ones and the cattle and the carriage before them.’

“He takes all this religious paraphernalia that he’s using to worship God and packs off with the other guy. Verse 23: ‘And they cried unto the children of Dan. And they turned their faces, and said unto Micah, What aileth thee, that thou comest with such a company?

[24] And he said, Ye have taken away my gods which I made, and the priest, and ye are gone away: and what have I more? and what is this that ye say unto me, What aileth thee? Ye have taken away my gods.’

*****

“Now that’s what happens when your religion is made up of all that external nonsense. When you lose your priest, your idols, your ephod--all this external paraphernalia . . . He says, ‘What do you mean, what ails me?! I don’t have anything left!’

“That’s a great insight into the psyche of people who get caught into this. One of the reasons they hang on to it is because it’s all they’ve got. And you can’t take something away from somebody unless you give them something better in its place.

“That’s why the gospel . . . Thessalonians says they ‘turned to God from idols.’ Not that they turned from idols to God, they turned to God, and when they did, they left the idols.

*****

“Deuteronomy 33:22 is going to match what Jacob said about Dan back in Genesis 49 when he gave those prophecies on the twelve boys. There are various places in your Bible where people give prophetic utterances (statements) about different people. Jacob does it in Genesis 49 about the tribes, the boys.

“In each one of them you’ll see, ‘This is the character of that tribe that comes from that boy.’ Here’s Moses’ assessment: ‘And of Dan he said, Dan is a lion's whelp: he shall leap from Bashan.’

“A whelp is the offspring. Who is the lion? Well, the lion of the tribe of Judah is the Lord Jesus Christ but this is going to be the lion of the tribe of Dan. Well, who’s the counterfeit lion in the Bible? I Peter 5:8. It’s Satan--going around as a ‘roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.’

*****

“That place Bashan is important. Psalm 22. Matt. 27. By the way, there’s no way to understand this stuff if you don’t study all of the Bible. I mean, I tried to use Revelation 17 and Judges 17 because those passages kind of crystallize it. There are three to four other chapters we could have used. But out of them you run all these other places.

“If you don’t understand the rest of Scripture when you read the thing about an ephod, you don’t make the connection between the robes and the long robes and by the way, in II Kings 10, you know what those long robes are called? Vestments. Jehu gathers the Baalite priests into the house of Baal and he gives them their vestments.

“You go into these churches and the lobby out front, you know what you call that? The vestibule. You call it that because that’s where the priests vestments were kept.

“I mean, everything you don’t understand that’s going on out there in the world, if you stay long enough you’ll find the answer to it in Scripture.

“You’ll never understand the real enemy if all you study is Romans through Philemon. If you study those books it becomes very obvious that Paul understood this stuff and expected us to understand it.

*****

“Matt. 27:36. All around that Cross, the only friends Christ had there were Mary and Mary and John; everybody else forsook Him. And the crowd around that Cross mocked Him. He identifies them as the ‘bulls of Bashan.’ In other words, they were carrying out this system right here and they were personified by Israel’s religious leaders. That’s why He told them in John 8, ‘You are of your father the devil.’

“Jeremiah 14:17 and Psalm 16. Here’s what their worship service centers around. Their worship is going to be focused in incense, drink offerings . . . The drink offering is going to be in that golden cup and that golden cup is going to be filled with wine. Rev. 16:4.

“Deuteronomy 32 talks about the ‘pure blood of the grape,’ and these guys when they consecrate that wine, what do they say happens to it? It turns back into blood.

“That’s why in Revelation 17 he calls it ‘MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT.’ When he says ‘mystery,’ he means superstitious mystery religions.

*****

“In I Kings 16, Ahab and Jezebel make Baal worship the official state religion. They go out and rebuild Jericho, a cursed city, and Babylon, a cursed city. And Israel never recovers from that.

“Go to Exodus 32 where they start worshipping the calf. When Moses came down off the mountain, Joshua says there’s the noise of war. Moses says, ‘No, it’s not the noise of war. It’s the noise of people dancing.’ And when he got down there, Exodus 32 says the people were naked. They were dancing naked to music.

“Where did they learn music from? They’re only a couple of days out of Egypt. Egypt in the Bible is a type of the world.

“You hear Christians talk about contemporary Christian music, but it’s just the world’s music and it makes you dance.

“There’s three parts to the language of music—the melody, the harmony and the rhythm. The melody is designed to carry the lyrics. Harmony is designed to bring harmony. When you have two more notes played, they have to be harmonious. It’s designed to make you feel; touch your soul.

“The rhythm is designed to keep it all together. Everybody’s hitting the same note at the same time. The rhythm is designed to make you take action.

“What do you need when you dance? You need the rhythm. My grandson is in the drum line. He says, ‘Grandpa, we control the whole band.’ Why? They can’t even hear it but they can feel it.

“Rev. 2:14. The first time the name Baal appears in your Bible as a stand-alone name not associated with a location is with Baalam back in Numbers 22-24. Baalam was a prophet from the east and Jezebel, she’s a woman preacher. You see the religion’s all in this stuff!

“Revelation 2:20 says, ‘Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.’

“Their worship ends in immorality. That’s what they were doing back in Exodus 32. All of this stuff ends in nothing but an open display and satisfaction of the flesh.

*****

“The thing that holds lost people in the satanic grip is that it all works to enhance the desires of your flesh, and of your mind, and to bind you by that. This religious system ends in that.

“It’s fascinating that both John and the Apostle Paul have the same conclusion about both of these things. In Revelation 18:4 is the prophetic orders.

“What’s Israel to do? Come out! Don’t be a partaker with her! But what was Israel? Joined to idols. Any time you see any of this stuff, run like a scalded dog in the other direction.

“Paul says in I Corinthians 6:15, ‘Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.’

“MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT is the ‘mother of harlots.’ She’s the source of the harlots. You know what the Corinthians are doing? They’re eating things sacrificed to idols.

“I Corinthians 10:20-21 says, ‘But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils.

[21] Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils.’

“Where would you find the table of devils? Don’t you offer cake and drinks and all that stuff around a table?

“Notice what Paul says in verse 14: ‘Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.’ You know what it means to flee? There are just certain things in your life you need to run from. Not just stay away from them; GET away from them!

“And that religious system—it doesn’t all have to get itself in. it just gets its nose under the tent like it did in Judges 17. That started out with that boy’s mama giving him some money to go make him an idol with—and it grew.

“When Paul says in II Corinthians 6:17, ‘Come out from among them and be ye separate,’ that’s what he’s talking about.

“When he says, ‘Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers,’ he’s not talking about, ‘Don’t marry some unsaved person.’ He tells you that in I Corinthians 7. In II Corinthians 6, he’s talking about this thing here! Don’t have fellowship with it! Don’t have communion with it! Don’t have concord with it! Get away from it!”

(new article tomorrow)

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*****
“Did you know that people like Bill Hybels at Willow Creek, and John Piper up in Minneapolis, people of great fame in our day, believe the nation Israel should be left to be destroyed and supplanted by a Palestinian state, and that we should not have a nation Israel in the earth?” informs Jordan.

“You go on the other side of the spectrum, and (popular preachers and theologians) say, ‘Well, they’re God’s people, and if you bless Abraham, you’ll be blessed; if you curse Abraham, you’ll be cursed. So, in order to keep America safe, we need to bless Israel.’

“Both of those things are totally unscriptural. They’ve nothing to do with the Bible. One is a whacked out view that thinks God is through with Israel, and all the promises He ever made to Israel about giving them the land, and giving it to them forever, have been spiritualized and somehow have already been fulfilled, and that all the curses belong to the nation Israel and all the blessings belong to us.

“Both of them just completely abandon a Bible base even though one of them believes there is a future for Israel, as Scripture teaches there is.

“I read that stuff, and I think, ‘What kind of confusion you get in that! No wonder the world out there thinks it’s time to take a couple of Alka-Seltzers and go to bed when people start talking about the Bible.'

“But the day in which we live is a day in which that’s going to change. No matter what the world thinks, you and I are 'the church of the living God.' The false system out there isn’t the criteria; the measure of our ministry isn’t what’s against us but who’s for us.

“The thing you have to understand is the course of a nation in the dispensation of grace is determined by the amount of sound doctrine resident in the populace; that’s going to determine the strength of the true church; not the institutional, civil religion, but the true church and our impact.

“We don’t have to be the majority, we never have been, but the spiritual impact of truth is so powerful. Paul says, ‘As unknown and yet well-known,’ and that’s the way we are, but when that is so diminished it comes to the place where there’s no ability to affect the culture.”

*****
“Simplicity is truth’s most becoming garb,” says Jordan. “It doesn’t have to get all complicated. Every time Paul talks about an inheritance, he never puts an ‘s’ on that word one time. As far as Paul’s concerned there’s only one inheritance. That one inheritance is distributed based upon the capacity; there’s what he calls ‘the reward of the inheritance.’

“There are various positions, stations, responsibilities in the inheritance but it’s still just the one inheritance.

“The issue of reigning with Christ is not the elitist, political reigning that you’re so familiar with; like what Jesus talks about in Mark 10 where you reign like the Gentiles, just having power and being in control and being boss.

“You look at our government today. Some of you older people can remember when we had what we’re called 'statesmen.' You don’t have any of those today.

“I get such a kick out of these guys when they talk about ‘gridlock.’ The president says, ‘I can’t get the Republicans to do anything,' and the Republicans say, ‘We can’t get anything done because of the Democrats.’ All they mean is the other guy won’t capitulate to do what I want. That’s all they’re talking about: ‘We want to reign.’

“So instead of seeing people lead your nation who are grateful for the privilege to serve, you have people who are grabbers of power and want the power to force people to do what they want done. Jesus said, ‘That’s not the way my kingdom works; that’s not the way ruling for God works.’

“You see, having God’s life is to have a life that always just instinctively lives for the benefit of others, never for itself. The Father finds all His pleasure in His Son. When you exalt the Son, who do you exalt? The Father.

*****
“In our situation we’ve been given the same kind of mandate that Adam had, only to do it in the heavenly realm.

“What He gave man on the earth is the example; the visible representation of what our function in the heavens is going to be. We’re going to be in a different dimension but the purpose, the activity, the mandate there is the same as the mandate here. We’re to go there and have dominion just as Adam was to have dominion here. We’re going to do it through the same kind of procedure—the discovering of wisdom, knowledge and understanding and the application of it.

“Colossians 1:9 says, ‘For this cause we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding.’

“Look at chapter two verse two: That their hearts might be comforted, being knit together in love, and unto all riches of the full assurance of understanding, to the acknowledgement of the mystery of God, and of the Father, and of Christ;
[3] In whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

“You see, our job is do just like Adam. God had hidden all these treasures in creation and Adam was to go out and harness that. Our privilege is to find the wisdom, understanding, knowledge that’s hidden in Christ; to harness that and then to put it on display.

“That’s what that thing is in Ephesians 2:7: ‘That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.’

“That’s the exceeding riches where you take that peach and wind up with peach a la mode. What we’re doing is digging out all that hidden wisdom and riches God has put there in Christ and you just develop this entrepreneurial reigning of a servant. It’s sonship service.

*****
“It’s always fascinated me how the Book of Mark starts out. The only one of the synoptic gospels that starts out saying Jesus is the Son of God is the one that’s going to present Him as the servant.

“So what you’re going to see in Mark is the sonship service that the Messiah accomplishes. What is that? That’s simply the service that the Son, an adult in the family, understands the Father’s will and is out carrying on the Father’s business. Not doing His own will; doing the Father’s will.

“And everything He does (‘The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.’) He’s just extracting out of the wisdom, knowledge and understanding God has put there and developing the capacity to do that.

“His plan was for Adam to go out among the trees and discover that and then to extract it out of creation to develop technologies that give Him the opportunity to take creation and make it work.

“An entrepreneur is somebody who takes something and makes new things out of it that add value to what’s already there.” 

(new article tomorrow)

Jealousy eats Esau's lunch

The word Edom means ‘red,’ from the red pottage Esau sold his birthright for, saying to Jacob, “Behold, I am at the point to die: and what profit shall this birthright do to me?”

Jordan explains, “What’s Esau interested in? Spiritual things or physical things? He’s just self-serving. He’s saying, ‘I don’t need anything from God. I’m sufficient for myself. I don’t need to be into what God has to do. I can lose God and I don’t lose anything. I can lose the birthright, the blessing, the Abrahamic Covenant—I can lose that and I haven’t lost a thing.’

“It says Esau despised his birthright. Now you go to Hebrews 12 and you learn he later on repents and had sought to change the deal. You know the story of his dad Isaac trying to bless him. Listen, Isaac knew who ought to have been blessed. He knew what the prophecy was and you know how mom comes in there and gets the blessing for Jacob.

“When God said He hated Esau, He’s talking about Edom, the descendants of Esau. It’s the contempt that Esau and Edom had for the Abrahamic Covenant; for the plan of God through Jacob.

*****

“Lot’s daughters commit incest and become pregnant by their daddy and when they do that, Genesis 19: 36-38 says, ‘Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.
[37] And the firstborn bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.
[38] And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Benammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day.’

“When you go through the Scriptures and read about the Moabites, they were Lot’s incestuous children. Lot is Abraham’s nephew. Lot understood the Abrahamic Covenant and the blessing and made some bad choices and winds up with a bunch of kids, the Moabites.

“The Moabites settle in what we call central Jordan and the Ammonites in northern Jordan. So all that territory of Jordan is settled by Abraham’s kin folk and all of them hate him. They hate his descendants; they’re mad at them.

“If you go to Numbers 22, you find it’s the Moabite king Balak who hires Balaam to curse Israel. He’s trying to invoke the Abrahamic curse on Israel because he thinks he ought to have it himself.

“There’s this ancient hatred among all of Abraham’s family that’s aimed at Abraham’s descendants because they’re jealous of them; it’s because of the covenant promising those descendants . . .

“That long-standing strife and enmity--the Moabites and Ammonites were at war with Israel all along. It’s fascinating that Abraham’s descendants are literally surrounded by nations of people who are, to one degree or another, relatives and they all hate them with a perpetual hatred that goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis.

“This isn’t anything new and that’s why Israel in the land has always been hated by the people around them. It’s really a family feud. It’s jealously over the fact God selected Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and the 12 tribes and that’s the seed line.”

*****

Here’s an explanation of the seed line:

“In Genesis, God says the Messiah’s going to be ‘the seed of the woman.’ Right there He eliminated half of the human race because of male and female. Then He says He’s going to be the seed of Abraham. One nation out of all the nations in the earth. See how He narrows it?

“But then when He says it’s going to be the seed of Abraham, it’s not going to be just any seed of Abraham. Abraham had a whole bunch of kids. Remember that? First he had Ismael, then Isaac. After Sarah died he got married again and had a bunch more kids. A lot of folks forget that.

“Well, God said it’s not going to Ismael and that other clan; it’s going to be Isaac. He narrowed it down again. Isaac’s got two kids, Esau and Jacob. He said of those two it will only be Jacob’s. Then Jacob has 12 tribes that come out of him, and God said of those 12 it’s only going to be the tribe of Judah.

“Then He says out of that tribe of Judah, it’s not going to be just anybody. As Isaiah 11:1 says, ‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.’

“Jesse is a descendant of Judah but now it’s going to be not just anybody out of Judah, it’s going to have to be somebody who descends from the family of Jesse. Jesse had a whole bunch of boys and it was only David who got chosen out of them.

“That’s why Matthew 1:1 says, ‘The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.’

“If you look at Psalm 132:11, it says, ‘The LORD hath sworn in truth unto David; he will not turn from it; Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy throne.’

“The Messiah is going to sit upon the throne, but when He does, it’s going to be the fruit of David’s body that He sits in. That’s why He’s called ‘the lion of the tribe of Judah,’ because that’s what David is.”

(new article tomorrow)

Tit for tat for Palestinians

Palestinians are the modern-day descendants of the ancient Edomites found in Old Testament. A sub-group of the Arabs, the Edomites are from southern Jordan and Palestine over toward Gaza.

Richard Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org) explains, “People are always talking about how the Palestinians need a state to have a country of their own, but, well, they’re Arabs. If they need a homeland, you’d think the Saudi Arabians or the Jordanians would take them in. But the Jordanians, for one, won’t let them in; they don’t want them.

“Literally, the Book of Obadiah, for one, is looking at, prophesying about, telling you what’s going to happen in the future to the people we today call the Palestinians.

“Now, the prophets use ancient terminology; they’ll talk about Teman, Dedan and mount Seir. They didn’t know how to say Jordan because there wasn’t a Jordan until after WW I. They couldn’t say Saudi Arabia because there was no Saudi Arabia, as the country, until the 20^th Century.

“Notice in Zephaniah 2:4, it says, ‘For Gaza shall be forsaken, and Ashkelon a desolation: they shall drive out Ashdod at the noon day, and Ekron shall be rooted up.’

“You know where the Gaza Strip is today. That verse is talking about the Palestinian territories. Verse 11 says, ‘The LORD will be terrible unto them: for he will famish all the gods of the earth; and men shall worship him, every one from his place, even all the isles of the heathen.’

“Now, if God famishes all the gods of the earth, what does that tell you about Islam? We’ll see as we go down through Obadiah the association between the Edomites and terrorism, religious-based terrorism, and how God’s going to set that right and destroy it.

*****
“It’s fascinating how this little one-chapter book has so much in it about, well, not current events because the things going on today in the ‘dispensation of grace’ aren’t the prophetic program, but before the tribulation can start, there are things that have to be in place. For example, Israel has to be in the land.

“You have to have some things in place that until the last 100 years, they didn’t exist. In 1947, Israel became a nation-state for the first time in two millenniums.

“All the prophecies about Israel being in the land have always been there, and Bible-believers have believed them, but then you see it happen and you say, ‘Well, that’s not the fulfillment of prophecy, but it certainly looks like a stage-setting,’ and as the stage is set, you can begin to see with some of these passages, ‘Oh, it’s going to look like THAT when it happens!’

“Obadiah and Jeremiah (both of which have some almost identical verses because they both are contemporary to the Babylonian captivity) look at the near-captivity and the far-captivity. That’s why in Obadiah verse 15, the key verse in the book, he says ‘For the day of the LORD is near upon all the heathen: as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head.'

“That’s the future, prophetically. What happens in these minor prophets is they see the near and the far, but it’s all a continuous vision. What they see back there loops over and happens again.

 “The hatred you see today has been there since the Book of Genesis. God’s going to destroy them because of it. The Book of Obadiah is talking about that specific issue; about why it happens and what will happen in the future.

“There must be 15-20 people in the Bible named Obadiah and while the Book of Obadiah never identifies which one it is, you know the book’s written in light of the Babylonian captivity, so it’s got to be connected with that.

*****

“In Genesis 21, Abraham and Sarah have two boys—Isaac and Ishmael. With his wife Rebekah, Isaac has the twins, Esau and Jacob. The reason God talks about being the ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,’ is because He’s the God of Isaac, not Ishmael, and Jacob, not Esau. There’s a selecting by God going on there.

“After Sarah died Abraham took a wife named Keturah and they had six kids. He winds up with a total of 16 kids, but the seed’s going to be through Jacob.

“Genesis 25 says that when Rebekah was pregnant with Isaac’s sons, 'the children struggled together within her; and she said, If it be so, why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the LORD.
[23] And the LORD said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb, and two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels; and the one people shall be stronger than the other people; and the elder shall serve the younger.
[24] And when her days to be delivered were fulfilled, behold, there were twins in her womb.
[25] And the first came out red, all over like an hairy garment; and they called his name Esau.

“Notice Esau is red. You know anyone else in the Bible who’s red? Revelation 12 talks about the great red dragon. You see the red heifer in Numbers 19. Same kind of association.

“Esau, in scripture, is going to be a type of the flesh, but he’s also going to be a type of the rebel that, instead of loving God’s plan and purpose for the nation Israel (God’s plan for Abraham and his descendants), hates it.

“People refer to Jacob as having stolen the birthright from Esau, but the truth is he bought it (with the pot of beans Esau traded it for). Obviously Jacob saw the value in being Abraham and Isaac’s heir. Jacob, for all his conniving, understood something about spiritual heritage that was being passed on from Abraham to his dad, Isaac, and would be passed on to Isaac’s heir. Esau, on the other hand, had no interest in it.

“Esau’s descendants are the Edomites and they populate the land on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, the land of Seir. It’s fascinating that there’s two dozen different passages about the Edomites as the thorns in Israel’s flesh.

“God says in Ezekiel 25, ‘And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel: and they shall do in Edom according to mine anger and according to my fury; and they shall know my vengeance . . .Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a despiteful heart, to destroy it for the old hatred.’

“Notice the phrase ‘old hatred.’ When Christ comes back He’s going to destroy these nations because of an ancient, perpetual hatred they have against Israel. Esau hated Jacob and he taught his descendants to hate Jacob and Jacob’s descendants.

“Obadiah verses 8-10, says, ‘Shall I not in that day, saith the LORD, even destroy the wise men out of Edom, and understanding out of the mount of Esau?
[9] And thy mighty men, O Teman, shall be dismayed, to the end that every one of the mount of Esau may be cut off by slaughter.
[10] For thy violence against thy brother Jacob shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off for ever.’

“The Book of Malachi begins with, [1] The burden of the word of the LORD to Israel by Malachi.
[2] I have loved you, saith the LORD. Yet ye say, Wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? saith the LORD: yet I loved Jacob,
[3] And I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste for the dragons of the wilderness.
[4] Whereas Edom saith, We are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the LORD of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall call them, The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the LORD hath indignation for ever.

“Malachi’s not talking about Jacob the man. He’s talking about Jacob the nation. Two nations are going to come of them. It’s brother fighting against brother in their descendants.

*****

“As Ezekiel 35: 5 says, [5] Because thou hast had a perpetual hatred, and hast shed the blood of the children of Israel by the force of the sword in the time of their calamity, in the time that their iniquity had an end.’

“That’s a passage about the fifth course of judgment. When Israel is carried off into captivity, the Edomites are there, watching it, going, ‘Hee-hee, get ’em! They deserve it! Hit ’em again for us!’ They don’t just say, ‘Hey, glad you’re going’; they go in and plunder and rob them.

“Even the ones Nebuchadnezzar didn’t get, the Edomites tattle, ‘Here, now they’re hiding over here.’ So full and complete was their hatred of Israel that they wouldn’t let any of them try and escape.

“Psalm 137 says, [7] Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
[8] O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
[9] Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

“People read that and get aghast, thinking, ‘How could these Jews say they were going to be happy when the Babylonians’ kids are punished and destroyed?!’

“Well, what the Israelites are saying is, ‘Him that curseth thee, I will curse.’ What the Babylonians are getting back is what they GAVE Israel, that’s all. They would come in and slaughter the whole family, babies and all.

“Remember Obadiah verse 15 says, ‘For the day of the LORD is near upon all the heathen: as thou hast done, it shall be done unto thee: thy reward shall return upon thine own head.’

“That is a statement of God’s foreign policy in connection with His client nation, the nation Israel. Israel is His nation in the earth, and His statement to all the other nations is, ‘You curse them, I’ll curse you in kind. What you do to them, I’ll do to you.’

“Psalm 137 is about curse-for-curse and that’s really what the Book of Obadiah is all about. There’s some sequences in it that are very helpful in ordering some of the events in the tribulation, but the functional issue of the book is, ‘He’s going to give them back what they gave to Israel.’

“Obadiah verse 3 says, ‘The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the ground?’

“In other words, ‘You’ve exalted yourself and for that exalted position, I’m going to bring you down.’

“Notice how He does it in verse 7: ‘All the men of thy confederacy have brought thee even to the border: the men that were at peace with thee have deceived thee, and prevailed against thee; they that eat thy bread have laid a wound under thee: there is none understanding in him.’

“The Edomites get into a confederacy with other nations who use the Edomites’ pride to deceive them into being a vehicle to accomplish somebody else’s purpose. In other words, they’re overturned by treachery. Well, what did they do to Israel?

“They indulged in treachery against Jacob, so they’re going to be overturned by treachery of their friends. Obadiah verse 13 says, ‘Thou shouldest not have entered into the gate of my people in the day of their calamity; yea, thou shouldest not have looked on their affliction in the day of their calamity, nor have laid hands on their substance in the day of their calamity;’

So if you go back to verses 5-6: [5] If thieves came to thee, if robbers by night, (how art thou cut off!) would they not have stolen till they had enough? if the grapegatherers came to thee, would they not leave some grapes?
[6] How are the things of Esau searched out! how are his hidden things sought up!

“If you read down through the first 16 verses in Obadiah, what you see is the kind of tit-for-tat back and forth. And then you come down to verse 17: ‘But upon mount Zion shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness; and the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions.’

“Now, that’s a famous phrase you hear from preachers about how Believers need to ‘possess their possessions.’ It’s sort of like the verse, ‘Salvation is of the Lord.’ I’ve hardly met a preacher who knows where that verse is. By the way, it’s in the very next book, Jonah.

“What are their possessions? Well, it’s the land. God takes it and gives it to Jacob. God has a specific solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and that’s the kingdom. But inside that He has some very specific things to be done in order to resolve all of those territorial disputes in such a way that brings about a resolution to it all.”

(new article tomorrow)

Generation upon generation of tragedy

Working on a new article to post tomorrow. In the meantime:

“The problem is the role of fathers has just been totally decimated, and the war on fatherhood has been waged with such devastating force that, I tell you, our culture has sentenced the next three to four generations to a disastrous tragedy upon tragedy. The Bible talks about the sins of the fathers being visited on the third and fourth generations. When you raise a wicked generation of fathers, it takes 3-4 generations to root out the evil that’s produced in a culture, and you’re going to have generation upon generation of tragedy”—Richard Jordan

*****

Jewish historian Josephus observes, “Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it was through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power…”

*****

Proverbs 30:11 says “there is a generation that curseth their father, and doth not bless their mother.”

When Jesus Christ said, ‘This generation shall not pass until all be fulfilled,’ He said of the generation He was talking about, “O generation of vipers who hath warned thee to flee from the wrath to come?”

Jordan explains, “When He talks about a generation, He’s not talking about a period of time somebody lives. We talk about the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. He’s not talking about that. He’s saying, ‘You were generated; you were created by snakes.’ Who is the viper? Satan.

“In other words, ‘You’re the offspring; your father is the devil.’ The generation is talking about the SOURCE where something comes from and in that Last Day, look at Proverbs 31:1: ‘The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.’

*****

“You see the Book of Proverbs is not just a book of history. It’s a book written for the prophetic program specifically to give the Little Flock in Israel, in the Last Days, some wisdom to stand against the lie program; to stand against the ‘strange woman who rides the beast.’

“There’s a generation that will be there and they love ‘Give me! Give me!’ Here’s one of the characteristics of that apostate generation in Proverbs 30:14: ‘There is a generation, whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men.’

“In Matthew 23:13 is just one illustration of how this stuff fits: ‘But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation.’

“Those hypocrites are the ones Jesus said, ‘You are of your father the devil.’

“Now, if you devour a widow’s house, aren’t you doing what that verse is talking about there? ‘Whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men.’

“How did they do that? They devoured widows’ houses and for a pretense make long prayers.

“Think about that for minute. Here’s a widow and you’re going to devour her house, and the way you’re going to do it is by pretense, making long prayers. Who would a widow want you to be praying for?

*****

“You ever hear of anybody praying for the dead? Well, a widow’s got a dead husband. You’ll find back in the Book of Maccabees, one the Apocryphal books, the whole issue.

“In fact, if you ask a Roman Catholic, ‘Why do you pray for the dead?’ they go to the Book of Maccabees and quote a passage that tells you what the Pharisees taught about praying for the dead. What are they doing? They’re going to that extreme with their religion just to get and suck.

“Here’s what they look like. Proverbs 30:15 says, ‘The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, Give, give. There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough.’

“It’s, ‘Give! Give! We need more money! We got more expenses! The mortgage’s got to be paid. We got to reach out! More, more, more! Give, give, give!’

“You see, they’ve perverted the truth of God into a system of enrichment. Micah 3 says, ‘Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob, and princes of the house of Israel, that abhor judgment, and pervert all equity.

[10] They build up Zion with blood, and Jerusalem with iniquity.

[11] The heads thereof judge for reward, and the priests thereof teach for hire, and the prophets thereof divine for money: yet will they lean upon the LORD, and say, Is not the LORD among us? none evil can come upon us.

[12] Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest.’

“In other words, the princes and the kings and the rulers of the nation are judging for money. ‘The priest thereof teach for hire. The prophets thereof divine for money.’

“When you see all that stuff in religion today, it ain’t nothing new. Hosea 8 says, ‘Israel hath forsaken God and built temples,’ and you see that going on today. Build monuments and to keep them going you got to, ‘Give! Give! Give!’

“In Israel at this time, the politicians, the priesthood, the prophets--it’s just suck, suck, suck out of the people. That’s why He wrote over it, ‘Ichabod, the glory’s departed.’

“So the indictment against Israel, the sins as He proclaims them, have to do with being corrupted into a nation that can’t be used by God, because this false religious system has so corrupted the thinking of the people, and of the leaders, that they have no ability to even identify the truth.”

*****

Isaiah 14 is a prophecy about the Antichrist. “It’s not talking about Lucifer in the beginning; it’s talking about the Antichrist at the end,” confirms Jordan. “What you have here is Israel, as Satan is thrown down into hell (verse 9 says, ‘Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming’), literally casting a proverb into the mouth of the Adversary.

“Verse 4 says, ‘That thou shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon, and say, How hath the oppressor ceased! the golden city ceased!’

“They’re literally going to mock him as he goes off into the bottomless pit. What they’re going to say to him is in verse 13: ‘For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.’

“It’s, ‘Here’s what you said back in the beginning. Look at what it’s got you!’

*****

“So verses 13-15 are going to give you the original plan Satan had. The goal of it is to be like the most high God, but notice the steps he’s going to use all have to do with ‘high places’--taking God’s place in the heavens, and in the government there, and having control; the religion.

When he says, ‘I will ascend into the heavens,’ he’s going to ascend up to the top position and assume rulership.

“ ‘I will exalt my throne.’ Notice he has a throne. In the original order of things, Lucifer had authority, but it wasn’t enough. He says, ‘I’m going to exalt my throne ABOVE the stars of God. I’m going to become the ruler over the angelic creation. All of it! I’m going to be the one who has the opportunity to dictate its directions, and talk about and explain what it’s going to do.’

“ ‘I will also sit upon the sides of the north.’ ‘I’m not only going to be the head ruler, I’m going to be the one people come to and give account.’

*****

The mount of the congregation on the sides of the north is a location in the universe.

“You remember in Job 1 when the angels came to appear before God and Satan came with him? Have you ever wondered how Satan got to come up into heaven and talk to God? The dirty rascal. Well, he didn’t go to the third heaven. That’s not where he met. He met on a place the Bible calls ‘the mount of the congregation.’

“It’s a planet in the universe where the angels would congregate and give account for their activity. It was an accounting thing. That’s what they were doing in Job. That’s why he asked the devil, ‘Where do you come from?’ He said, ‘From going to and fro in the earth. I control the earth. I’m down there running what I control down there!’

“That mount of the congregation on the sides of the north is the . . . when you talk about the sides of something, you go back in Samuel, and Saul is pursuing David, and David hides in a cave--he’s in the sides of the cave. What that’s talking about is the farthest back recesses of the cave.

“When he talks about ‘the sides of the north,’ he’s talking about the upper region of the north up here. The universe has an identifiable shape to it. It has locations to it. There is a north (not magnetic north in the earth) but a north relative to the universe and that north is where God’s throne is.

“New Jerusalem is north. It would do you well to always know which way north is. There is a place up there in the sides of the north where God calls His angels together and Satan says, ‘I want the whole universe to be accountable to me. I want them to be answerable to me.’

“Then Satan says, ‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds.’ God’s throne is surrounded by clouds. In Samuel, when Hannah and David talk about it, He dwells in the darkness. That’s because when Paul says He dwells ‘in the light which no man can approach,’ God holds back that glory with a veil.

“Satan says, ‘I’m going to go sit up there where He sits! I’m going to be the one that the universe worships! I’m going to be the one whose plan the universe is executing!’ ”