“You hear a lot of discussion among evangelicals railing against post-modernism, but when you go looking for a definition, it’s strange how they don’t have one,” says Jordan. “Relativism is really what they’re talking about and it’s just Genesis 3; that there are no absolute standards.”
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If you type “worship him in spirit and truth,” into Google there are said to be more than 1.8 million results. In John 4, Jesus Christ informs the woman at the well that it isn’t about religion and outward stuff. He says, "God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."
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“When you talk about the essence of God and who He is, there’s always this issue of Psalm 14: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God,’ " says Jordan. "That statement you find again in Psalm 53, which is almost an identical psalm.
“Somebody says, ‘Well, that’s the wish in his heart; it’s what he says in his heart.’ There are all kind of anti-theistic ideas.
"When the Bible says you’re going to worship God and the essence of God, the idea is He’s a spirit. You’re not going to know Him in the physical realm. So a fool, somebody who thinks that all there is the physical, material world to relate to, says there is no God.
“Because God is a spirit, in order to be qualified to work with Him, you have to connect with Him at that level. The problem with man, descended from Adam, is we’ve been separated from God because of our sin.
“We’re spiritually unqualified, and so what the New Covenant does is it brings the spiritual qualification; the spiritual status whereby we can work with God, who is a spirit. When you work with Him, that’s where it all has to start.
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“In the Book of John, God’s plans and purpose were with the nation Israel, but we now know He had more plans than just with Israel and that we’re now a part of the household of God, too.
“Genesis 1:1 says, ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’ Think about that verse because when we talk about ‘rightly dividing’ the Word, the first verse in the Bible divided something; it divided the universe into two parts.
“That one division right there; if you get that you’ll get everything else that happens in the Bible, and if you don’t, you won’t get the Bible.
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“Paul says in Ephesians 3:16: ‘That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man.’
That word ‘might’ that Paul uses there is the same word as the verse that says, ‘Through mighty signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God; so that from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum, I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.’
“You see, the powerful working of the power of God in your life . . . he tells the Thessalonians to do the work of faith with power, but that’s a spiritual power in your inner man. It’s not moving cold fronts and snow storms kind of stuff. And it’s not coming in and zapping you and making your hair stand up on end.
"There’s this inner working of the power of God, but all of that is according to a plan called ‘wisdom,’ and God’s essence works together with all that.
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“One of the things ‘right division’ does is it takes you out of all that superstitious nonsense business and helps you to appreciate the wisdom of God. It isn’t about power.
“You’ve got these ‘word of faith’ preachers where it’s all about POWER—you make God move in your behalf and it gets so confusing: ‘I’m suffering but I’m resisting. I’m claiming God’s healing and, because I am, I’m resisting, but I’m still sick.’
“You know, it’s, ‘Resist the devil and he’ll flee from you, but he’s still whacking me!' The preacher says, ‘Well, you just keep resisting and that’s godly suffering.’ I’m thinking, ‘Godly suffering! That’s a fool’s errand, is what that is! There’s nothing God-like about that!’
“You know how many times in the Bible when somebody would tell a demon to flee? If somebody says, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ’ for a demon to flee, what would the demon do?
“He’s got no power against the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ! I know, somebody says, ‘Well, over there in Mark 5 he didn’t go right away.’ Yeah, but you got no idea in the world anything about Mark 5, so don’t start telling me about that stuff. That demon didn’t want to leave the land; he didn’t care anything about leaving the guy. He went in the pigs. He might have thought that was a step up, I don’t know.
“There’s stuff going on there (in the Four Gospels) that people don’t have any idea about what’s going on and yet they all talk about ‘spiritual power.’ What they’re all talking about is just superstitious nonsense.
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“When you understand the essence of God, then you understand Jesus Christ is God the Son, the second person of the godhead, who took upon Him the essence of man--spirit, soul and body-- and holds each together in one person.
"That’s our contact point and that’s why God made Him to be sin for us that we might be made His righteousness. Christ’s the point where the justice of God puts us and where things are set right, and now we’re compatible with all the essence of God.
“I think about that and say, ‘WOW, whoa, what a thrilling thing it is; we now are spiritually qualified to be used by God in his plans and his purposes in the universe.’
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“All of God’s attributes work together in harmony and there are two essences that function together to make God’s integrity, or His holiness.
“It’s made up of righteousness, which is the standard of His integrity, and justice, which is the function of His integrity.
“Righteousness is the perfect rightness of God; His capacity as complete and total perfection in character. His justice is always right—perfect rightness. His justice judges or blesses people and takes action. If you don’t match His righteousness then there’s judgment. If you do, there’s blessing.
“Our point of contact with God, when you think of His essences, is not His love; it’s His justice. We think of God’s love like our love and it isn’t like our love. God’s love is the motivator of His other essences and it’s the love of God that motivated the justice of God to develop a plan.
“When you think of salvation, justification and our redemption in Christ Jesus, and you begin to watch the different essences of God work together, His love motivates God. It motivated His omniscience; God’s all-knowingness.
“Omniscience is His wisdom. He has perfect wisdom, so God’s love motivates His wisdom to devise a wise plan of redemption and reconciliation and restoration. His justice is going to be motivated to develop a plan whereby lost, sinful man can be restored. The plan is called grace.
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“Romans 3:25-26 says, [25] Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God;
[26] To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.
“God’s justice had faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, in the fact God could take our sin and impute it onto His Son and that that would be a right thing to do; that would satisfy the righteous standard of God and that He then could take Christ’s righteousness and impute it to us.
“So God is just and the justifier. Our sin isn’t put under the rug and just ignored, where He just loves us in spite of ourselves. What His justice did was demand that His righteousness be honored and hence, Jesus Christ comes.
“I mean, who would have ever thought to have asked God to do that for you?! That’s what that verse in Ephesians 3 is talking about! ‘Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us.’
“Forget about asking Him; you would have never thought about suggesting that to God! But His omniscience thought about it. His love motivated Him, but His justice executed the plan and it’s always through His justice that we contact Him.”
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