My Life and Books (6) Kingdom Authority

When I was a young Christian, I studied the New Testament avidly. I very quickly noticed that Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God far more than he talked about the church. He preached the good news of the Kingdom of God. I realised that it was important to understand the nature of the Kingdom. It took me a long time to come to a full understanding.

Since I decided to follow Jesus fifty years ago, I have been zealous for the kingdom of God. I wrote a book called the Glorious Kingdom in the 1980s, but no one was interested in the Kingdom back then, (and it was badly written) so it flopped. “Prophetic” was the popular buzzword at that time, with prophetic conferences and books on prophetic leadership.

A decade later, “apostolic” had become the popular adjective. Books were being written about apostolic government, apostolic leadership and apostolic reformation. That fad seems to have passed and “kingdom” has now become the adjective that everyone is using to describe what God is doing.

Authority is the heart of every kingdom. If there is no authority, there is no kingdom. Therefore, to understand the Kingdom of God, we must understand how authority works, in heaven and on earth.

Everything in this universe is shaped by authority. In the beginning, God said, “Let it be” and it was. He had authority over everything. Two chapters later, God said, “Let us give authority to humans”. Why on earth did he do that? When Jesus was being tempted, the devil said, “I have authority over all the kingdoms of the world”. How did that happen?

When Jesus preached the gospel, the people recognised his authority. Who gave him authority? By the end of the gospel Jesus was saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me”. How did that happen? The Book of Revelation says that Jesus has authority to open the scrolls that release God’s activity on earth. How does that work?

My book called Kingdom Authority describes the history of authority in both the spiritual and physical realms. It explains the big authority shifts that have had massive impacts on earth. Most theologies jump from the fall straight to the cross, without much need for the stuff in between. That is a mistake, as if we ignore the events described in the Old Testament, we will fail to understand everything God is doing, and the big authority shifts that have constrained him.

If we do not know about authority, we will not understand why evil has been so active on earth. God gave authority over the earth to humans. The forces of evil have been active on earth, because humans gave them authority, while God did not have the authority he needed to deal with evil. It took a special human do that, and until he came the powers of evil had a ball. Jesus preached the gospel of the Kingdom of God. This raises a couple of serious questions.

Jesus prayed that God’s authority would be done on earth and it is in heaven. How did the God who created the universe end up losing authority over the earth? What happened on earth and in heaven that meant his authority on earth has to be restored?

Why has God taken so long? Things went wrong on earth right at the beginning. Yet God let thousands of years go by before he sent Jesus to put things right. Why did he let evil go on for so long, before something about it?

To understand these questions, we must understand the working of authority and the big shifts in authority that have shaped history on earth. The big shifts in authority are described in Kingdom Authority. It also describes God’s plan for getting back the authority lost to the spiritual powers of evil and establishing his Kingdom on earth.

Human politics are an obstacle to the Kingdom of God because they use Imposed Authority, which empowers the powers of evil. Government-spirits have leveraged their feeble power by controlling political and military authorities. In contrast, God refuses to impose his authority on earth using force and coercion. He rejects all forms of political and military power. Instead, he calls people to serve him and freely submit to his will because they love Jesus.

More about Kingdom Authority.

My Life and Books (5) Healing

About a year after I chose to follow Jesus, I was feeling really frustrated. I felt like I had not made much progress in learning how to follow him. It felt like I had not changed enough.

I talked to the young woman who led the study and fellowship group we belonged to. She had been a Christian most of her life, but she did not give me answers. She wisely suggested that I read the book of Acts and see if I could find out what made a difference for the new believers in the church.

I quickly read right through the book of Acts looking for the thing that made a difference. The answer jumped out from every page. Things happened and people were changed because the Holy Spirit was active. I realised that I desperately needed the Holy Spirit in my life.

The next Friday night, I went to town and visited a Christian bookstore. I bought three books about the Holy Spirit. One of them was the “The Holy Spirit and You” by Dennis Bennett. He was better known for “Nine O’Clock in the Morning”, but I did not notice that one.

On Saturday morning, my wife went to work at 6.30 am. I did not get up, but stayed in bed and read the Holy Spirit and You. By midday, I had finished the book. At the end of the book, Dennis Bennett referred to a promise in Luke 11. I got my Bible and I read it carefully.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him! (Luke 11:9-13).

As I sat in my bed, it seemed obvious. I needed the Holy Spirit. The Father had promised that if I asked, he would give him to me.

So I asked.

And the Father delivered on his promise.

The Holy Spirit filled me with his presence. I began to speak in a language that I did not know (a spiritual language has been an important part of my life ever since.) It was like in the book of Acts, but in my bedroom. I gained the joy of having the Holy Spirit in my life, and began to push into what he wanted to do in my life.

When we moved to Dunedin, we belonged to a group called “Prayer and Praise”. The Holy Spirit was moving and we often prayed for people who were sick. Being a curious person, I got a notebook and listed every person we prayed for and what was wrong. The following week, I would check up and see how the person was.

After a couple of months I was surprised by the results. About a third of cases were uncertain. For example, a person had a cold and a week later, they were better, but it was not possible to definitely attribute that directly to the prayer, because they would have gotten better anyway. For another third, nothing happened. But the remaining third were clearly healed, and it seemed like it could only be the Holy Spirit who had done it. Over those few months, a dozen people were healed of sicknesses.

The problem is that once you have seen the Holy Spirit heal one person, you are ruined. You can no longer say that God does not heal people anymore. You cannot say that the Holy Spirit does not want to heal people, because you have seen it with your own eyes.

That experience set me off on a searching path over many years. I was puzzled why some people were healed and others were not. It was not because the Holy Spirit is not strong enough to do it. There had to be other reasons and I wanted to know what they were.

So I dug into the scriptures and looked for patterns. I investigated every healing in the Bible and studied every passage that dealt with healing. I discovered some real insights. I put everything I have learned in a little book called Healing. It does not contain all the answers, but the book does have some important insights.

In some ways, this is the most important book I have written, yet it is actually the least popular. I suspect that it because many Christians have given up on the gift of healing and just accepted sickness as a normal part of life. That is sad, because Jesus was beaten for our healing, so it would be a pity if his suffering were wasted.

Jesus told his disciples to heal the sick and preach the good news of the kingdom. That is what he did. We tend to preach the good news, but we do not bother about the other bit. But Jesus never said it was optional. The best proof of the reality and love of God, and his power to rescue, is someone being healed. In this secular age, the good news of Jesus will only be successful in the way we want it to be when it is accompanied by the gift of healing.

My prayer is that followers of Jesus will press into the Holy Spirit and discover more of the gift of healing that the Father promised.

More at Keys to Healing and Insights for Christian Healing.

My Life and Books (4) Times and Seasons

Reviewing numbers was a key role during my secular employment. I discovered that I have ability to spot patterns in numbers that other people often miss. Sometimes it would be a discrepancy. Other times, it would be a common pattern in data that seemed to be disconnected. This ability more than anything made me good at my work.

This ability translated over to my study of the scriptures. For the first twenty years after I chose to follow Jesus, I read the Old Testament through every year (two chapters and a Psalm a day gets it done). My mother had read from Egermeier's Bible Story Book when we were children, so I began with a good understanding of Biblical history. I read the New Testament as well.

During my reading, I discovered patterns that other people did not see. I saw important connections between the Old and the New Testaments. I began to understand that God was not working by trial and error, but had a plan to restore the world and his people, right from the moment when Adam and Eve messed things up by rejecting his wisdom. He is still working on that strategy.

Soon after I chose to follow Jesus, I read a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay. Everybody was into this book at that time. It explained that we were in the end-times and that world is stuffed. Jesus would return soon to rescue his people. This escape message was popular at that time (more time has proved it wrong).

I initially accepted the message of the book, but wanted to check it out against the scriptures. I was stunned when I did this, because when I examined them carefully, his teaching was just not there. He had wrenched a few verses out of their context, and turned them into a gloomy prophecy for the future, whereas the scriptures are full of hope.

I wanted an understanding of history and God’s plan for the future that was consistent with the broad and deep hope of the scriptures. So I studied the book of Revelation in detail and began looking for patterns. I searched out all the images in Revelation that described the same event and put them together to see how the account of God’s plan unfolded.

I also looked for patterns across the Old and New Testaments, and began to see how they all fitted together. I discovered that God has a plan and purpose for the earth that is far more wonderful than the doom and gloom of Hal Lindsay’s book.

I discovered that the next big event is not a secret rapture in which God takes all the believers out of the world, along with his Holy Spirit. (Why would he do that if he cared about his creation.)

I discovered that God plans to establish the fullness of his Kingdom here on earth as the Holy Spirit works through his people.

I discovered that the next big events in human history are the Jewish people coming to faith in Jesus and the collapse of big government. These events will come during a time of distress. These events are pivotal, because they will remove the last obstacles to the Kingdom of God coming in fullness.

I preached a series of sermons that outlined what I had learned to the church at Waikaka Valley. Again, one of the elders suggested that I put it together in a book, so more people could learn what I had discovered. After a couple of false starts, I put this material together in a book called Times and Seasons. It explains God’s plans for history and how they will climax in the fullness of his Kingdom.

Times and Seasons describes how human governments seize more and more power to deal with the economic and social crises that their mistakes have created. They will collapse under the weight of their pride and hubris, which will provide an opportunity for God’s people who are prepared. During a season of distress, they will work with the Holy Spirit to proclaim the gospel and bring in the Kingdom of God.

My Life and Books (3) Grow Where You Are

After I resigned from parish ministry, I began 33 years of employment in a public sector organisation 1984. We had moved to Christchurch with three young children, so we badly needed a home and income. There were not many jobs going at that time, so I took the one I was offered, even though it did not seem to be right, assuming that something better would turn up.

I had resigned on a principle of faith, so I presume I was hoping for something more spiritual, or more important. It took me quite a long time to realise that God had put me in this place to bless me. Some of the things I have gained over the 33 years in employment include the following.

• My first manager was a really good writer, something that I always struggled with. She taught me to write clearly and precisely. She showed me that using the right words is essential for communicating a message. I did not realise at the time how important that would become.

• Four ten years, I was responsible for editing many of the organisation’s information releases. I learned how to produce really tight writing, with clear, readable, concise, accurate information.

• I was manager of large division for five years. I really struggled with this task, but I learned a lot about how good leaders operate and relate to the people following them.

• Just as I had to be a pastor of a church to discover what the church could be, I needed to be part of a large bureaucracy to understand how bureaucratic organisations can lose their way. Bureaucratic or political power can bring out the worst in people.

• For the last twelve years before retiting, my role was advisory. I had to learn how to have an influence in situations where I had very little authority. I discovered that people are not necessarily persuaded by the truth or strength of your arguments. Influence depends much more on the quality of your relationships and strength of their respect of you.

• I worked with some incredibly clever conceptual thinkers. I learned how to work through step-by-step from first principles to realistic practical solutions. I learned how to expose implausible assumptions and false logic.

• I interacted with a diverse range of people: people from many nations, a variety of religions, and every other difference that you can think of. I have learned to see the image of God in people who are very different from me.

• I made good friends, and got to know some people whom I can really trust.

• I had the opportunity to travel to about a dozen different countries and meet with some very interesting people.

• The income provided for the needs of my family while they were growing up. I once said that it was a good trough to have your snout in. The comments at my retirement suggest that the organisation got good value for the money.

• For the last fifteen years, I was able to work part-time, and still receive a good income. This freed me up to do the things that God has called me to do. I wrote and published four books. I have added hundreds of articles to the Kingdom Watcher website.

So it was a good place to be, although I did not always realise it.

My Life and Books (2) Being Church

After I had completed my theological studies, I was invited to be the minister of a Presbyterian church at Waikaka Valley in Southland, New Zealand. It was a rural parish near Gore. Most of the parishioners were farmers, so I felt comfortable with them and understood the seasons of their lives.

When I arrived in this parish, a verse of scripture really spoke to me.

See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain (Ex 25:40).

It is quoted in Heb 8:5. I probably found it there.

I knew that I needed to do everything according to God’s pattern. The problem was that I did not have a revelation of what that pattern should be. I had to work with what was already established, so I took on the traditional pastor role.

I enjoyed the preaching and teaching aspect of being a minister. People responded well to my messages, and appreciated what they learnt. However, I struggled with most of other aspects of ministry, especially providing pastoral care for grieving and hurting people. The only thing that saved me was that most farmers are resilient, so they rarely go to a minister for help.

I did not feel like a leader, but I was expected to be one. I felt like I was expected to be skilled in many tasks, but was only skilled in a few of them. I was expected to be a Jack of All Trades, but master of only one. This frustration forced me to go to the scriptures. I knew it was not just me that was wrong. I realised that there was something wrong with the ministry that I was trying to do, too. So I decided to study the New Testament and see if I could find out how ministry was supposed to work in the church. I guess I was looking for God’s pattern.

What I found was astonishing. I discovered a variety of ministries that God needed in his church. They needed to be committed to each other and serving the body. I discovered the key ministry is the elder.

I preached what I had discovered in a series of eight sermons. They were quite radical, so I did not know how they would be received. I needn’t have worried, because the farmers loved them. They thought they were very sensible. One of them said, “You really need to put these sermons together into a booklet, so other people can read them”. (Thanks Geoffrey Lietze.)

I took his advice and I put them together in a little booklet called “The Bride of Christ”. I got a couple of thousand printed, but they disappeared like hotcakes. There was no internet back then on which to promote them, so news about the booklet mostly spread by word of mouth.

People who read the booklet wrote that the Spirit witnessed with the message. Some said that God had been saying something similar to them. I am not sure that many put it into practice, though.

A few years later, I realised that some parts of the booklet, were not clear, and that people had not understood the message. So I decided to rewrite the messages to make the meaning clearer. God told me to take all the stuff that was negative about the church out so it did not distract from sharing a clear vision. I put in several diagrams to help make the message clearer. This new revised book is called Being Church Where We Live. It is the message of my eight sermons to farmers made clearer.

Being Church Where We Live is the most important thing I have written. It is the foundation on which everything else sits. The other writing that I have done about politics, economics, God’s plan for history, and the Kingdom of God, does not make sense if this book is not understood. They will not be practical, if they are not built on the foundation of Being Church.

Being Church Where We Live explains how a group of people who have chosen to follow Jesus can support each other in a neighbourhood church by giving and sharing. By living close together, they will establish a place where the authority of Jesus is acknowledged and the spiritual powers of evil are squeezed out.

Each neighbourhood church will be led by a team of elders with complementary and balanced giftings: one will be prophetic, at least one will be an evangelist, and several will have a shepherd gifting. They will be bound together by love and submitted to each other for spiritual protection. They will watch over those who have chosen to follow Jesus. Neighbourhood churches grow and multiply by sending apostles into a new neighbourhood to establish a new community. These communities of love are the essential foundation that makes possible everything described in subsequent books.

When my wife was typing out the sermons for the original booklet, she said, “How can you be a minster of the church when you believe this stuff?” Initially, I did not see the inconsistency, but eventually I was convicted to practice what I preached. So in 1984, I resigned from the ministry and we moved our family to Christchurch, leaving work and home behind. God was good and provided for us in amazing ways during that change of season. I was able to obtain a position working as an economist for a large professional organisation.

My Life and Books (1)

I grew up on a farm beside the Pareora River in South Canterbury, New Zealand. It was a marvellous life, so I left school early to become a farmer. After a couple of years working on the farm, I realise that I did not have the strength and stamina that farming needs. While working with sheep and driving the tractor, I had lots of time to ponder the poverty and suffering that are rampant throughout the world. The root causes of these problems are economic and political, so I enrolled at university to study economics and politics.

By the time, I had completed four years study, I realised that I was digging a dry well. These disciplines did not have the answers to the problems that worried me. The assumptions that economists have to make to ensure their models work are so unrealistic that their theories are irrelevant to the real world. It seemed that during the first three years of economics, they told you all the solutions, but in the fourth year, they explained why they would not work. (I noted that my fellow students who went into politics, often only did the three-year course, so they went out boldly assuming they had effective policies to implement).

While growing up, our family had gone to church every Sunday, but for me it was just a habit. When I reached university and studied philosophy, I gave up my religious habit and I decided that I was an atheist. However, I found it is hard to be an honest atheist, because life loses meaning and purpose. So I constructed a safe philosophical god that suited me.

While I was studying for a Masters degree in economics, I heard the gospel of Jesus clearly for the first time. Just when I became disillusioned with economics, I had a deep encounter with the living God. He said, “I am who I am. You are trusting in an empty box. If you want to follow me, you need to accept me as I am”. I surrendered to him and decided I would live by his Word and Spirit.

A few months later, I had an exam for a post-graduate course on comparative economics. The lecturer was a staunch Marxist. Full of my new-found faith, I wrote in my paper that Marx has no solution to human problems and that Jesus is the answer. I gave a similar response in an exam for a paper on macroeconomics.

Surprisingly, I passed the course with first-class honours. However, my professors must have decided to tackle the problem because at the beginning of the following year, one of them asked to meet with me. He disclosed that he was an atheist. He said that he could not understand it, but, but acknowledged that my faith seemed to be genuine.

He told me that it was not enough to say that Jesus is the answer. I needed to explain how he could be a solution to the problems that concerned me. He concluded with a telling question: “What would the economy and society look like if everyone was a Christian”. I had no answer to that question. I knew it would be different, but I could not explain how.

My lecturer suggested that I should enrol in a Ph.D programme and he would supervise me while I developed an answer to his question. I took his advice, but after a couple of months, I realised that I simply did not have enough knowledge to tackle the problem. There were very few books or journal articles to draw on. I realised that I did not know enough about God, or his solutions to economic problems. I needed to be better prepared before I could answer his question, so I pulled out and moved to Dunedin to study theology in preparation for ministry.

I went to seminary for three years and studied theology and New Testament Greek. Later, while employed as a parish minister, I read every book and article that I could find that is relevant to economics and the gospel. I always knew that I would come back one day and answer that important question.

During the following thirty years employed as an economist, I studied and thought deeply about both theology and economics. I also studied Hebrew for several years to get a better understanding of the Old Testament. I eventually got to the place where I could answer the tricky question, but it was a long journey.

Leviticus (20) No Penal Substitution

Penal substitution is missing from Levitical offerings and from the Day of Cleansing. The animals that are brought by the people are not punished for their sins. Their blood is used for appeasing the spiritual powers of evil and for cleansing objects that are unclean. Their meat is food for the priests. Their fat is burnt to produce a sweet aroma for Yahweh. The animals are offered as an act of worship, so having to cover the cost of losing a valuable animal is not a punishment, but an act of thanksgiving and worship.

Leviticus required that all animals offered should be without blemish (Lev 22:17-22). This means that an animal cannot be hurt or mutilated in any way before it dies. If it was punished, it would have blemishes and not be an acceptable offering. Leviticus never says that the animal is an object of God’s wrath. It never says that it is being punished. If it was abused or suffered unnecessarily, God would be offended.

The animals do not die as a substitute for the people who offer them. They placed their hand on the animal even when it was being given as Grain Offering or an Ascending Offering, which was not for sin, so it is not an indicator of substitution. The animals are not killed in the place of the people offering them because the unintentional sins they had committed did not require a death penalty.

The priest confessed the most serious transgression and depravities over the goat for Azazel. These were the worst sins, but the goat was sent into the wilderness. It was not punished. It was not killed, and its blood was not offered to God. The wilderness goat was not a substitute for the people who had sinned. It was a carrier. The people were forgiven their transgressions without paying any penalty.

This full series is at Leviticus.