“Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon. And the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world…”
– Revelation 12:7-9
From Congregations of Sheep to Convocations of Maturing Sons
We’ve got work to do people. It starts with revelation, progresses to identity, and ends with exploits.
In ancient times, men carried swords. If not swords, they were armed with some sort of weapon, whether it was the axe they used for chopping wood, a
hunting knife, or a leather strap with some rocks in their pocket.
While the natural masculine qualities of defender and protector are more important than ever, my larger point is spiritual. By and large, Christians don’t know how to fight. In fact, we aren’t even sure if we’re supposed to! Why? While I’m sure a number of factors could be identified, our hesitation is a natural consequence of centuries of deeply engrained “church” culture.
Let me explain. Churches, by default, are mostly built around a model focused on congregational health, therefore the average church’s priorities and messaging tends to be internal and nurturing. True shepherding requires tremendous time, relational capacity and emotional output — all of which admirably reflect the Great Shepherd of our souls. We all need this from time to time! Thank God for the powerful, patient ministrations of love and healing one member can give another. However, over-focusing on self-care has generally infantilized the Body of Christ. As a result, this model slowly adapts an increasingly feminine value system to continue tending to the flock with more and more nurturing capacity. The problem is obvious: it’s a black hole. Sheep need a lot of attention, so constant pastoral care without prophetic vision and apostolic strength becomes all-consuming to the eventual neglect of other qualities that desperately need expression.
The Bible gives more than one metaphor for the people of God. For example, the companion of the Bridegroom is a Bride. The Temple of the Holy Spirit is made of living stones. And yes, the flock of God is sheep…but the family of God is also meant to mature as Sons and Daughters. All these symbols confirm one fact: we are not just sheep. nor are we only healers or caregivers. We are also sent ones, intercessors, servants and colonizers. These more masculine, missional and expansionistic impulses help keep the Body of Christ strong, healthy and balanced.
More to the point, an exclusively feminine model is mostly incapable of fulfilling the original charter of the ekklesia to contend with the Gates of Hades. Thus, the masculine soul of the Body of Christ must begin to flex its muscle in these days.
“EVIL LOVES CIVIL, POLITE CHRISTIANS”
Of course, the enemy has already sought to preempt our surging strength with false flags warning about “toxic masculinity.” The correlation between society’s increasingly sweeping condemnations all things “male” with the feminization and impotence of the church would probably make an interesting study. Today,
if men are armed at all, its generally with a readiness to apologize for whatever offense they just caused someone by being, well, too male. We’ve mixed up the meekness of Jesus and His teachings about peace and traded both for the lesser values of civility and politeness, neither of which carry either the courage of meekness, nor the strength required to produce peace.
Evil loves civil, polite Christians.
You Live in a World At War
If a paradigm shift is necessary, perhaps it can begin here: The Bible is filled with war. Scripture starts with a serpent who was already a rebel by the time Eve encountered it in the garden. And then the Bible ends with war against that same “ancient serpent” (Rev. 12:9). As Revelation 12:7 succinctly states, “Now war arose in heaven.”
For six millennia, everything and everyone between Genesis and Revelation has been caught in that struggle. You don’t need to get stressed by that news, because Yahweh is absolutely superior. As the God of Shalom, His peace promises to crush Satan under your feet in due time. And lest there be any confusion about the target of His wrath, remember that when Jesus was born and the world still lay under the burden of sin, the angels sang of peace on earth and God’s goodwill toward men. That was pre-Calvary! We are made in God’s image. His favor and love rest upon us forever. But He has zero goodwill toward Satan. He will broker no peace with His enemy, but will destroy him to the last.
No matter your age or the relative prosperity and peace of your times, you were born into a world at war. Romans 8 says the earth itself is groaning for deliverance from the toll of sin and slavery triggered by this cosmic conflict. Creation awaits the manifestation of mature sons of God. The Apostle Paul turned this into an End Times Manifesto:
“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now…waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons…”
ROM. 8:22-23
The Key: Beholding Jesus as the Christ
Spiritual War isn’t a new idea, of course, but for many Christians it remains a distant, inconvenient reality. As a result, deliverance ministry (a legitimate and needful thing!) became a little cottage industry that accidentally turned the reality of cosmic struggle into a primarily personal one.
Let me ask: Do you (or does your church) live with a sense of priorities and focus that reflects the fact that planet earth is ground zero in the cosmic war? Now let me turn the question a bit: One way or the other, for better or worse, by awareness or neglect, you probably do. Let that sober you.
In contrast to church-thinking, the ekklesia possess a distinct identity and a bold mission. It is baked in. We are not just a transformed people, we are an empowered people, called into community, and delegated with authority sufficient to the task. That authority derives from a full and proper revelation of the majesty and total authority of Christ Himself.
As in the pivotal passage in Matthew 16 (examined in more detail later), Jesus asks every generation, “Who do men say that I am?” For each of us, that is the question.
Joining Peter, we answer, “You are . . . !” What? What do you say? “The Christ!”
Many can answer correctly by rote memory because of Peter’s famous declaration, but such knowledge must come from the Father. We cannot produce this revelation, we must receive it. Out of that revelation, Jesus entrusts us with a great mission. Once we truly, deeply know who He is, He tells us who we are.
“Upon this rock, I will build” — what?
Do you know what comes next?
Is the church the mission, or is it the vehicle of the mission…or is it actually a well-intentioned, misguided substitute for what Jesus committed to build? Why did Jesus proclaim the gospel of the Kingdom and why does Scripture constantly show both natural and spiritual kingdoms in conflict? To what did Jesus commit Himself in Matthew 16, and therefore to what should we be equally committed? Is the Greek root word, ekklesia, really the same thing as our English word, church, or is it much, much more?
Asking the Right Questions
If Jesus is building an ekklesia and we’re building a church, this would represent a tragic failure of mission on our part. Can we courageously ask some hard questions? Can we strip away our sentimentality and confront our sacred cows? For those who are willing to go there with me, we need to go first to the anchor text, Matthew 16, to properly orient ourselves to the local context of the conversation Jesus deliberately staged with His disciples. It happened in Caesarea Philippi. Why?
Why was the ekklesia desired by Jesus in the first place? How does the history of the word inform what Jesus meant?
- Why did the Master Rabbi take His disciples to a wicked, pagan location to announce it?
- Why did Jesus follow Peter’s unique proclamation with His particular response?
- What is the real point of what He is building, and what is the believer’s responsibility in the territory he or she oversees?
- What is our corporate mission?
- Why is prayer so fundamental to the ekklesia? How did Jesus position the ekklesia relative to culture amidst the clash of kingdoms?
- Does the modern church reflect these priorities? Do we prioritize Jesus’ stated goals, reflected in how we prioritize our money, people, time and training, or are we distracted by many good but lesser things?
The answers to these questions are critical to accomplishing our mandate. Stay tuned!
“We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
– 2 Cor. 4:18
Hiding in Plain Sight
Like many of my generation, I grew up a Trekkie. If you remember the original campy classic, Star Trek, you know there were two primary enemies, the Klingons and the Romulans. The Klingons were dreaded warriors, but what made the Romulans so dangerous was their highly advanced “cloaking” technology. An entire fleet of Romulan warbirds could be right in front of a Starfleet vessel yet go completely undetected. Consider the obvious advantage: Romulans could engage in direct warfare with an enemy that did not even know they were there. Now ponder the greater advantage of deniability if you wish to achieve other more destructive ends over a longer period of time that do not require a frontal assault.
On a personal level, if you and I were conversing, and you began pointing to thin air, claiming with certainty that a terrible, mass-murdering enemy is right there — where? Oh, it’s invisible, you say. Uh-huh — would that not invite a measure of scorn and derision?
But should it?
Creation itself tells us we should not so easily jump to such conclusions. We know that the spectrums of light and sound contain real frequencies beyond a human’s ability to see or hear. In other words, the sounds and sights are there, but humans don’t have the hardware to detect them. They exceed the sensory capabilities of our eyes and ears. Does that make the spectrum false, nonexistent or untrue? Of course not. When I put a piece of leftover pizza in my microwave and hit the Cook button, I don’t actually see that spectrum at work, yet my food still heats up, because microwaves are, indeed, real. So if an enemy really does lurk in a part of the spectrum of reality that lies hidden from our natural eyes, this enemy lives at a supreme advantage.
Furthermore, if such an enemy were also a master of thought systems (which are also invisible) and could carefully construct a highly convincing, world- dominating paradigm that only validates what can be seen or measured according to its own mechanistic terms, then he would in fact be more perfectly cloaked and more dangerous to your soul than a Romulan warbird could ever be.
Such an enemy could wreak havoc on humanity with nearly unhindered freedom. This is the sad fact of our existence.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Blinded by What Can Be Seen
The world has slowly accepted the iron helmet of an increasingly hyper- rational, mechanistic, “provable” reality as the basis for civilized human thought. As the church has slowly adopted this same iron helmet, our awareness of (and capacity to discern or comprehend) higher realities grows correspondingly dimmer and dimmer.
A personal story will illustrate this. In the years leading up to my atheist father- in-law’s death, I had countless conversations where I presented “Bob” with compelling “spiritual data” — prayers answered, healings documented, impossible scenarios of lives delivered and changed. I offered a range of real- life, genuine miracles, yet nothing moved him. Why? Because he was blinded by his own paradigm, locked in a mental and spiritual vice grip. Every possible shred of supernatural “evidence” was DOA because his worldview denied the possibility of anything beyond nature, so how could a miracle come from a dimension that does not exist? My stories were dismissed as mere coincidence. He couldn’t see God because God wasn’t there to see. His lens blocked out the truth.
(Happily, we never stopped praying! In the end, the power of prayer prevailed and heaven broke through Bob’s stubborn blindness. Five hours before he passed away, after decades of hardened atheistic belief, my father- in-law yielded to the Lord and received salvation).
Dr. Michael Heiser asserts that the creepy, hit Netflix series, Stranger Things, is ironically closer to the truth than many Christian’s worldviews. The show includes supernatural elements such as an alternate reality called the Upside Down, a realm inhabited by terrible creatures, the worst of which is called The Mind Flayer. But Heiser doesn’t apologize. Within the shows fiction, he sees true elements of the struggle between spiritual kingdoms for which only the gospel holds answers. Key spiritual questions raised by Stranger Things are addressed the same way they are in Scripture, with mystery and transcendent power.
“The biblical supernatural worldview is a lot more variegated and nuanced than you’d hear in church,” , adding that “There’s a hunger for mystery in today’s materialistic, mechanistic world. People everywhere wonder what the point of their life is and why they’re lacking a sense of mission.”
Leadership Crisis
I can hear you now. As a Christian, perhaps you are saying, but I do see and accept the truth of spiritual realities. And I hope you do! However, the reason I am spending so much time here is because I fear the modern Christian has become far more influenced by unbiblical mindsets than we want to admit, even if only to water down our conviction about the the supernatural aspects of our material history. After all, the problem with a blind spot is that you don’t realize what you’re missing! Based on various polls regarding the present belief systems of the church (by the Barna Group and others), most Christians have adopted a more mechanistic, denial paradigm than they realize.
“According to the latest release, pastors have a biblical worldview in only one of eight worldview categories measured. Among Senior
Pastors, for instance, 41% hold a biblical worldview—the highest
incidence among any of the five pastoral positions studied…(but) the study found that only 12% of Children’s and Youth Pastors hold a biblical worldview. And among Teaching Pastors, the level of biblical worldview is a mere 13%.” ( )
Less than half of senior pastors hold a Biblical worldview, and only 12% of youth pastors. While these numbers are both shocking and tragic, they testify to the schemes of an invisible enemy undermining the faith of many in the plain teaching of Scripture. Ironically, these statisitics are evidence of the toll of the war on your soul. If you deny a war exists, you’ll never engage in it.
Remember, earth is a war zone. Like a dilapidated apartment building infested with roaches, earth is infested with demonic powers who, though invisible, wield real influence with unending malice toward you. You think your life is “normal” and that you do not suffer at their hand, but you might. So too might your neighbors, your family, your career, your relationships, or, perhaps, even your health. In the grace of God, you don’t have to be a victim of their schemes, but how would you know until your eyes are fully opened? Neither ignorance nor denial are luxuries you can afford.
The cosmic war is real, led by a cosmic rebel who is bent on your destruction. Lives hang in the balance.
Thrones & Dominions
Scripture has made this war utterly plain.
In his letter to the Colossians, Paul talks about things like “thrones” and “dominions” and “rulers” that are “in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible” (1:15). In 2 Cor. 4:18 he further admonishes us to see past the cloaking device and “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
Sadly, many Christians prefer the comfort and convenience of denial. Rather than accepting the truths of Scripture at face value, we explain them away, leaving us at a deficit to properly frame the events of history and the development of civilization from Creation to the Flood to the Tower of Babel to the Call of Abraham to the time of Christ…to now.
Here is why this matters. Church belongs to one world, preferring the polite and domesticated comforts of family meeting time in the living room of the church building. That’s your average Sunday morning. Ekklesia, on the other hand, belongs to another world that is raw and ready for war because it starts with a different commission. It is a fighting force, yes, but more specifically it is spiritually governmental, prepared to leverage its authority in intercession, servanthood and proclamation. It is organized around this imperative.
The Bible is a priceless gift to humanity because it not only tells an engrossing, thrilling, perfectly told story, but also because it is fearless in its assessments and truthful in its revelation. In other words, Scripture accurately reveals God while constantly decloaking the enemy. If we will permit it to shape our paradigm, our eyes will continually be opened. We will become free of lies, fully equipped for personal purpose, and a legitimate threat to the kingdom of darkness.
Once you cross that line, ekklesia makes so much more sense, and “normal church” makes so much less. How will you engage? What will you do with the command of Christ to bind and loose, to receive and utilize keys of the kingdom of heaven, and to act in such a way that the gates of Hades are pushed back?
Settle the question of reality. The world is at cosmic war and you are needed in the fight.
“Through the plan of prayer, God is inviting redeemed man into full partnership with Him; not in making the divine decisions, but in implementing those decisions in the affairs of humankind. Independently and of His own will, God makes the decisions governing the affairs of earth. The responsibility and authority for the enforcement and administration of those decisions, He has place upon the shoulders of the church EKKLESIA.”
— Paul Bilheimer, Destined for the Throne
Forgive my above edit, but I wanted you to see it in print. Written five decades ago, Bilheimer’s book naturally uses the English word ‘church’ because church represents the vernacular of God’s plan for man over the last several hundreds of years (at least in common usage). In fact, nearly all of our energies have focused around the permissions and limitations of that word and the culture it has produced. Yet as this series will continue to reveal, the actual word Jesus committed to building is ‘ekklesia‘ — a far richer, more robust word.
Ironically, Bilheimer’s description is much more apropos to the ekklesia in its role of governmental intercession, a concept and practice nearly foreign to
most regular church activities. Read his quote again and honestly ask yourself how routinely your church takes part in that level of authority . . . or even the attempt of it? Quite the opposite, it has proven historically frustrating (to say the least) to actually convince the church to adopt and sustain this great enterprise (the influence Bilheimer describes), because the mindset of the average church is simply very different than ekklesia-thinking.
A Federal Goliath Falls
On June 24th, a 50-year-old federal Goliath fell in America. In their landmark decision, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned Roe v. Wade. Even five years ago, much less ten or twenty, this would have been considered both impossible and unthinkable by most Americans, including the vast majority of Christians who profess some degree of technical agreement with the power of prayer. In fact, the collective unbelief and hesitation (if not outright resistance) coming from wide swathes of the church is precisely the problem I wish to address. We need to understand not only the dynamics behind this decisive victory over legalized infanticide, but also the relative indifference with which many sincere Christians tolerated it for so long.
While the battle now goes to the states, and much additional work is needed to truly advance the culture of life (adoption, fostering, mother care, etc), sectors of the church are strangely divided over what should be viewed as a clear triumph of Kingdom values over demonic values. The problem? Many Christians no longer possess a Biblical worldview, and even among those who do, our traditional “church culture” does not naturally foster the necessary instinct for spiritual governance over principalities and powers.
“KNOWLEDGE AND EVEN EMOTION DOES NOT EQUATE TO TRUE CONCERN, BUT THE ROOT IS BAD THEOLOGY MORE THAN AMBIVALENCE.”
We may run to the potluck, but we don’t run to battle
What do I mean? I mean it is not enough to acknowledge tragic statistics. Knowledge and even emotion does not equate to true concern, but the root is bad theology more than ambivalence. We don’t raise our voice in prayer because we haven’t truly believed in its power. I mean our Biblical illiteracy has left us vulnerable to the savvy web of lies espoused by anti-Christ ideologies. Depending on the issue, the denomination, the demographic, church-goers
are as likely to surrender to the same lies that bind and blind the rest of society as we are to confront or dismantle them. We are strangely content to meet faithfully on Sundays, sing our songs, give our tithe, and think we have done our duty.
This “church-as-usual” mentality must change. Legislative prayer and governmental intercession are fundamental to the charter of the ekklesia. The national holocaust of Roe was toppled precisely because of the dedicated work of millions of grassroots voters, along with the tireless efforts of local, state and federal politicians doing the hard work of national reform, yet none of these efforts would have succeeded without the shift of hidden power structures afforded by the battering ram of believing prayer over the last 50 years. Yes, many things finally brought Roe down, but prayer stands at the top of the list. Prayer made the impossible possible.
Now what? There will surely be other battles, which is why we need to learn our lessons and surge forward. If we could see into the demonic realm, I think it would look like the Philistines on the run after David brought Goliath down with a sling and a stone. We need a fresh spirit of clarity and resolve. If we’re still hesitant about how or why we are meant to engage in the great challenges of our day, other Goliaths will rise. Truth be told, other Goliaths already await our sling full of intercessory rocks! So what will we do?
First step: get our thinking straight.
Geometric Thinking
Remember high school geometry? Geometry is built on a rigid progression of logic. Problems involving distance, planes, angles, area and lengths can be solved by stringing together assumed truths called postulates that are used as a basis for reasoning. To succeed, you have to learn how one truth builds upon
another in a relevant sequence that solves a particular problem. Such solutions are called “proofs.”
For example (bear with me), the postulate called Addition Property Of Equality states “If the same number is added to equal numbers, then the sums are equal.” Read it again. Obvious, right? Yet by distilling the obvious into a bite- sized nugget of irreducible truth, these truths can then be stacked and combined with other truths to achieve “proofs” because a careful sequence of truths won’t lead to a falsehood. So for the problem I wish to solve — which is why Christians often lack confidence or clarity to engage in culture — we must first confront a number of anticipated challenges, i.e. aren’t all cultures equal? Who are we to argue for change? What about the mother’s rights? What about the separation of church and state?
Do you know how to answer these red herrings? The Bible provides a clear framework — proof of the invisible war that rages across the planet — yet this has become almost entirely foreign to the mindset of the average Christian. This simple, 6-step, geometry-style sequence of logic will help pierce that fog of lies.
- Because humanity is sinful and the world is fallen, and
- Because the effort of any identifiable people group to create or improve their collective experience over time is known as that group’s culture or civilization, and
- Because the kingdom of God is a perfect, sinless reality with a superior value system to every other organizing principle, therefore it follows that
- Culture cannot be neutral, but is either inclined toward righteousness or wickedness; furthermore
- Culture, left to itself, will naturally degrade toward the sinful tendencies of the humans that shape it, therefore
- Culture must be redeemed by the citizens of a better kingdom
More simply stated, don’t buy into the claim that all cultures are equal. That’s part of the toll of the war we’re in; part of the web of lies the enemy has spun to entangle us in hesitation and keep us out of the game. Our lack of confidence in this logic underpins the uncertainty some Christians feel about Roe, and is employed in any number of fallacious arguments from raging opponents claiming that a democracy is built upon individual human rights. While true in part, American culture must be weighed against a different, more eternal value system than human rights…which leads us to the thorny, historic problem of imperialism.
Impugning Imperialism
To help tease this out, let’s introduce another high school class, World History, where you likely first learned about imperialism and its cousin, colonialism. In today’s politically correct world, Social Justice Warrior world, imperialism is a curse word. But let’s look further, because throwing out the baby with the bathwater has real spiritual implications.
Definitions may vary, but if colonialism could generally be understood as one country physically exerting complete control over another country, then imperialism would be a stronger nation exerting formal or informal economic and/or political power over a weaker. Boiling it down further, colonialism might be thought of as the practice of domination and imperialism as the philosophy behind the practice.
Once upon a time, colonialism was studied more for its historical influence in the development of many nations, including America. However, because it involved powerful nations (mostly European) acting out of a presumed racial superiority to conquer and dominate foreign lands, it has come to be viewed largely as a period of unique political and racial hubris marked by the systematic oppression of indigenous peoples, and therefore, deserving of wholesale moral outrage. To be fair, current assessments contain many data points and painful nuances that were glossed over in previous tellings. For example, imperialism was often cloaked in a derivative missionary zeal designed to spread Christendom more than the Gospel, resulting in the plundering of wealth more than the saving of people’s souls. It’s a mixed, complicated legacy at best, yet objectively speaking, many of the colonized nations experienced tremendous blessings over time and were ushered into the modern age as a result of their colonizers (obviously not without complications and many injustices committed along the way).
Now take a look at the modern lie, the cultural trickledown, because you must see it to be free of it. Very likely, it has seeped into your thinking and your praying.
The lie is this: to position one culture’s strengths against another’s weaknesses is fundamentally imperialistic, therefore racist, therefore wrong. Therefore you do not engage in cultural issues.
Cosmic War & Cultural Trickledown
Do you see the problem? The problem, at a conceptual level, is that the Kingdom of God is quite imperialistic! The Great Commission is an imperialistic charter. In modern society’s highly charged, emotionally timid and politically correct climate, most Christians don’t have the logical or rhetorical fortitude to untangle the mess. So for fear of repeating the errors of the past, we back away from the argument altogether, becoming complicit, passive bystanders as culture tumbles off the cliff into the abyss.
In other words, the painful (often criminal) legacy of imperialism has caused the ekklesia, the holy nation of God, to shrink away from the courage needed to advance, take ground, and rescue cultures from darkness. Anything approaching imperialism is shouted down as hubris, pride, and racism. How can you have faith to pray for change if change is inherently wrong to pray for?
So what gives you the right to shift history? What gives the ekklesia scattered across every nation the right to judge and challenge any false, damaging, unjust, immoral or otherwise deleterious aspects of their local culture? What gives us the right to say girls are girls and not boys? Or that homosexual marriage is not God’s best for anyone, including the people involved? Or that abortion is…gasp…wrong?! At some level, these are imperialistic claims, imposing one kingdom’s value system on another.
Indeed! Precisely!
Which is why a more accurate question would be, Who gives you the right? Participating in communities of contending intercession means you have determined your loyalty to Christ is greater than your fear of the world. It means adding your spiritual equity in agreement, faith and prayer in corporate actions, effectively wielding legislative and judicial power in the spirit so that the Kingdom of God, through your voice, your prayer, can invade and produce positive, disruptive change. It means that values and truths defined by the Word of God form our intercessory agenda. You are invited to take your place in an ekklesia, but this carries a much different, more sober, more joyful level of privilege and responsibility than merely attending church. The ekklesia is delegated with authority to enforce kingdom values, release kingdom blessing, and target evil with kingdom justice. If you don’t understand these things, the ekklesia will largely never make sense, and you will be satisfied with routine churchianity.
Yes, human empires sin greatly, but that does not alter the fact that God’s kingdom is fundamentally imperial and territorial in both scope and strategy. If we feel embarrassed by the eventual, total dominion of Jesus, or feel the need to apologize or water down the “Winner Takes All” reality of Rev. 11:15 — “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and His Christ, and He shall reign forever” — then our worldview is not yet fully conformed to the mind of Christ. Even as the church, “the royal priesthood and holy nation” has been called “out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9), so it is our privilege to exert this same influence as local ambassadors deployed by the King into our respective nations and cultures.
“Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory?
The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle!”
– Psa. 24:7-8
Imperialistic Prayer
In my last email, we looked at the logic of redemption, along with the boldness and clarity necessary for the ekklesia to pursue it locally. In other words, while redemption is first and foremost the personal, inner work of the Holy Spirit in a person’s heart and mind, the power of redemption does not stop there — or at least it shouldn’t.
Rather, it should be assumed that people once redeemed will begin to “leaven” their own surroundings with a witness that functions as “salt” and “light” for the renewal of nations and cultures. If national citizenship is properly understood as spiritual ambassadorship, our attitude toward our nation’s culture should decisively tilt toward engagement, not passive disenfranchisement. R. Arthur Mathews was a member of the 12th Frontier
Force Regiment in the British Indian Army during World War II, and later served as a missionary to China. In his book, Born for Battle, Mathews said:
“In warfare there are four possible attitudes—offence, defence, détente and desertion. Am I expressing the enmity God put between the devil and (Christ) or, am I seeking détente, coexistence and peace through compromise? Should we not encourage each other to gain imperial perspective in our praying?”
Let me boil that down: the redeemed nation of God should be more imperial in our prayers, not less. Now to avoid confusion, I will precisely restate: the ekklesia should be more imperialistic in the way we pray for the good of people and nations, and the manner in which we proclaim the Kingdom among them.
My point is not to advocate the natural aggression or exploitation of any nation against another. I am not speaking of one fallen human culture conquering another, nor of the dark racial bias that might have driven such efforts in the past. I am not advocating any new surge in colonial expansion from one nation into another, nor advocating imperialism as a matter of foreign policy.
Even so, I cannot shrink back from the command of Jesus. Framing the issue in cosmic terms of Kingdom, Jesus unapologetically issued His own imperialistic directive: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:18-20)
To truly disciple nations means we are baptizing entire people groups and geopolitical entities into the truths (dispelling lies), values (confronting injustice) and ways (revealing God’s nature) of the Kingdom of God. The very idea of discipling nations means we are taking territory from the enemy — inches of land and harvests of souls. There is no other way.
Three Revelations of God’s Nature
If you feel conflicted or anxious to read what could be construed as “spiritual aggression” (I prefer the term spiritual imperialism), may I suggest that your misgivings are a kind of proof that that the cosmic war is quite real. After all, it is in the enemy’s interests to cloak himself while simultaneously keeping you sidelined with a respectable kind of spiritual politeness, ignorance or uncertainty surrounding your mission. Remember, before it ever makes the headlines, the battle for truth first plays out in your mind. Our damaged thoughts must be baptized in truth and made new. Perspective controls directive! To that end, it is useful to consider three aspects of God we need to understand: God as Bridegroom, Judge and King.
God as Bridegroom thinks relationally in His desire and affection for His Bride. As Judge, He thinks legally regarding the balance of mercy and justice as manifestations of His perfect righteousness. Similarly, God as King thinks territorially (see Gen. 15:18, Lev. 26:42, Psa. 74:20, Isa. 49:8). This commitment is not only to the people of the land, but to the land itself. It covenantally includes people, animals, earth; i.e. every tree, every river (Psa. 98:3-9). In other words, it’s all His. We gave it away, and God the King wants it all back! (Rev. 11:15)
“Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.”
Psalm 24 helps explain what I mean by imperialistic praying, because while all of humanity is beloved of God — every tribe, tongue and soul — the nations and cultures which humans naturally form must go through their own redemptive rinse cycle. Thought the gates of culture might try to lock out the King, the power of our intercession helps to open them, with spiritual force if
needed (notice, it is people making the declaration above, not angels). Furthermore, this authority is not our own, but has been delegated to us from the King Himself. So to the degree that culture resists the ways of God, our mission is to encourage conformity and renewal by our witness, and by resisting the powers that foment corruption by our intercession.
For example, any culture that values sacrificing their children and eating them would be considered abhorrent, and rightly so. That’s why the ultimate agenda of radical secularism and multiculturalism is to normalize every social construct so that we have no objective measurement by which to distinguish healthy, beneficial societies from oppressive or wicked ones.
Here’s another way to look at it: any nation that prohibits the proclamation of the gospel is fundamentally unjust. Until we understand this, we will not be able to make sense of the present escalation of tensions, nor the subsequent, simultaneous rise of both anarchy and totalitarianism. History is not only marked by the clash of empires, but at the cosmic level, the clash of Heaven and Hell, God and Satan. Like it or not, this means that thousands of verses from Genesis to Revelation put the people of God in every nation at odds with the cultural trend lines of history (just ask Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego).
This has always been true, but never more than now. Culture is spiraling downward at an accelerating rate of descent. All cultures. Western civilization is collapsing, but so is Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Middle East for one reason or another. Over the course of my lifetime (54 years), even more my children’s (ages 21-31), and even more in just the last 30 months or so, we have witnessed shocking degrees of mental instability, including the normalization of deviancy, lawlessness and lies. Amidst this fog of war, it should be noted that I am automatically disqualified to offer any commentary because I embody every disease that needs purging from society, i.e. white privilege, male privilege, western privilege, heterosexual preference and privilege, etc.
Thankfully, I am not woke enough to recognize my disqualifications! Why? Because my head is filled with decades of submission to the objective truth of Scripture. Sadly, however, millions of believers are far more conformed to worldly thought systems than eternal Truth. No wonder the world isn’t thinking clearly. Their conscience, the Body of Christ, can’t think clearly, either! Meanwhile, what we used to call sanctification — the spiritual battle to renew our mind in God’s truth — has now become the literal battleground for civilization itself. The thought police are real and they want to control how you think.
While the Powers That Be call it wokeness, what they really want is for your brain to go to sleep. To that, I can only echo the Apostle Paul, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”
A Turning Point in History
At this point, it might be useful to back up, clarify, and review some of my previous statements. Many of you are tracking with me, but some might be a little confused. As I’ve previously written, one of the most dynamic pivot points in human history took place just outside Caesarea Philippi when Jesus uttered the famous phrase,
“Upon this rock I will build My __________.”
You can easily finish the sentence, right? For many Christians, this well-known passage is full of assumed truth. If you grew up in church, you likely grew up hearing it repeated over and over. It is comfortable and familiar, like a favorite meal or song. In other words, we know what comes next: I (Jesus) will build my ‘church’, right? But did you know that the word translated church is actually the Greek word, ekklesia? Jesus actually said, “I will build my ekklesia!” That may not seem like a big deal until you realize that the plain, open, confirmable facts of history reveal that the word ‘church’ was imposed upon ekklesia as a deliberate mistranslation required by King James himself!
Whoa, that changes things. If our assumed truths are built on mistranslations, then what does a true translation reveal? Only now we have to swim upstream against generations of cultural current with its assumed meanings and practice. Are you willing to explore, without bias or sentimentality, some of our most cherished notions and traditions for the sake of discovering (and aligning ourselves to) what Jesus originally meant? We have assumed that Jesus is building the church, which has directly informed our sense of mission, priorities, time and money. But what if we’ve been wrong for a long, long time?
What Did Jesus Really Mean?
We would be wise to ask, both contextually and theologically, what did Jesus really mean when He promised to build His ekklesia?
Stated another way, does “church culture” suitably demonstrate the sort of muscular language that follows as the expected outcome of the Lord’s emphatic promise to build something? For example, Jesus immediately associated ekklesia with certain outcomes, so do we regularly see keys being granted to the church for binding and loosing? Do we see Hades’ gates succumbing to the relentless onslaught of a Christ-empowered company of intercessors who impact culture through prayer? Do you see any disconnect between the routine mission and experience of “church” and what Jesus describes as routine and normative? In other words, does a typical Sunday morning service fit the Matthew 16 description?
“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my (ekklesia), and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 16:18-19)
Try to tell me how this accurately depicts our normative church experience. Sadly, it doesn’t. So how did we get here? For now, it’s enough to know that objectively and etymologically, the Greek word, EKKLESIA, and the English word, CHURCH, are not the same. We’ve been taught that church is the translation of ekklesia, but it is simply not true, as any English dictionary will tell you. The two words are loosely connected because both generally mean an “assembly.” In reality, however, “church” was officially inserted as the result of a complicated mess of royal politics, religiosity, and reformation power plays during the days of King James.
The Problem with Blueprints
I hope the problem is obvious: you’ll build whatever blueprint you follow. If I wanted to build a Tesla from the ground up, and had the material and means to do so, the most detailed blueprint for a Ford Model T won’t help me. If Jesus has committed to building something, I want to know what that thing is specifically — not a paraphrase and not an approximation. I don’t want to build man’s ideas, I want the blueprint of heaven!
Instead, centuries of entrenchment in the blueprint of man-made “church culture” have led us to organize our labors around that other thing instead of the ekklesia thing. We go to church, we do church. A popular song on the radio right now says, “The devil’s gonna try to take me out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of me.”
Millions are happily singing this because it makes them feel good. It makes them feel loyal to Jesus because we’ve been told that church is what Jesus is doing. Meanwhile, ekklesia is far more robust in mission, anointing and purpose, yet we’ve barely begun to be the ekklesia. Ekklesia is more focused, more servant-oriented, and more rulership-minded. No wonder people are bored with church—it wasn’t part of the original blueprint!
“NO WONDER PEOPLE ARE BORED WITH CHURCH. IT WASN’T PART OF THE ORIGINAL BLUEPRINT!”
The Athens Connection
So what if we’ve been building the wrong thing? What if church is insufficient for the task? What if nostalgia for an institution is keeping us from destiny?
In A Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, Oskar Seyffert stated that the ekklesia was “the assembly of the people, which in Greek cities had the power of final decision in public affairs.”
Did you catch that? The assembly had a function: to govern.
History confirms that the ekklesia played a robust role in the governance of Greek and Roman society. An ekklesia wasn’t a building, it was the ruling council of the local city-state, as it had been for 450 years prior. So from the days of Aristotle up to the time of Christ in the Roman Empire, the ekklesia governed their cities and territories. The Apostle Paul knew this! (Watch the 3- min. video below).
The Call to Spiritually Govern Territories
With this in mind, consider again the word Jesus chose. While other Jewish and Greek words would have been more suitable if Jesus primarily intended a religiously-themed location filled with religiously-minded people dedicated to sharing meaningful, sacred time together — something more like a “Christian synagogue” — Jesus doesn’t use those words. Instead, He announces that He is forming His ekklesia.
In other words, Jesus is inaugurating His government, using a secular Gentile word with no religious connotations whatsoever yet containing 500 years of inescapable cultural pedigree. Simply put, the ekklesia were the instruments of territorial governance in the Greco-Roman world. While the government of Christ is spiritual because His “kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), it should be understood as legislative in prayer rather than religious in personality.
I don’t mean to be too cheeky, but honestly, is that not what the institution of church has largely become in the eyes of society and in our own weekly experience? Is that what Jesus intended in response to Peter’s inspired confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God!”? In other words, “Nice work, Peter. You nailed it. I am Lord of History. I am the one to Whom all nations will bow. I am the long-prophesied Messiah. Now let’s go build a really compelling, relevant Sunday morning service!”
A couple of weeks ago, I said this:
“Earth is a war zone. Like a dilapidated apartment building infested with roaches, earth is infested with demonic enemies who, though invisible, possess real power and unending malice toward you…(so) neither ignorance nor denial are luxuries you can afford. The cosmic war is real, led by a cosmic rebel who is bent on your destruction. Lives hang in the balance.”
What is our response to this? We church!
Oh, my friends, do you see how small the thing we’ve built, compared to how great the thing He wants to build?
For Jesus to announce that He would build His ekklesia was similar to the President of the United States announcing his cabinet, those who will deploy the President’s policy agenda and who carry the authority to enact it. Similarly, the ekklesia is not about building programs, or even people (at one level), but rather it is about the intention of Christ to take over the planet. We read Matthew 16 through the lens of church history and assume He is prophesying the coming birth of the church in Acts 2, but that is reading the text backwards based on what we’ve made it to be.
Why do you think the early ekklesia needed all the power of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2? To meet together? To appoint bishops and compose hymnals? Does your mission (and your church’s mission) require Acts 2 degrees of power and authority, or are you getting along well enough with it? If the latter is true, you might be on the wrong mission, building the wrong thing. It doesn’t matter how right our reasons or how sincere our hearts have been for these many hundreds of years, I believe the Lord is now releasing zeal in the hearts of Christians to see the Body of Christ radically come into alignment with the Builder’s blueprint. The earth is groaning for us to take our place.
Even so Lord, come.