Tag: Kingdom of God

151. Abdicate and Serve

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

When Jesus lived on earth, He had power over nature, power over sickness, power over demons, power over everything. He taught about speaking to the mountain and telling it to move. He operated in the power of the kingdom to bring everything into subjection to God’s will and purpose. He wants us to live the same way.

‘Training for reigning’

Those who receive the abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ (Rom 5:17)

It is clear from this verse that we will reign. Reigning is what is done by a king, on a throne, over a territory or an area they govern (their kingdom). Notice that those who are to reign need to receive it as a gift. It is not achieved through our own strength, self-effort or self-worth. It is through receiving the gift of righteousness.

You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth (Rev 5:10).

There is a period of training we have to go through for this. Many of us find ourselves in that place of training right now. If we try to remain in control, seated on the throne of our life (which contains the scroll of our destiny), there is no seat of rest or government for us. We have to abdicate the throne of our lives in favour of Jesus. We have to give up the throne, give up control of our lives.

When we make Jesus Lord, He can then train us to be lords. That training involves trials, troubles and tribulation, circumstances which teach us to overcome and to grow, situations in which we manifest His kingdom.

Servant

But the first thing He wants us to do is to learn to be servants.

We sing about ‘lifting Jesus higher’. The first way of lifting Him higher is for us to go lower. When we have abdicated the throne of our lives, when we are on our faces in obedience, He is higher. The servant does the works of God. This is part of our training to occupy the throne and the seat of government.

Jesus is our example of what it means to be a servant. Even though He was a king, he came to serve. Everything in the kingdom of God starts with having a servant heart:

“Whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant” (Matt 20:26).

“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

“If anyone serves Me, he must follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also; if anyone serves Me, the Father will honour him” (John 12:26).

When Jesus talks about ‘where I am’ in this verse, He is referring to the relationship He has with the Father: He is in the Father and the Father is in Him. He says that we can be part of that relationship too.

Humility and obedience

When we humble ourselves, when we bow down in obedience to serve Him, the Father will raise us up. It is not for us to raise ourselves up, and try to get on a throne. We certainly do not try to lord it over other people, or seek to control or manipulate situations. We bow down in humility, and we surrender our lives to Him who will equip us to be on a throne. If we sit on a throne, and do not know how to use authority correctly, we will abuse that authority. The correct use of authority will bring blessing to ourselves and to others. And God will honour us.

Jesus was obedient to do the works that the Father directed Him to do. In absolute strength, He surrendered that strength to His Father. He learned to allow God to work through Him.

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner” (John 5:19).

“Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (John 14:10).

Obedience is the training to know that we are a habitation of God’s presence; to know that God will work through us as a channel of His glory and power – if we surrender.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father” (John 14:12).

Doing greater works than Jesus may sound pretty impressive, but it is actually just being a servant.

Bond-servant

“For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants for Jesus’ sake” (2 Cor 4:5).

In the Old Testament, when someone was sold into slavery, they could go free after seven years. Many chose not to go free, and became bond-servants. So a bond-servant is someone who could have gone free, but chose not to; someone who chose to surrender their freedom in order to serve their master. They wore a ring in their ear to show that was their status. This is how Paul describes both himself and Jesus:

…although He existed in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Phil 2:5-8).

Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered (Heb 5:8).

Through the things that Jesus went through in His life (and death), He learned obedience.
We learn to obey through exactly the same process, even through the difficult things that sometimes happen to us. Jesus totally humbled Himself and surrendered His authority and power so that the Father could use Him for His kingdom purposes.

Jesus was a bond-servant, and God is looking for those who are willing to become bond-servants, just like Him. Because they can be trained to be kings, and ultimately revealed as sons.

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150. Eye Of The Storm

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Be still

It is really good to simply sit in the presence of God, and do nothing. That may sound like it should be really easy, but actually it is not. I remember going through a period of two to three months in which God taught me simply to rest in His presence and do nothing. I could hear His voice, but He kept me in a dark place under that shadow of His wing so that I could not see anything. I am not used to that at all.

If we want to build our spirit, we have to quieten our mind. Then we are not going into His presence already thinking about all kinds of other things, and we can really focus our attention on Jesus. It is our spirit that we want to engage, not our mind. When our spirit begins to engage with God, we will find that it starts to develop and grow, and to discern the presence of God so that we can engage with Him more readily.

In that place, we can worship and adore Him. Worship is not really about singing. It is an attitude of surrender and obedience to God. From there we can go on to listen and receive revelation from Him.

If we practice these things, our spirit will continue to grow stronger. We will find ourselves able to engage more clearly with the spiritual realm around us, engage with the realms of heaven, and see God face to face as we meet with Him.

We looked last time at the seat of rest, one of the most important things we can understand if we are to engage with God’s kingdom in the heavenly realms and then to outwork things here.

Weary and heavy-laden

Come to Me, all you who are weary and are heavy-laden and overburdened, and I will cause you to rest. [I will ease and relieve and refresh your souls.] Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest (relief and ease and refreshment and recreation and blessed quiet) for your souls. (Matt 11:28-29 AMP)

This is the time to take Jesus’ yoke and be joined to Him. When He sets the field, the path and the direction, then He will carry the weight. We are all called to live in a state of rest regardless of what is going on around us in our lives. What wears us out is trying to do things in our own strength. The storms of life come to everybody: it is how we respond to them that will demonstrate to what extent God’s kingdom is manifested through us.

We are called to live in the eye of the storm. There may be violent winds blowing all around us, but in the eye, everything is completely peaceful. Jesus never promised we would have no troubles – the very opposite, in fact. But He gives us His love, joy and peace, so we can live at rest all the time.

This is not automatic: we have to learn how to do it.

Peace, be still

Jesus is our example. He was asleep in the boat, crossing the lake, when a great storm rose up. His disciples were in a panic, even though He had already told them they were going to the other side. They woke Him up, and He brought peace. He rebuked the storm and everything became calm (that particular storm was demonic, designed by the enemy to stop Jesus getting to the other side of the lake where He would set a man free from a legion of demons).

I know we can sometimes feel up or feel down according to our circumstances, but true joy and peace comes out of our relationship with God. We need to be able to live in the peace and joy which comes from that relationship and does not depend upon our circumstances. We need to live with an attitude of thanksgiving and praise, rejoicing always. That will keep us in the eye of the storm.

Choices

Bringing a sacrifice of praise is a choice. Sacrifice means it costs us something. We may not feel so good because of what is going on in our lives, but still we choose to praise Him. We choose to acknowledge Him, His mercy, His goodness, His love.

Treating trials and tribulations as joy and an opportunity for growth and transformation: that too is a choice. When something happens, we can choose not to react; we can choose how we respond to it. We can choose to sit in that seat of rest and live in the eye of the storm.

What Jesus did, He has called us to do. So just as Jesus said ‘Peace’, we can say ‘Peace’. When He said ‘Peace’, the storm was stilled. We need to take authority and live from the place where we can change situations around us. We cannot change the situation around us while we are ourselves being swept around at 200mph, caught up in the hurricane. But from the seat of rest we can.

The seat of rest is the Kingdom of God within. It is the manifestation of the fullness of the government of God in us to bring revelation of the kingdom to the world around us. When we live from the seat of rest, the world sees a manifestation of God’s kingdom.

From the place of rest, Jesus wielded the power of the kingdom in order to bring everything into subjection to God’s will and purpose. He wants to train us to live the same way.

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Image: Typhoon Haitang 7-15-2005 1402 UTC.jpg via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

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142. Present A Living Sacrifice (2)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

Therefore I urge you, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect
 (Romans 12:1-2).

Transformation is complete, thorough, radical change. It enables us to prove (to find out and be sure of) what is the perfect will of God for us (that is, what is our destiny), and then to outwork it.

Present ourselves daily

But it involves sacrifice.

Worship is surrender. Worship is obedience. So we come to Jesus, our High Priest, and we present ourselves at the altar as a living sacrifice. This is something we are to do every day. We present ourselves to God so that He can use us, He can transform us, He can change us. It is not the sacrifice who is responsible for the changing. We do not have to transform ourselves: we merely have to present ourselves and God will do the changing.

So by faith we enter the Holy Place, in the heavenly tabernacle, in the heavenly realms. There is an altar there. Not the bronze altar where Israel used to offer sacrifices: Jesus was offered on that altar once and for all. We come instead to the altar of incense. When we give ourselves to God as a living sacrifice, the fragrance of our submitted lives goes up before Him, and He loves it.

Therefore, brethren, since we have confidence to enter the holy place by the blood of Jesus… (Heb 10:19).

Because of Jesus’ sacrifice and death, we can come right into the Holy Place. We do not come on our own merit, we come by the blood of Jesus. The blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:17).

Jesus is our High Priest, and He prepares the sacrifice that we give Him: our life. We have to present ourselves to Him and allow Him to deal with us. So we come by faith to surrender. We have looked before at the details of how the sacrificial lamb was prepared for sacrifice. It is really helpful for us to understand how those steps apply to us. If you are not familiar with this, please do take the time to read about it before moving on.

Click this link to read our earlier post (opens in a new window or tab): Present A Living Sacrifice (1).

Preparing the sacrifice

It is a picture of what we need to have done to us. The priest slit its throat, drained its blood, chopped off its head, skinned it, split it open, right down to the marrow of the backbone. Everything was opened up before God. All the inner organs were washed and  the legs cut off. Then the pieces were put on the altar.

We have to surrender our lives to Him, fully, for Him to do what He needs to do. Jesus said, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it” (Luke 9:23-24). We surrender our life to God, and exchange His life for ours. That is the meaning of sacrifice.

Dead, but alive

Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God.
(Rom 6:11-13).

If the flesh has to die, how is it a living sacrifice? It is because the flesh dies, but we carry on living in the spirit. Then our flesh does not get in the way, and the members of our body can be presented as instruments of righteousness, so that God can use us for His kingdom purposes. ‘Not my will, but Yours be done’, as Jesus said.

For the Word that God speaks is alive and full of power [making it active, operative, energizing, and effective]; it is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating to the dividing line of the breath of life (soul) and [the immortal] spirit, and of joints and marrow [of the deepest parts of our nature], exposing and sifting and analyzing and judging the very thoughts and purposes of the heart (Heb 4:12 AMP).

We are allowing God to open us up and reveal the deepest parts of our nature, to cleanse us, to purify us, and restore us; to expose, sift, analyse, and judge the very thoughts and purposes of our heart. And because he loves us, He will change us from the inside out, so that we are more like Him.

‘In like manner’

In our daily walk we are surrendered and obedient to what God wants to do in us. We walk by faith and not by sight; according to His will and not ours, only doing what we see the Father doing. And the Father in us is able to do all His works through us. That is how Jesus lived every day, and He wants us to live every day that way too.

We cannot do it in our own strength. We cannot do it by the flesh. We can only do it in the spirit. We have to surrender.

Therefore Jesus answered and was saying to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, unless it is something He sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner” (John 5:19). If Jesus could do nothing of Himself, how much less can we?

Faith of the Son of God

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20 KJV).

When Jesus was on the cross, bearing our sin, we were crucified with Him. He is living in me, and that life is lived by faith of the Son of God (I have purposely quoted a translation that says ‘of’: it is not even my faith that I live by, but His). Jesus surrendered His life so that we could have full, abundant life. I want to encourage you, every day to present yourself as a living sacrifice before God. Surrender, and allow Him to prepare you, to change you, to transform you from the inside out, to deal with your soul so that your spirit can flow in the life of God.

We are going to pray, and I want to encourage you to be willing to daily deny yourself and allow the Spirit and the life of God to flow through you, out from you, and to change you.

Every day, present yourself. I do, every day; so that every day, God can use me.

Father, I thank You that You sent Jesus
to die on the cross for me
to take my sin, my sickness,
and everything about my flesh,
and to die in my place.

I choose to surrender myself as a living sacrifice to You,
and allow You to prepare my life
for the life of Jesus to flow from me.

Prepare my life as I surrender,
so that everything that has come through nature
can be transformed
everything that has come through nurture
can be transformed,
everything that has come through trauma
can be transformed,
so that I live a life flowing in the Spirit and in the power of God
bringing the kingdom of God from heaven to earth,
living as a manifestation of Your presence here on earth,
that Your light would shine through me.

I open up my life in surrender to You.
so that You can do Your work through me
and that I might bring glory to You.

Jesus, as You gave Your life for me,
I choose to give my life to You, daily,
as a living sacrifice,
in order to fulfil my destiny
and the purposes of God, here and now in this time,
so that in eternity I will be able to fulfil all You have for me to do there.

Father, I praise You,
Father, I bless You,
In Jesus’ Name

.Amen.

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120. God on the Inside

Mike Parsons 
with Jeremy Westcott – 

We’re looking to cultivate a relationship of intimacy with God so that we become one spirit with Him.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within us (Luke 17:20-21), and God has come to make His home in us (1 John 3:24). So we can meet with God anytime we want – He is right here inside us. In our hearts, as we saw yesterday, we each have a garden.  Our garden is a secret place we can go to on the inside of us, a place of relationship where we can meet and fellowship with God. We need to cultivate it. And in that garden, in our life, there is a wellspring: a fountain and a river. 

We saw this scripture yesterday too:

And her wilderness He will make like Eden,
And her desert like the garden of the Lord;
Joy and gladness will be found in her,
Thanksgiving and sound of a melody.
(Isaiah 51:3).

Perhaps we might feel that inside of us is like a desert. Nothing growing there, no water there, no life. Have you ever seen one of those nature programmes with time-lapse images of how a desert is transformed by just a little rain? Within a few days the whole barren wasteland can be teeming with life, ablaze with colour. How does that happen? There were seeds waiting for water to cause them to germinate and spring into life.

(Click here to watch this clip on YouTube – opens in a new tab/window, or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://goo.gl/SdBbNN)

If it feels like a desert, our garden may be just waiting for us to water it. Then ‘joy and gladness will be found in [us], thanksgiving and the sound of a melody’. That is a lovely description of what our lives should be like: the sound of a melody. joining in with the symphony and the harmony of heaven.

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed… Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers. (Gen 2:7-8, 10).

The Bible says of Lucifer, “You were in Eden, the garden of God” (Ezek 28:13). Eden is the garden of God. At this time, heaven and earth were overlapping, and earth was in connection and relationship with the heavenly realms, not separated as it is now. So the garden of God was in Eden and it was the same as the Garden of God in the heavenly realms. Then, it says, He planted another garden, and the water flowed out of Eden (the Garden of God) and watered that garden (which we call the Garden of Eden, the garden that God made for man). The garden God made for man on earth was connected to the Garden of God in heaven, by the River of Life.

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day… (Gen 3:8).

Adam walked with God: they enjoyed relationship in His garden, where the Tree of Life was. As a result of Adam and Eve’s sin, that garden and that Tree are now in heaven. Adam and Eve were driven out, and at the east of the garden God stationed cherubim with a flaming sword (they did not have flaming swords in their hands: the flaming sword is a living angelic creature). They were to guard the way to the Tree of Life (Gen 3:24) and stop Adam accessing that realm.

Jesus said, “… whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

Now our lives have become the garden, connected to the Garden of God by the River of Life that is flowing into our lives, watering what was a desert. Our connection to the heavenly realms has been restored.

And rivers are also to flow out of our garden to water the earth, bringing the rule and dominion of God to the rest of the world, to the universe, and beyond.

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102. Investiture, Succession, Enthronement, Coronation.

Mike Parsons
and Jeremy Westcott – 

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Pet 2:9).

We are royal, and we are a priesthood.

What kings do is rule. And as priests, as we saw last time, we have access to stand in the courts of heaven.

“The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt 11:12). This does not happen easily. God commanded Adam to subdue the earth and rule (Gen 1:28). You do not just rule, without going through a battle; you do not subdue unless there is something to be subdued; you do not have dominion unless there is something to have dominion over. In our own lives we all have plenty that needs subduing and dealing with.

We must be militant about this. We cannot sit back and be passive, then expect to enter into rulership. Coming into our identity, coming into our destiny: those things happen when we pursue them, grasp hold of them, and fight for them. Paul said “I take hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of me” (Phil 3:12). The kingdom suffers under forceful ones, and forceful ones occupy by force. There are opposing forces in the heavenly realms whose aim it is to stop us ruling, and we have to deal with them.

It must have been in late 2008 or early 2009 that God gave me four words. I understood them (up to a point) but I did not immediately understand all the implications of them. Those words were:

  • Investiture
  • Succession
  • Enthronement
  • Coronation

Investiture

God wants to invest us with authority. I still remember King Charles III’s investiture as Prince of Wales in Caernarfon Castle in 1969. In the UK, being Prince of Wales goes along with being heir to the throne.

Succession

But you also have to come into your authority. Prince Charles did not succeed to the throne and become King while Queen Elizabeth II was still alive and reigning. He did not succeed until she died. In the same way, we will not succeed until some things die. Some of those things will be in our lives, but some of them will be in the heavenly realms. We need to see those things defeated so that we can come into that succession.

Enthronement

And succession is not enough. We are called to occupy thrones, as we have seen. Put simply, thrones are where we rule from. If we leave those thrones unoccupied, there will be no government in those areas. Or, worse still, the thrones will be usurped by others who do want to rule, but draw their authority from the kingdom in darkness.

Coronation

Ultimately, God will display our rulership on the earth. The sons of God will be manifest. The kingdom will be on earth as it is in heaven. Heavenly authority is higher than earthly authority. That is why we need to rule in the heavens. It supercedes all the authority that operates here. The laws of the spiritual kingdom are higher than (and have precedence over) the  laws of the natural kingdom.

Heaven to earth

The traditional (Greek) view of the heavens goes something like this:

We live in the first heaven. The Bible tells us that Paul visited the third heaven, the realm where God is (2Cor 12:2). In between there must obviously be a second heaven – so says Greek, linear thinking – and that is where Satan and his angels and demons operate. The enemy has used this broken imagery to his advantage: if we are in the first heaven and God is in the third, then we have to go through that second heaven to get to God. And it is full of darkness. That whole pattern of thinking has stopped us from even thinking we could possibly access the heavenly realms.

Some people have tried to do it. They have attempted to go through the second heaven, but have usually been beaten up because they were coming against a higher level of authority with only their earthly authority.

The reality is different. The heavens are not linear, and we do not need to go through anything to get there. Here again is my representation of what the heavenly realms are really like. If this is the first time you have seen it, you might find it helpful to go back through the past few blog posts and read more about it:

Realms Of Heaven 20130809

As we saw before, we can choose to turn into the kingdom of light, or into the kingdom that is in darkness. This earthly realm is connected to a spiritual realm which is where God created it from. In fact it is only the word of God that holds this realm together.

He is inviting us to go into the heavenly realms so that we can bring higher authority from those realms into this one. When we do, then nothing here or in the atmosphere of the earth will be able to stand against us.

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98. Seven Mountains, Seven Thrones

Mike Parsons 
and Jeremy Westcott – 

Heavenly Realms.eng

The diagram above is a representation of the realms of heaven we have been exploring.

You may have heard people talk about the first, second and third heavens. In the past, that may have helped us to get some understanding of where we were, and how we could interact with heaven, but it was very basic, and in fact it was very flawed. With our Greek (rather than Hebrew) understanding, we assumed that we had to go through the second heaven to get to the third, and that is not the case at all. Instead of layers, we now think realms, or dimensions. We have spoken before about seven realms, three into the earth, the atmosphere of the earth, and three into the heavens.

Seven realms

Looking at the diagram above, we live our physical lives here in the Kingdom of Earth, where we can experience God’s Presence. We are also aware of the atmosphere of the earth – remember that Satan was called ‘the prince of the power of the air’. There are actually three spheres within the atmosphere of the earth: rulers, powers and principalities. These were created by God, but are currently occupied by the forces of evil. Up to now they have been reasonably successful in blocking the flow of God’s glory from coming to us through the Everlasting Doors (we will consider these Everlasting Doors in the next post).

Moving into the heavenly realms, we see the Kingdom of God, the place of God’s government. Fallen angels and the demonic still have access there, but they do not have access to the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom of God is where the court is in which Satan accuses the brethren. But the devil and his angels have no access beyond this, to the Kingdom of Heaven, or to Heaven God’s abode – though we do; it is where we are seated with Christ in authority. And beyond that, there are other realms as you see.

Under the earth there are also three realms. These were all created by God, but are now occupied by fallen angels:  Sheol is the place of the dead; Tartarus is where the ‘angels who did not keep their proper place’ are chained up; and Satan’s Lair. There are other places down here as well, including Satan’s trophy room that we have written about before.

God’s intention is that we take back all the realms currently occupied by the enemy. But it is not for us to engage fallen angels – there are twice as many angels on God’s side who will do that for us if we learn how to interact with them. Our role is to take up our mantles and operate in the authority that God has called us to exercise.

Seven mountains, seven thrones

In the heavenly places there are mountains, and thrones on those mountains. That is to say, there are places of authority, and seats of rulership. Associated with those mountains and thrones are scrolls: decrees, mandates, and resources we can draw upon. Freedom Church has seven mountains and seven thrones. They were not unoccupied – giants were sitting on them, and they have had to be unseated. In fact every church has mountains and thrones of its own which relate to God’s purpose and calling for that particular body of believers, so every church needs its giant-killers.

And we all as individuals have seven thrones, which we need to go and occupy. Family, marketplace, gifts, ministry, calling, and so on – there are many different thrones we might have, and we only find out through revelation, from God showing us. Remember, if we are not sitting on them, something else is, and it will need to be battled with and dethroned. Killing a giant is not difficult, but it takes spiritual effort:  we are going to need to build up our spiritual muscles. If the throne is rightfully yours, you can dethrone the giant and occupy it. But you have to have the authority to rule there – you can’t just go and take someone else’s mountain and throne for them.

I know this may all seem a bit ‘out there’, a bit Lord of the Rings, but actually Tolkein understood some of these things. Giants, dragons – you have to chop off their heads, rip open their bellies, and recover their spoil.

A different kind of authority

With all this talk about rule and authority, please understand we are not being arrogant. In the kingdom, the last will be first and the first last. The ruler will be the servant of all. We are not rulers to lord it over people. It is a different kind of authority. We are there to support people, serve them, help them discover their gifting and their own God-given mandates, to bring others where we are and beyond. That is how it is with the Joshua Generation.

Heaven to earth

The plain truth is that if we are to bring heaven to earth, as we have said before, we need to access heaven. That is how Jesus did it. He brought heaven to earth in the form of miracles, deliverance, healing, salvation, transformation, signs and wonders – and He did so by operating in dual realms (look at the present tense of the verb ‘is’, in John 3:13).

There are higher levels of mountains within the Kingdom of God, and dragons occupy those thrones. I have been there, fought dragons, but I can’t do it all myself. No-one can. As yet I have only seen a handful of others there, but it is time for us all to step up and begin to occupy the places of authority God has given us.

There are yet higher mountains and higher thrones in the realm of the Kingdom of Heaven (a yet greater degree of authority and  rule).

The mountains actually represent our governmental positions of authority, we are mountains. When we occupy the top mountain, our governmental position,  we can rule all the other mountains from there.

It is time for us all to act as the lords, and kings, and sons we are called to be.

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93. What Is A Mountain?

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott

On this blog, we have been talking about mountains and thrones in the heavenly realms. I want to give you some scriptures now about mountains, what they represent, and how they outwork here in this earthly realm.

We have seen this passage before about the fall of Lucifer, or Satan as we now call him:
“You were the anointed cherub who covers, And I placed you there. You were on the holy mountain of God; You walked in the midst of the stones of fire. You were blameless in your ways From the day you were created Until unrighteousness was found in you. By the abundance of your trade You were internally filled with violence, And you sinned; Therefore I have cast you as profane From the mountain of God. And I have destroyed you, O covering cherub, From the midst of the stones of fire” (Ezek 28:14-16).

From this scripture we can understand that ‘the holy mountain of God’ is what it looks like in heaven. It is a mountain of authority, and God rules from a throne in that mountain. Satan would have had access to all that until he fell. He walked in the midst of the stones of fire. We can all walk on those stones of fire now: they are a place of revelation.

God appears on the mountain

When God suddenly started coming and appearing to man, it was on a mountain top.

And to the eyes of the sons of Israel the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like a consuming fire on the mountain top (Ex 24:17).

Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised,
In the city of our God, His holy mountain (Ps 48:1).

The city of God and the mountain of God are synonymous terms. They refer to the same place. And the bible uses lots of different terms to describe how God rules and where His throne is. Sometimes it will be like a temple, like a city, like a mountain, but they are all talking about the same place. So when we talk about ruling over cities, we are using the same kind of language.

Mount Zion

But as for Me, I have installed My King
Upon Zion, My holy mountain. (Psalm 2:6).

The heavenly Zion is God’s holy mountain, the place where He rules. Here God is saying that David and his offspring, his descendant Jesus, would be king on His holy mountain. That mountain is obviously in heaven, but also here on earth: the mountain of the house of the Lord is to be raised up (see below), which refers to the church.

So in Hebrews 12:22, where it says ‘But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels’, the New Jerusalem is a mountain. We will look at the structure of the New Jerusalem in a future post, but I can tell you now, it isn’t what most people think it is.

The mountain of the house of the Lord

Now it will come about that
In the last days
The mountain of the house of the Lord
Will be established as the chief of the mountains,
And will be raised above the hills;
And all the nations will stream to it (Isa 2:2).

This is an earthly outworking of what is in heaven. The hills are lesser authority figures compared to the mountain, but they are not insignificant. The highest authorities, whether natural authorities or ungodly supernatural authorities, will have less authority than the church. This is the way it will be when God raises us up and we take up His delegated authority in the way He intends. God will raise us up once we have occupied authority in the heavenly realms – because that is the only place the authority to rule comes from. It is not earthly, natural leadership or rulership.

Jesus talks about the authority figures on earth how they lord it over people (Mark 10:42). And He says His kingdom is totally different. He didn’t come to be served, but to serve. So everything about rulership in God’s kingdom is about serving, not dictatorship. The first will be last and the last first. That turns on its head the whole system of the world, in which people want to be more highly placed than others so that they can stamp on them and keep them down. And what do most church leadership models look like – the world, or a reflection of heaven?

In the kingdom of God, authority is intended to be all about raising people up. So yes, there is a place where you rule, and it is called a mountain and a throne, but the whole nature of the rulership we are called to is to raise people up into their own places of authority and power, not to keep them down and subservient.

My Father’s house has many rooms

Jesus said,

“My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?” (John 14:2).

Now that refers to us, as God’s people here on earth, but it also says that there are many rooms within the mountain of God, the house of God in heaven. I have been in some of them, and there are many, many more that I don’t even know about yet. There’s the war room, the mantle room, the treasury room, the book room, and so on – and in those places we can obtain specific revelation that we are going to need to fulfil our call and purpose on earth. And we are able to access those rooms.

A very high mountain

When he was tempting Jesus, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory (Matt 4:8). Where do we think Satan took Him? Everest? No, to heaven. It is not talking about a physical mountain, but a heavenly one. He was showing Him all the glory of the kingdoms of the world. And not only natural kingdoms on the earth, but all the levels of authority in the heavenly realms, because those were the areas that Satan had rulership over.

He was offering Jesus a shortcut to rulership of everything He would later obtain through the victory of the cross – but without the suffering and dying. Jesus did not succumb to the temptation, as Adam and Eve did. Satan offered them the same deal – ‘do it your own way, instead of God’s way: in fact, you can do it without God’.

Satan took Jesus into the realms of the heavens and showed Him everything. As God, he knew all this already, but Satan took Him there as a man. And that is the key. We also can go there, as men and women, into those realms. We can go in the realm of the spirit, see the reality of heavenly authority, and begin to occupy thrones and mountains there.

Jesus withdrew to the mountain

In His earthly ministry, Jesus often went to mountains.

So Jesus, perceiving that they were intending to come and take Him by force to make Him king, withdrew again to the mountain by Himself alone (John 6:15).

This time it probably was a physical mountain, but I don’t think He stayed in the physical realm. You find that He went to mountains before He made big decisions. He was going into heaven to obtain the revelation He needed, and to bring it into this realm.

After He had sent the crowds away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray; and when it was evening, He was there alone (Matt 14:23).

It is the same again here. He is praying, not to a God far away, but into His very presence. Jesus lived in dual realms, heaven and earth: that is how in every situation He could see what the Father was doing (John 5:19).

Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee. Then He went up on a mountainside and sat down (Matt 15:29). You might think that by sitting He was just resting. I believe He was taking a seat of authority in that realm. This is where we have  to start thinking Hebrew and not Greek. We need to think function, not form – and that is alien to the western mindset. The function of a mountain is authority. The function of a seat is a throne of rulership. All the scriptures we have looked at here show us what mountains are for, what they are about, what they represent. When we come across them in scripture, can we now stop thinking about them as big lumps of rock, things to climb and plant a flag on?

One more example: Jesus took Peter, James and John up to a high mountain and was transfigured before them (Matt 17:1-9). What high mountain was that? Moses and Elijah came too: it wasn’t here on earth. He told the disciples not to tell anyone else what they had seen until He had gone back into the heavenly realms.

They had accessed something of heaven that day. And in time they would be able to teach others to do the same.

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91. The Way, The Truth, and The Life

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

In this ‘Kingdom Realms’ series we have begun to understand that God intends us to have access to heaven, right now. But to do so there are certain steps we must follow. He said to Joshua, the High Priest:

If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My laws, then you will also govern My house and also have charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who are standing here’ (Zech 3:7).

The earth is filled with his glory

Isaiah saw the Lord on His throne.

In the year of King Uzziah’s death I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said,
“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts,
The whole earth is full of His glory.” (Isa 6:1-3).

So the Lord sits on His throne, on top of His mountain. And the structure of it is like the temple. There are seraphim who stand above Him (we will look at the angelic realms in more detail in a later post). They are prophesying the revelation they are receiving: that the earth is to be full of God’s glory. And God has chosen the church, He has chosen us, to display the fullness of His glory on the earth.

The Temple

The temple consists of the Outer and Inner Courts, the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies. The veils (or matrices) between the different heavenly dimensions are the way, the truth, and the life.

In the Outer Courts there is darkness. If we don’t want to spend eternity there, we must seek to fulfil our purpose and our call. This is where we will find those who are not faithful to fulfil what is written on their scroll and the destiny they have been given in God.

We have looked at that before: those such as the five foolish virgins, and those who say ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ to whom Jesus says ‘Depart from Me, I never knew you’; they will be thrown out into the outer darkness. It is not the place some think of as ‘hell‘ – how could a place of fire be dark?

The Way, the Truth and the Life

When Jesus described Himself as ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’, He was referring to the pattern of the heavenly and earthly tabernacle, and specifically to the doors or veils between the various areas or dimensions. To those who were listening to Him it was perfectly clear what He was talking about, because they were familiar with those areas of the temple. He was saying that if we follow Him, we can enter in to the holiest place, and find abundance of life. Of course, if we approach this saying with a Greek mindset rather than a Hebrew one, the meaning will be completely lost on us.

There is a process to this, a progression, a series of protocols that God has prepared for us to enable us to enter in.

Everlasting Doors

Let’s look at this diagram again.

Most of the enemy activity that we are experiencing and trying to deal with right now is going on in the atmosphere of the earth. That is where the spiritual hosts of wickedness, the rulers in darkness, and powers are functioning in principalities (or spheres of geographical areas).

The pattern that is in heaven is expressed in us. We are made in the image of God. We are body, soul and spirit. And in us we also have a door into the realms of the heavens, which we can open and experience the kingdom of God in us.

In the same way, there are also Everlasting Doors on the boundary between the atmosphere of the earth and the heavens. We read about them in verses 7 and 9 of Psalm 24. Those doors are ruled by things we need to dispossess. I have seen God open some of these doors, often as a result of prayer and of intercession. When they are opened, revival starts to take place. God’s Presence and His glory become accessible in this earthly realm.

Mountains and thrones

Click the image for a larger, easier to read version (opens in new tab or window).

In the realm of the Kingdom of Earth is where we ‘walk in His ways’ (Zech 3:6-7). In the Kingdom of  God is where we ‘keep His laws’, and where we are to rule as lords. In the realm of the Kingdom of Heaven is where we ‘rule His house’.

There are mountains and thrones in each of those realms, on which God intends us to rule. For example, in the Kingdom of God, we at Freedom have seven mountains as a church, and seven scrolls attached to those mountains. Other churches will have their mountains and scrolls too.

Each of us as individuals also have our own mountains, our own places of rule. These are according to our destiny, our call and our gift, and we are to occupy them as lords. Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords: we are the lords and kings that He is Lord and King of. As lords and kings, we raise people up in discipleship to themselves become lords and kings.

The seven spirits of God stand before the throne in the realm of Heaven. They are not God, they are creatures, and they are there as tutors to bring us to revelation of who God is and of His ways. We need to engage them and learn from them if we are to be revealed as the sons of God.

This is another view of the realms of heaven, based on Ian Clayton‘s ‘menorah’ diagrams.

You can see how these realms of authority in the heavens are arranged in the same way as the structure of the temple: Outer Courts, Inner Courts, Holy Place, Holy of Holies. There are protocols we can follow which will help us to access each of these, as we will need to in order to fulfil our destiny. We each need to be able to rule as a lord, and a king, and to stand as a son.

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God (Rom 8:19).

And we will be manifested as sons on the earth, just as God always intended.

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SoundTrack: The Way (New Horizon) – Housefires (feat. Pat Barrett) via YouTube

87. The Heavens and the Earth

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott –

Joshua the High Priest

And the angel of the LORD admonished Joshua, saying, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My laws, then you will also govern My house and also have charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who are standing here” (Zechariah 3:6-7).

We saw last time how there is a progression here in the things that Joshua is required to do if he is to enjoy free access to the heavenly realms. It begins with walking in God’s ways and continues with performing His laws. We will go on to look at those heavenly realms to which he would have access, but first let’s touch on those laws.

12 Laws out of Jerusalem

The laws are not the Ten Commandments. They are ‘laws’ in the sense of ‘principles’, and they describe how God works within His kingdom.

• Law of the Spirit of Life
• Law of Sin and Death
• Law of Love
• Law of Faith
• Law of Sowing and Reaping
• Law of First Mention*
• Law of First Born
• Law of Abundance
• Law of Justice
• Law of Judgment
• Law of Grace
• Law of Righteousness

These are principles of how God operates and how we should operate in the kingdom. Like Joshua, when we start to do so, we gain free access to the realms of heaven.

Heavenly realms

I want to share with you a representation of those realms of heaven, so that you have some idea of how these realms relate to each other. It is only a representation though, and our understanding of this is developing all the time.

You will see that there are realms under the earth. In fact, there are three realms into the earth, three realms into the kingdom of heaven (into God’s kingdom, a kingdom that was given to Adam), and there is the atmosphere in between them, making seven. You will always find sevens in the things of God, because seven speaks of completion and is the perfect number.

Each heavenly realm has seven dimensions or levels of authority within it. I don’t know what they all are yet, but I do know that they are linked to the court structure (covered in the last session of the Transformation series, available on our website).

Within the atmosphere of the earth there are three realms (Greek thinking would see them as layers, but they are not), realms of God’s kingdom rule, and you will see the kingdom of earth where we experience the presence of God. Within this atmosphere is the area where we are supposed to rule: it is in darkness.

Under the earth, there are various places: Sheol, and Satan’s trophy room, and Tartarus, where certain angels are wrapped up. There are other places there too, but I am not going to deal with them here.

It is important to grasp that you do not have to go ‘through’ one realm to get to another. That again is Greek thinking. God has shown me places in many of these realms, and it is only over time that I have come to understand where they are located.

Let’s look at some scriptures, because we need to look at beginnings to see how some of this took place.

Satan fell

In the beginning (Gen 1:1) God created the heavens and the earth. He created the heavens first. The heavens were not just physical, they were all those realms we have just been looking at: realms of His kingdom, realms of His authority. The kingdom is all about authority, government and rule. Adam was supposed to bring what was in those realms onto earth. Earth was supposed to reflect heaven. Earth was not in the same place as we know it now. This was before time: in fact time didn’t exist at this point. And he created sons of God, which were the angels, particularly the ben elohim, who were preparing Earth for Man.

Now we have verse 2: The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. But God did not create it that way. Something happened between God creating the heavens and the earth and the earth becoming formless and void.

What happened was this: Satan fell.

This was before Adam was created. The Spirit was hovering, resonating, over the surface of the waters. The fact that the whole planet was covered with waters indicates that there had been judgment. God did not create it like that.

For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him (Col 1:16).

Everything was created for Jesus. Thrones, dominions, principalities and powers are not the names of demons. They are not the names of fallen angels (although fallen angels do presently operate in those realms of authority and power). So all these things – thrones, dominions, principalities, powers – were created for Jesus. ‘All things visible and invisible’ were created for Him: but things which are invisible to us now, to the natural eye, were not invisible to the spiritual eye for Adam.

The kingdom government is the heavens come on earth. It is all about bringing about on earth a reflection of what is in heaven. Whatever you see in heaven, those are the things God wants to see worked out in us. The principles of heaven need to be reflected in our own lives, and then in the world around us (starting with our spheres of influence). Everything that is in heaven, God wants to bring on earth.

What was the earth like when God created it? How can we know it was not created ‘formless and void’ (as a different reading of Gen 1:2 would have it)? Look at this verse in Isaiah:

For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (He is the God who formed the earth and made it, He established it and did not create it a waste place, but formed it to be inhabited), “I am the LORD, and there is none else” (Isa 45:18). He did not create it a waste place.

Connected to the realm of heaven

This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven (Gen 2:4). Do you see how the two halves of this verse are referring to different things? There is ‘created the heavens and the earth’ and then there is ‘made earth and heaven’. He originally created it, then something happened to spoil it (and we have seen what that was); and out of the formlessness and void, He made earth and heaven. In the original creation, there were no stars, planets and galaxies as we know them now. They didn’t exist in that creation because earth was in the centre of that circle, with a direct, seamless connection to heaven. Earth always was (and still is) intended to be connected to heaven.

Now, as we know, Adam had access to walk with God. The earth, in the centre of everything, was connected to the realm of heaven. There was an overlap between Eden (the garden of God), and the garden God planted for Adam. That meant that Adam had access to every realm in our diagram from under the earth upwards, up to and including the realm of Heaven. After the fall everything was moved out into time and space, and the earth was no longer connected to heaven in the same way. The earth’s axis moved and everything became elliptical rather than circular, right down to the orbit of electrons around the nucleus of the atom.

If Adam had not fallen, and if he had taken the Tree of Life (which was the pathway to life), he would have had access to the higher realms: Heaven of heavens, Perfection, and Eternity.

But as we know, he chose a different pathway.

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* The Law of First Mention sets the precedent for how we should interpret a particular word or phrase throughout the scriptures. Since everything is always a circle with God, in many cases we have to go back to Genesis if we are to properly understand what comes about in Revelation.


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82. Characteristics of the Joshua Generation (#21-25)

Mike Parsons
with Jeremy Westcott – 

The veil is open: in the spirit we can walk through that veil which is Jesus’ flesh, into the heavenly realms. So we can live there. There is a whole dimension here that we need to enter into. The Promised Land is not just about here on earth, it is about bringing heaven to earth. As we saw last time, if we are to be truly effective we have to learn to rule in the heavens and then bring that authority to bear in this realm. Today we will return to looking into the characteristics of the Joshua Generation again, but as we do, I want to encourage you to look at them from that perspective.

Another Joshua

First, though, let me mention another Joshua for a moment, to help us grasp all this. This is a much later Joshua, who was the High Priest, being called to enter the heavenly realms.

‘And the angel of the LORD admonished Joshua, saying, “Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My laws, then you will also govern My house and also have charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who are standing here’”’(Zech 3:6).

‘If you will walk in My ways and if you will perform My laws’: those are the things we do here, in this realm. We can read Psalm 119:1-40 to understand more about His ways: His ordinances, His character, His nature. It establishes precedent when we fulfil the ways of God. Then it talks about performing His laws: if we follow the principles of the kingdom, here in the earthly realms, we will see manifestation of the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

‘Then you will also govern my house’: ruling the house is something to be done in the heavenly realms. The house of God is a dimension of the realms of heaven. And we are also a house, a dwelling place, for God.

‘You will also have charge of my courts’: the courts of heaven are where God administers justice, and the jurisdiction of God’s kingdom, manifested in the heavens, can be outworked here on earth.

‘And I will grant you free access among these who are standing here’: standing before the throne, in heaven. The High Priest had access to come into the very presence of God. If we are able to govern the house, and take charge of the courts, we will have access to stand in the presence of God. In His personal presence, not just His Presence. It is the difference between smoke and fire. Smoke tells you there is a fire. The Presence of God that we experience here in worship is like the smoke. But beyond that there is his Person, which is the fire. This passage in Zechariah is describing protocols which we must go through in order to be able to stand in the fire.

Let’s get back now to our original Joshua:

21 The Joshua generation will encourage people to hear the word of God directly.

Joshua 3:9 Then Joshua said to the sons of Israel, “Come here, and hear the words of the LORD your God.”

It is important for us as individuals to come and hear the words of God for ourselves, and to train up others to do so for themselves too. We need to come before the throne, to come into the courts, to rule the house. My intention in doing so myself, and teaching it to you, is that I bring you into it.

Entering into the realms of heaven is for all of us. Separate to that, I have a role which is to bring signs and wonders and miracles and healing. I am going to pursue that for myself. But you, too, need to find out what is written on your scroll, and pursue that for yourselves. We each need to fulfil the scroll of our destiny (which we can find in the heavenly realms), read it, eat it, get it inside us, into our heart, and start outworking it.

22 The Joshua generation will be honoured and respected by the next generation.

There is going to be a culture of honour. Jesus said, “if you receive a prophet in the name of a prophet, you will receive a prophet’s reward” (Matt 10:41). We have to receive people in their gift and calling in order to receive the reward in our own lives. We want to honour one another and receive one another, because every single one of us have gifts and calls, and we must look to help one another fulfil those and work them out.

On that day the LORD exalted Joshua in the sight of all Israel; so that they revered him, just as they had revered Moses all the days of his life (Joshua 4:14).

23 The Joshua generation will free the next generation from the reproach and effects of the past generations, into new revelation of past activities.

‘Now when they had finished circumcising all the nation, they remained in their places in the camp until they were healed. Then the LORD said to Joshua, “Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you.” So the name of that place is called Gilgal to this day. While the sons of Israel camped at Gilgal they observed the Passover on the evening of the fourteenth day of the month on the desert plains of Jericho’ (Joshua 5:8-10).

There are things we have done, and things that we have within God’s kingdom and within the church, in which we have operated up to the level of revelation we previously had. But now everything is moving up to a higher level.

Here they celebrated the Passover and re-instituted circumcision, which they did not do in the wilderness. They came to consecrate themselves to God; the reproach of the past was wiped away, the stumbling-blocks were removed, the purifying and refining was taking place. When we come into new revelation, even in the things that we have done already we will begin to appreciate new levels of meaning as God opens them up to us in their fullness.

24 The Joshua generation will operate with the angelic realm.

This is something which causes Christians a lot of needless problems and argument. ‘Why do we need angels when we have the Holy Spirit?’ – you know the kind of thing. Angels and the Holy Spirit are completely different. Angels have a completely different purpose and function. And in fact all angels have their own particular functions.

For example, one night when Ian Clayton was here, he dropped frankincense on the floor and the aroma of it filled the room. It took me into the realms of heaven and I saw a canopy, and big angels being released from the throne. They had huge wings, and razor-sharp feathers which I could tell they were going to use as weapons. I knew instinctively who they were: they were the hunter angels. They go out to bring in a harvest. Their weapons are about cutting blindness off people’s eyes, which would prevent them from seeing and responding to the truth. And God is releasing them right now. They are different from the gathering angels, and the watcher angels, and other angels that we see. You notice, we even describe them by their function.

Now it came about when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing opposite him with his sword drawn in his hand, and Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us or for our adversaries?” He said, “No; rather I indeed come now as captain of the host of the LORD.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and bowed down, and said to him, “What has my lord to say to his servant?” The captain of the LORD’S host said to Joshua, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so (Joshua 5:13-15).

When you read that he ‘lifted up his eyes’, it means he was looking into the heavens, and seeing into another realm, another dimension. As you read the scriptures again, you will see examples of this in other places too, such as when Abraham ‘lifted up his eyes and looked’ and saw the three men standing opposite his tent (Gen 18:2). And in this passage, the captain of the host goes on to give Joshua strategy that will help him be victorious and successful. When we praise God, that high praise releases some of these angels. Read Psalm 149 and you will see more about that, how we execute judgments that are written, how we execute vengeance upon the enemy.

We are not fighting against flesh and blood. Earthly strategy just won’t cut it.

25 The Joshua generation will hear God’s strategy for warfare.

The LORD said to Joshua, “See, I have given Jericho into your hand, with its king and the valiant warriors. You shall march around the city, all the men of war circling the city once. You shall do so for six days. Also seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of rams’ horns before the ark; then on the seventh day you shall march around the city seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. It shall be that when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and the wall of the city will fall down flat, and the people will go up every man straight ahead” (Joshua 6:2-5).

When God said, “See”, how could Joshua see that? It hadn’t happened yet. The answer is that God was showing him in the realms of heaven what would happen. It is just like when Jesus said He did the things He saw the Father doing (John 5:19). In what realm did He see the Father doing them? The Holy Spirit will disclose things which are to come, before they actually happen, because we see – and can step into – a different realm.

Again, when this passage talks about a city with its king and its warriors, we can understand that solely in the natural realm. But above and beyond that, in the realms of the heavens, there are also mountains, and rulers and kings. We need to deal with them in that realm in order to deal with their counterparts in this realm. As I wrote last time, that is why we may historically have struggled to overcome in this realm – it is because we cannot do so effectively without dealing with the heavenly realm first.

Like Jesus, we also need to see what the Father is doing, in order to bring it to earth. If that is how Jesus operated (and He told us it was), then surely that is how we must operate too. Jesus lived constantly in two realms, in relationship with the Father.

The strategy God gave for taking Jericho was very clear, and very detailed. And the strategy that Joshua received in the heavenly realms, he had to carry out in this earthly realm. We need to be able to do that, every day, all the time.

That is what it means to be living in dual realms, to see what the Father is doing, to be constantly connected.

And that is what it takes to bring heaven to earth.

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