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Confounded by Consumerism – Money, the Counterfeit of Faith.
1 Timothy 6
1. Those who are under the yoke of duty (those who carry the brunt of a task), should regard their masters with all respect, so as the name of God and His teachings will not be blasphemed.
2. Those then who are faithful to the Lord, should not be abused on the basis that they are mere brethren; on the contrary, they should be ministered to even more, as they are faithful and beloved; those that (truly) give their life in the ministry -- learn from them and love them.
3. If, however, there is someone who teaches another sort of knowledge and does not present the healing words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teachings of submission to God,
4. This one elevates himself while knowing nothing, except he engages in vehement altercations and verbal controversies, from which stem divisiveness and ruin, and blasphemies and the basis of evil ideas,
5. And human subterfuge -- these [estranged priests] that subvert [the people's] ideas and drive them away from the substantive truth, and they assume that the submission to God is a business. You, however, distance yourself from such priests.
6. For our business is great indeed, that which is the submission to God to the extent of our ability (to the worthiness of our capacity).
7. For we neither brought anything into the world (universe), nor can we even take out what we learned (or earned) from it.
8. That is why all we worry about (all we are to be concerned with) is food and clothing.
9. Those, however, who wish to be wealthy, will fall to temptation, in pitfalls and into a multitude of foolish and searing lusts that will sink humanity into the throes of destruction and ultimately oblivion.
10. For the root of every evil is the consideration for money (the compassion of and for money) above all else, and there are people who absolutely adore money, and they lose all faith and open themselves up to a multitude of demons.
11. You, however, O human being from God, run from all this and chase after holiness and righteousness and faithfulness and love and Hope and kindness.
12. Fight the good battle of faith and remain focused on life everlasting for which you were called, and celebrate the blessings of faith in witnessing to the multitude.
13. I have witnessed on your behalf before God who resurrects everyone, Jesus Christ, He who witnessed before Pontius Pilate the beautiful testimony,
14. And you shall likewise observe the commandment (That you should love one another as He first loved you) without protest or oaths, until our Lord Jesus Christ is revealed,
15. He who is destined to show the Hallowed and Almighty God, Infinite, King of kings and Lord of lords,
16. He who alone is Immutable and lives in the Light that no person can come near Him and neither can a human being from humanity see Him, nor show Him, to Whom belong honor and authority to the [end of the] universe, of all the universes, amen.
17. To the rich of this world, tell them neither to think highly of themselves, nor to rely on the wealth upon which there can be no reliance, except rely on the Living God, He who richly fulfills our every need. (Therefore, take no thought for what you should need)
18. And tell them to do good deeds and be enriched by worthwhile commitments and be an example of giving and philanthropy,
19. And tell them to consecrate for themselves a foundation of blessings toward what is destined, so as to inherit the true Life.
20. O, Timmy, beware of being rushed, run from the retinue of empty noise makers and from the path of false doctrines.
21. For those who proclaim such practices are lost to the faith. Blessings be with you, amen.
Paul seemingly contradicts himself in the above text by first admonishing the servant(s) of God to be only concerned with food and clothing and yet he also says that God will richly meet our every need. The first injunction is all about our priorities – do not be drawn away by false concerns as if having needs other than those most basic to life – the second is the assurance that all our (real) needs will be met by God who has already been provided for them in Christ.
When we believed, it was made possible for us to access the whole package – for in Christ, in the kingdom of God – is everything. We have already been given all things that pertain to life and Godliness in the knowledge of Him, but this endowment of the kingdom is for the kingdom. O that we might fully comprehend and so apprehend this essential Truth of the good news of the manifestation of the kingdom – we need nothing else except Christ – yet the whole economy of the world system is geared toward distracting us from this central reality and the irony of it is that it is all just a reflection of God’s goodness which we already possess which is pulling us toward the reflection and away form the goodness, and when it gets between God and us, we see it for the lifeless darkness that it truly is.
As any angler knows, the more sophisticated the appetite of the fish, the more cleverly he must dress the hook. We live in an age of sophistication and distraction, lured to the left and to the right by what seems to be right. It is no coincidence that the distractions of Mammon look their best at night as they are illuminated by their borrowed light but pale into gray with the coming of the light of day. Even Lucifer himself may appear as a messenger of light, but he is to God as the moon to the sun – one a generative life giving force capable of consuming everything yet without which no life is possible – the other a lifeless reflector capable of exerting a pull which affects the tides of consequence but which is revealed for the blackness it really is when it gets between the earth and the sun.
This brings us to the question of why does God allow it to happen this way – why did He not just simply give us everything if He was going to give us everything anyway? Why did He allow the tempter to tempt? Why did He say to Adam, “Don’t eat of it”, knowing full well that he would? Why did He set everything in place the way in which He did? Well for starters, He knows what He is doing – we have to have confidence in this – but do we really? Our very actions for the most part show that as a whole we do not trust God nearly as much as we might suppose we do, or like to think that we do.
We may only truly appropriate God’s goodness and live in and therefore out of His kingdom by faith, so that it might be by grace alone and not by works lest any man should boast. Much of what we suppose to be faith or what is presented to us as faith is in fact wish-craft, witchcraft and dead works dressed up to look like faith. Man is an inveterate manipulator – the flesh knows no other way to get what it wants as it pursues and clamors for the glitz and glamour of Mammon’s distractions. The whole world monetary system is a deception which derives its very currency and power from the deposit which God has placed in the life of every man, woman and child on the planet. It steals its very existence from you and lends it back to you at interest, and demands that you spend your life on a treadmill further empowering and ensuring your own slavery to its demands (which actually are your demands) to pursue its false blandishments. We are led aside of our own lusts. It is our own desires which are mirrored in this antichrist moon and which lead us to the oblivion of hog country. When desire for anything other than God has ceased, then there is no more any distraction which can draw us in our prodigality from our Father’s hearth and heart.
Yet in and through all of this, God is accomplishing His infinite purpose which is the reduction of all our desires to Love. I would not even be able to communicate with you through the foolishness and contentiousness of my preaching were it not for this computer and the whole system of wealth creation and distribution. Why then, again, has God purposed for it to happen this way – why has He allowed it to be so?
The answer is really quite simple. Throughout the Bible, as a record of God’s dealings with men, He tells us the problem before He reveals the answer. The continuing theme of the Prophets and the Law is that there is a problem which is of Man’s making and an answer which is from God yet the catch is that no one could perpetually maintain the faith it would take to see the answer persistently manifest – the problem of our innate disobedience exhibited greater persistence than the obedience required to sustain the answer, because Man’s fundamental inclination was toward evil. Only the son’s of God, the Adamic line through which Messiah would come, would maintain a modicum of obedience as the Spirit of Christ in them piece by piece spoke the answer into being, and the Word eventually became flesh – the answer became a manifest reality in human form, so to die in our place so that we might have His Life in us. (1 Peter 1:11)
The legalistic mind might think that by “doing” what the Old Testament prophets told us, that we might have the blessings. This denies the very reason that these very things happened – as
examples for us that we might not make the same mistake of thinking that we could amend our own mistakes or engineer our own salvation through works.
In Deuteronomy, God through Moses enumerates the blessings associated with obedience to Godliness, and the cursing associated with disobedience – but the catch is that no-one can fulfill or satisfy the righteous requirement of the Mosaic Law, let alone the Ultimate Law – the Law of Life in Christ Jesus, except by grace. Even the capacity, ability and enabling to love one another as He first loved us is received as a gift and not manifest as a work. It flows through us as we are in right alignment with it as from a deposit in our heart – the hidden man of the heart – our duty or function is simply to agree and believe. The instant that we try to make it about us, it becomes a dead work and is crosswise to God’s flow and intention – we divert the flow and the attention to ourselves and it will quickly dry up and we will begin to function out of the evil deposit of the heart – that being the serpent nature. We fail to acknowledge or to
recognize this duality at our own peril – to recognize the automatic tendency for the flesh to vaunt itself as a judge, to lust after the spirit and to operate in denial of grace. In guarding our heart with all diligence, may we
dis-empower this serpent nature of the flesh by denying it both the tree to hide in and the power and opportunity to speak into or out of our lives.
I learned a profound lesson on this wise when once a sister came to my shop. She seemed troubled and my heart went out to her and I began to share what was in my heart. It was an amazing message and I saw hope and faith rise up in her and tears filled her eyes. She thanked me and told me that that was just exactly what she needed to hear. At that instant, through my prophetic gift I could see where the message led – it was like looking at a teleprompter – and I began to continue to preach but immediately and loudly I heard within my being – “And
Satan comes immediately to steal the seed.” I bit my tongue, apologized and she left. We can so conveniently rationalize our own pride when it comes to the expression of OUR gifts, yet it is our very pride which is the seed of the serpent nature in us, so if you do not think that you have anything you need to submit to God, if you think that you have conquered your own pride, then you are in fact probably conquered by it and that is why you or I may continue to live in defeat. It is His victory over death and sin which is to be shared in by cooperation with His Spirit.
I have met people who hate hearing things like that God designed and designated the darkness to obviate and differentiate the light, but it is never-the-less true. Positivism and negativism – good and evil – function outside of the kingdom as natural forces and events, like night and day. Do you or I think that there is electricity in heaven or that anything which we have learned down here will really have any consequence there? The only things which have any eternal value are the faith, hope and love which is developed in us as the fruit of the Spirit which is Christ’s, but so much of our life is devoted to learning that which advances and establishes us in the natural realm rather than that which will have any eternal value.
You, however, O human being from God, run from all this (the pursuit of fame and wealth) and chase after holiness and righteousness and faithfulness and love and Hope and kindness.
As a friend of mine is want to point out, when Jesus meets us after the death of our mortal selves, He will not be concerned about what we did or achieved for us, but for what we did or did not do for and to Him. Did we do the one thing He asked us to do, and from which springs any and all worthwhile pursuits – did we love one another as He first loved us – did we fulfill our calling to love? Did we manifestly become reconciled to God and therefore to be the ministers of reconciliation? No matter what we do, it is all meaningless vanity unless it is purposed, powered and predicated by Love, and God is Love.
God is telling us, teaching us what the nature of the problem is and then showing us the answer. If we persist in certain destructive and/or antichrist behaviour, then we will continue to drawn thereby until we repent. In trying to reconcile our (idolatrous) desires, whatever they may be – and that includes building churches under the pretext of serving God – we will find that we will continue to be lured and hooked through our desires. In other words, deception becomes ever more refined the more sophisticated our hidden desires become in order to be manifest.
Flesh is incredibly adaptive to environment, and the heart of man deceitfully wicked above all things, so the more we desire to be drawn to God; the more effectively it will play the religious chameleon and attempt to high-jack our good intentions to serve God when underlying it all is the intention to serve ourselves hence the more vigilant must be our watch. Revival inevitably ends up in carnality because the deception of self evolves to adapt to the environment, so that it may take over again.
Churchianity is not short of preachers who rail against works and hypocrisy and then turn right around and do the same. This is evidence of the dichotomy and duality which is betrayed by what we preach. Many years ago, Jesus told me that if I listened carefully to a man’s words, that he would reveal his heart. God has chosen the contentiousness of preaching, such that we cannot hide what lurks inside – the coiled serpent of prideful self being from the seed of the serpent – which angrily strikes at that which contradicts its will – God will fashion a hook to draw it out that we may be delivered thereof – our addictions and compulsions reveal our suppressed consciousness of our own need for deliverance from this monstrosity which stands in the temple of God, proclaiming itself to be God.
In Acts 8, there is an interesting contrast between two men – Simon the Sorcerer and the Ethiopian
who was a functionary, a trustee of the treasury of Candace. Simon betrayed his value system by attempting to buy God’s gifting and blessing, thinking that he could apply his values to God’s free gift. It was his money and sorcery which gave him his dubious power and prestige and so he judged that the same would be true of God and the servants of God. The Ethiopian, however,
understood the obligation of trust and the value of the integrity of God’s Word and so had no problem comprehending grace. There are also two other men contrasted in this passage – Saul and Philip – one being a persecutor of the church, the other a proclaimer of the kingdom.
Wherever two men are contrasted in Scripture, it is to show us the dichotomy of human nature in that good and evil are co-existent in all flesh. The simple reason why we fail to comprehend the integrity of God’s Word, or the degree and extent to which we do, is contingent upon the degree to which we are submitted to our ascribed function in the kingdom of God, which is the expression of His will and purpose, and/or the degree to which we are still operating in our own sorcery, which is the expression of our own will and purpose. We might well like to identify ourselves with the Ethiopian and/or Philip and disavow any relationship or similarity to Simon or Saul but we can all of us
recognize characteristics of all four if we are honest with ourselves.
1. And since we have these domains, my beloved, let us cleanse ourselves (let us ourselves be washed by the water of the Word and be renewed in the spirit of our minds) of all abomination (idolatry) of the flesh and spirit, and [let us] perform saintliness through total submission to God.
2. Proffer the Hope [of the Kingdom,] brethren, as we loath (abominate) no one, corrupt no one, and cheat no one.
by Ian W.
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