Natural man is shallow. His pretensions are petty; his plans are seeped with selfish thoughts. His heart is haunted by a covert lust that lingers in his intentions. Natural man is self-centered and shallow. He is a mere depression on the surface of life’s landscape, a wallow that cannot contain the latter rain. When he hears the floods of heaven coming, He will sit up in the mud, lost and alone—but not abandoned. For God wants to take him to the land of the deep things of God (Gal. 5: 19-21).
But before that can happen, old man Adam must be born from above, or else he “cannot see” the deep things of God. Unless he is “born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into” the deep things. And those deep things are all the blessed things that pertain unto the kingdom of God.
We saw earlier that the deep mysteries of God concern His kingdom and government here on earth. The things that God has prepared for those of us who love Him are things about His kingdom and how He will rule through Christ.
So there it is—the deep things, the mysteries that are revealed to us by His Spirit. It’s the kingdom of God. The literal government coming to this earth, headed by the glorious Monarch Christ, worthy of all praise.
This worldwide kingdom is what all the patriarchs and prophets looked for. And because of their faithfulness, “God is not ashamed to be called their God: for He has prepared for them [and us] a city.” This is New Jerusalem (Heb. 11: 14-16; 12: 22). Of which deep things the apostles have much to share, but can’t because most Christians are still babes in Christ, little children mostly alive for what they can receive from their spiritual Father. They are like natural man. They need the milk of the word and not the strong meat of the “deep things.” The milk is the apostles’ doctrine (Heb. 5: 10-14; 6: 1-2). The strong meat concerns the weightier matters of the kingdom.
Don’t Be Afraid of the Kingdom
When we speak of the Kingdom of God, many have been conditioned to think of the Jehovah Witnesses and have been turned off. You see their church houses everywhere: The Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Don’t be fooled. Just because they speak of it does not mean it is a false doctrine. I disagree with most of their doctrines, but I concur with their belief in the kingdom of God coming to earth. Study it out for yourselves in the word. Christ said to seek the kingdom first. All the parables of Christ was about the kingdom. The prophet Daniel said that the “God of heaven shall set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed” (2: 44). Being born again allows you to enter the kingdom of God. There are many more passages about the kingdom and its importance to God.
The whole shooting match is all about Him preparing a people to inhabit His heavenly city already prepared for them. And that people is us who believe.
It is not totally about “getting saved,” avoiding hell, going to church, and “going to heaven.” It is all about getting prepared to live in the heavenly city of New Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven to this earth! Heaven on earth. Right here. Rather, it is setting down on the real estate that stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates. That’s the reason that the Holy Land is so important in the Holy Bible; it is the center of the magnificent 12,000 furlong cubed city whose capital is where Old Jerusalem now sits. Abraham spoke with Yahweh-in-human-form about the city, no doubt. For it was of the ultimate importance in God’s plan (Rev. 21).
Even the preachers, pastors, and priests of churchianity will tell you to walk in faith like Abraham, to have his same faith. Well and good. He looked for a city whose builder and maker was God. This city no human eye has seen, nor ear has heard. Somewhere in this mind-blowing universe that has not been touched by human hands, New Jerusalem is waiting to come down.
A City Built by God
New Jerusalem is a city built by the Creator Himself. He is the Architect and the Builder. And He built it especially for us His children. It is the “city of the great King” (Psm. 48). It is a royal city built for those with a royal destiny. Peter said that we believers are a “royal priesthood.” A body of kingly priests is our destiny; to intercede for those who are in need will be our occupation in the kingdom.
New Jerusalem is built for those of the same faith as Abraham, who left his home, obeying God’s voice. And he left his home there where all his kinfolk lived, there near Haran in Padan-Aram in northern Mesopotamia. God wanted him nearer to the place where God’s throne room would be when the city set down. God went ahead and gave that real estate to Abraham and his seed as an inheritance. We are his seed, his offspring in Christ. Therefore, we own the earth where the New Jerusalem will set down [the last two sentences were not in my rough draft journal…it just came now…].
This real estate is the “land of promise.” The promise is God’s declared word that if we walk by faith like Abraham and the other patriarchs and prophets and apostles, that we will live in this great heavenly city with our King Yahshua the Anointed One. And “God is not ashamed to be called their God: for He has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11: 16).
But, my brothers and sisters, before we can go more deeply, before we can digest the meat of the word [for many choke on it], we must have the sure foundation of Christ’s doctrine. If we do not, then when the wolf blows on our spiritual house, it will sadly come crashing down. This is why so many Christians backslide. They are “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine,” and their house is spoiled by the enemy.
Without the apostles’ doctrine as our sure foundation, even these few thoughts shared out of the meat of the word today will with time fade in our memory as a lovely song heard many moons ago, forgotten like bird song in a southern wind. The enemy will steal it from one’s mind and replace it with shallow thoughts about one’s self—because, alas, the self is still there. Kenneth Wayne Hancock
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