For when there is a change in the priesthood,

there is necessarily a change in the law as well. Heb. 7:12

 

 

I want to write you today about one of the most profound truths poised to shape the transitioning age at hand. It is about government in the world to come.

 

Today, the eyes of the world are upon the laws of the gentiles—their parliaments, congresses, courts, prime ministers and presidents.

 

Meanwhile, the eyes of Israel are upon the return to the Old Covenant law by which their nationality was originally identified.

 

And the eyes of the church are upon the Gospel which bears the message of the original spiritual transition from the Old Covenant law to the law of love through the spiritual priesthood in Christ, but whose eyes otherwise remain captivated by the law of the gentiles or to some "gentilized" version of the Old Covenant, or both.

 

In the face of all this, I want to capture your attention today by the concept of the priesthood as it relates to all this law—specifically to how earth is next to be governed in the age at hand.

 

 

Law, Law, Everyone Is under Gentile Law

 

Everybody is under law in one form or another, whether or not they want to admit it. Every day around the clock the world brings us news about law—law being passed and law being broken.

 

The whole world is under a law consciousness—one that goes back to the knowledge of good and evil. The prevailing laws of earth in this age are those of the Gentiles (for which cause these are called the "times of the Gentiles.")

 

 

                - Those with Religious Law Still Strapped to Gentile Law

 

Meanwhile, as alluded to above, religious and spiritual people are under additional layers of law. Jews and Messianics constantly struggle over keeping some form of original Mosaic law—and over how to do so vis-a-vis the dominance of surrounding gentile law. (Modern Israel functions as an awkward hybrid state under the parliamentary principles of gentile law and as a member of the "united gentiles"—i.e., the United Nations.)

 

Christians for the most part consider themselves free from Mosaic Law—at least in theory.  We vaguely understand something about a "change in the priesthood" of Christ meaning a change for us in relation to Mosaic law. But this is more a theology often without practical clarity.

 

Meanwhile we Christians still build our own "gentilized" forms of Mosaic Law to which we conform through our churches—utilizing adaptations of New Testament and Old Testament writings to form our policies. And we too do all this in addition to comporting with the overarching gentile laws at large.

 

Christians struggle over how to divide affections between church laws and the world's surrounding laws—while almost always accommodating the gentile laws whenever the gentiles demand it.

 

&&&&&

 

The main point is that neither Jews nor Christians are made autonomously self governing by their religious or spiritual laws (though some utopian cults and communes have tried to be). They are all strapped to the inescapable dominant context of gentile law, eventually having to bow before it.

 

 

 

The Imminent Collapse of Gentile Law

 

All that said, there is yet one still greater reality to observe about the laws of the Gentiles today. It is this: They are all crumbling and the nations they bind are imploding.

 

The capacity for human law has lost its power to restrain human lawlessness across the globe. In fact, only angels are holding back the "four winds of heaven" now to prevent the certain self-destruction of man under the weight of his lawlessness.

 

The age of the Gentiles with its capacity for making and enforcing law is coming to an end.

 

 

A New Perception of Hebrews 7:12

 

But what does all this have to do with today's theme:

 

"When there is a change in the priesthood, there is also a change in the law"?

 

Through this one simple statement, the writer of Hebrews shows us God's way out of the mess we now endure called the "times of the Gentiles." Hebrews 7:12 points to the destiny of law in the next age when the world is no longer governed by the failing powers of inherently lawless men.

 

But what then is this "change in the priesthood" which we are citing?

 

We already know that Christ died as the spotless lamb to take away the sins of the world. We know that in doing this, He changed the priesthood from Aaron to Melchizedek "after the power of an endless life."  And we also know that as a result, the Mosaic law was put away as mankind's reference for righteousness—to be replaced with the "law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus" by which the faithful live and are justified.

 

But today, we are taking Hebrews 7:12 a step further—a giant leap further in fact. The Spirit wants to prophetically extrapolate for us into the future the practical implications of this change in priesthood, not on ceremonial priestly law, but on world law and governance itself.

 

&&&&&

 

Have you ever stopped to wonder what life will be like in the Millennium? How will it be like when the kingdom of God is manifestly established and seated in the earth to rule over the gentiles? How will the "overcomers" govern the nations with a "rod of iron" as promised in Revelation 2:27?

 

Hebrews 7:12 holds the keys to these answers. But before going there, let's dispense with some wishful mythology on the part of both Jews and Christians over past religious heritages. (We don't need to discuss Islam or anyone else, because all other religions are classed as Gentiles native to the times of the Gentiles to be replaced.)

 

 

Religious Myths of Legal Reconstructions

 

The first myth is that once the Lord Jesus is established in His manifest headship over the nation of Israel, He will reconstructively restore the entire Mosaic law and Aaronic priesthood. And that based on such a reconstruction, "the word of the Lord will go forth from Zion" to rule the nations—meaning that all the peoples will be somehow harnessed under the Law of Moses.

 

I hate to say it this way, but this is just so laughable to anyone who can read the plain English of the book of Hebrews. The fact is that, if the Book of Hebrews is the Word of God, it is utterly impossible for there to be a return to the Mosaic Law or the Aaronic order.

 

Why? It's because it is impossible to reverse the change in priesthood that took place through Christ's death and resurrection. Once Christ was raised to the priesthood of Melchizedek, he was so raised to that forever.

 

                Heb. 5:6 as he says also in another place, "You are a priest forever, after the order of Melchizedek."

 

The priesthood of Melchizedek is forever. And therefore so is the change in the law of which Heb. 7:12 speaks. Because the new priesthood is forever, replacing the first dying priesthood, and because the change to a forever priesthood nullifies the Mosaic law to which the priesthood it replaces is tied, there can never be a return to the Mosaic Law.

 

Thus, the Mosaic Law can not be "the word of the Lord that goes forth from Jerusalem" in the Era of the manifest kingdom. It must be another kind of law altogether. We will get to that.

 

&&&&&

 

But we must also dispense with another similar Christian myth, especially in "Christian America." That myth is the belief that after God is done dealing with this gentile age, He is going to reconstructively restore the "Christian American Republic" as it was originally "meant to be," as well as the lawful structures of other nations as we now know them, but in a way not now perceivable.

 

No. This is not the case. There is not going to be a restoration of the American republic or any other republic as we have known it. This shows a lack of understanding of the nature of the earthwide transition before us. 

 

All these forms of human government, be they republic, or democracy or dictatorship or even tribal—regardless of how influenced by the Christian faith—are intrinsic to the meaning of the "times of the gentiles." Those "times" are coming to an end, and so are therefore the failing principles of human government by which they functioned, regardless the form. All the especially cherished parliamentary and republican forms of British-origined human government since Magna Carta are going to be replaced, not reconstructed. 

 

The forms of human government as we  have known them throughout the millenniums of gentile domination are no more going to be brought "back to life" after those times end than the Mosaic Law is going to be reconstructively established in Israel.

 

 

Shedding the Myth-Breeding Mindset

 

The problem with these mythical views of "christianized" human government is that they are built from a carnal viewpoint based in fundamental alignment with the world locked into the knowledge of good and evil.

 

They are not built from the viewpoint of resurrected life and eternal priesthood into which we have been born and have been destined to grow. They are constructed according to the "elemental principles of the world" instead of like the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We are not taking His viewpoint as the eternally changed and transcendent Son of God.

 

Once we can responsibly dispense with these imaginary carnal myths and get free of regressive "retro visions" of God's purposes under mortality, we can truly begin to understand what God wants to show us about future earth government.

 

It is at this point that we are ready to understand the glorious macro meaning of Heb. 7:12 as the Holy Spirit would extrapolate it for us relative to earth's laws under the times of the Gentiles.

 

Read this again now please with resurrected eyes into the future:

 

For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well. Heb. 7:12 

 

This verse is stunningly prophetic. It is not just a word about a past completed act concerning covenantal transition. It is about what God will do to bring forth a new kind of law out of the demise of the times of the Gentiles.

 

Today we are going to consider the lawful practicalities of being a "royal priesthood" after the "order of Melchizedek." What has been but theory to us is slated to become eminently real.

 

 

"Bringing Many Sons to Glory"

 

Although the Book of Hebrews describes a past completed divine act to effect a covenantal transition by Christ's death and resurrection, its view is also to the future—toward what God has planned forward to accomplish by that past completed act. The writer says it thusly:

 

Heb. 2:10 For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering.

 

Throughout these times of Gentiles, God has been outworking a very long process in alignment with what He accomplished in Christ at Calvary. At that time, the Father effected the swap out of the Old Covenant with the New Covenant—meaning He effected a swap out of the priesthood, and with it, a swap out of the law—both irreversible.

 

The forward developmental purpose however of the covenantal swap out was and has been to bring forth an entire company of "sons" like to the Son of God who have assumed that same priesthood and therefore have entered into the fullness of the glory of an eternal law that functions after the power of an endless life.

 

From this perspective, the "change" in the priesthood that Hebrews is prophesying is the change to immortal glory of the Father's worshipers. 

 

The original change of the priesthood in Christ is a prototypical change, forerunning a to-be-fulfilled consummate change in the body of sons to follow—and so creating a prophetic change in priesthood to come.

 

I have often resorted to the terms "pure versus applied" and "principle versus practice" to describe the difference between what we have obtained in Christ already and what we are to display of what we have obtained.

 

For us, the change in priesthood from Old to New has occurred in principle. But under mortality we have not realized its actuality through an endless life without death. We own it in pure principle, but we do not possess it in applied practicality as an undying incorruptible reality.

 

But this is what we are being brought toward. We have already experienced the change in priesthood vicariously through Christ in pure principle. But we are about to experience the fulfilling change in priesthood where that priesthood becomes ours in actualized practice of fact.

 

 

The Change in the Law of the Gentiles

 

This is the grand "change" in priesthood that we are pointing to today. But with it, we are thereby pointing also to the grandest change in law ever known in the history of the world.  

 

Heb. 7:12 is predicting the change in the law of the gentiles under the times of the gentiles. It is predicting the supplanting of all human government by the law of the word of the immortalized priesthood. The change will be a supplanting and a replacing, not a reconstructing. And it will be as permanent and irreversible as was the change out of the Mosaic Law when the Melchizedekan Order was first inaugurated through Christ.

 

The Times of the Gentiles with all their legal structures since Adam are to be swapped out for a new, unprecedented, unheard of legal system based in the manifestation of the authority of an immortalized people who have been translated from the confinement of death into full physically glorified eternal life.

 

This new government, the Government of Christ in the Flesh, will be based in the Spoken Word that proceeds from the Power of an Endless Life. And it is that Word that will go forth in that day from Mt. Zion to rule the nations with a rod of iron.  It is the word of the glorified priesthood.

 

The word of the glorified priesthood is to be the new Law of the earth that will replace human law under the times of the gentiles as it has been known since the fall of man. And it is this word that will fulfill all that the Old Covenant ever pointed to.

 

 

Exhortation

 

So what is the point of all this? The point is to show us what we should be looking for as long as we have to labor under the daily grind of ongoing rumors related to the crumbling law around us.

 

For too long the church, including the "prophetic" church has been deceived through its engagement with the gentile legal structures as to what it was doing or what it should expect.  We have been called as salt and light to the nations. We have had a job to do there, and still do. (I am deeply involved in the American legal structure as we speak.)

 

But our destiny has never been to try to effect eternal beneficial changes in the gentile legal structures and then call it the "kingdom of God." Our destiny has been to grow through our friction against the gentile systems toward readiness to acquire immortality, realize the full Melchizedek Order, and become part of the New Kingdom System slated to replace what's left of the failed systems about us.

 

And we are on the threshold of that now!—if we can just keep our eyes on it through all the smoke and noise around us. Everything around us is burning. We ourselves are severely pressured under the events. People are yelling out "Go here, Go there. Watch this sign, watch that sign."

 

Many voices. No one in charge. In the church....

 

The prophets are still stuck on warning signs and questions like, "Is it too late for America?"

 

What? Are you kidding? The greatest transition in world government is at hand with the replacement of mortal human law, and we're worried about whether it is too late for America???  

 

 

                    - Throw Out Your Compass. It's Broke.

 

Our times are not ultimately about judgment! Nor are they about revival! They are not about whether certain nations will escape the beast or whether the beast will take them over! They are not about building bomb shelters and storing away food supplies! Our times are not about the "signs of the times!"

 

Our times are about transition!  Transition! Transition! —Transition to Immortal Life with its new Worship and Law. It's time to get out of the rut of the earthbound judgment versus revival question, the endless tail-chasing of end time signs, and the never dying phobic "Is America going to make it or not?" 

 

It's time to start using the signs instead to do as Jesus said—be looking up for our redemptive change to the new priesthood and its eternal law to transit us safely through and out of the mess we now see about us. There will be new names, new nations, new boundaries, new economy, new ways to exercise immortal life. 

 

These are the things we should be listening for....

 

 

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I'm "end-timed out "I need something else to look at. And for me, this is it.

 

I hope it might be as exhilarating for you to look at as it is for me.

 

That's why I write.

 

Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island

First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org

01/14

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