The Kingdom Freedom Stage of Salvation

 

As we near this kingdom harvest manifestation, God is challenging us with implications of our gospel of liberty never before realized. Over the centuries and millenniums, we have always seen the Gospel relative to the salvation and sanctification of our souls. And that it is first and foremost. But the outworked implications of our salvation extend now to affecting the very world systems around us.  

 

It’s important to see that the closing events of Revelation detailing the world’s downfall are integrally tied to a breakthrough growth of our salvation as a kingdom people. They are not just sovereignly appointed events to close out the age while God delivers us into glory “over on the side somewhere.” As Paul’s worship once produced a supernatural jailbreak, so the world’s age-ending breakup results from the culmination of eternal life development in God’s worshipping priesthood brought to maturity over many generations. 

 

Let’s return to the picture of the kingdom as a growing seed. Only now think of it as a buried seedling growing up through concrete. For the longest time that seedling is covered over and seemingly squelched. You can’t even see it or would know it was there. But the seedling’s life comes to the point it can no longer be repressed. It cannot help but to grow up through the concrete, causing the upheaval and breakup of that which cannot be broken by the human hand.   

 

So it is that for centuries our people have been growing in the spiritual realities and revelation of new birth, sanctification and limited powers of the anointing hidden beneath the concrete of the world’s systems. But here at the end of this age, God is calling our sanctification into a new practicality that can no longer be repressed by these concrete systems that define what’s left of the Times of the Gentiles.

 

The Father’s life within is calling us to at last “grow up” through the concrete. He’s calling us out of debt to the world’s banking industry, out of servitude to its crumbling corrupt legal systems, out of dependence on all its insurance and benefits programs. And in all this, He’s calling us to shoulder a new personal and corporate responsibility under His care on this last leg of the journey toward complete glorific freedom in Christ.

 

From Minors to Sons

 

In Part I we noted how the transition from childhood to adulthood exemplifies the graduation from servitude to freedom including a transfer of governmental responsibility. The same applies to us as a spiritual kingdom throughout this age.

 

During the formative centuries of our kingdom faith, we have—relative to kingdom manifestation—been in a position of “minors,” having the status of a “slave,” even though we are technically “lord of all” God’s inheritance (Gal. 4:1). Yes it’s true that since Christ came we have been made “sons” relative to the law. But relative to the immortal glory of our kingdom to be revealed, we have been accounted only as “babes” and “children” awaiting maturity to the glorified placement of immortal sons (Rom. 8).

 

The New Testament is written to us largely as a formative people, a people of minors. It is written to us as “dear children.” In this, we still have a “slave” status under the flesh. Consequently, regarding our relationship to world powers and employment systems, the apostles exhort us to be in submission. (See Romans 13 and I Peter 2 in this light.)

 

But just as children who, though submissive to their parents, are designed to outgrow that submission into their own responsible freedom, so is our salvation as God’s “corporate child” designed to outgrow our subservient position before the world’s kings and governors.

 

Thus as this age of kingdom minorship closes, and God once again “calls His ‘Son’ out of Egypt,” our yearning toward total kingdom liberty makes it so we can no longer quietly acquiesce to every demand of world systems. Read me carefully here. This yearning is not about rebellion against world systems! It is about the inability to conform any longer to world systems. It’s about the fact that world systems can no longer house our irrepressible liberational energy as God’s ready-to-harvest people inside their ways of slavery masked as “freedom.”

 

From Bears to Giants: Graduated Overcoming through Outgrowing

 

I’m treading carefully here because what I’m teaching this moment is only for the mature—not for hothead radicals looking for an excuse to overthrow earthly government. As Jesus said, “If you can receive it…” Each reader must weigh his relationship to this instruction.

 

Hear it then, we are now at a time when—due to the harvest ripeness of our corporate age—God is calling us as a body to rethink our relationship to all earthly government. He is calling us to graduate from both “childish” subservience (seen in the early apostolic instruction) and “adolescent” rebellion (seen in such events as the violence-riddled Reformation and the American Revolution) to mature outgrowing readiness for exodus and responsibility transfer.

 

To prove this is not as far-fetched as you may think, I point to another prophetic illustration with which most wilderness readers have already had experience. Before David ascended to the kingship, he had to overcome various levels of adversaries. As a shepherd, he first learned how to kill a bear and a lion. Yet as intense as these conflicts were, they were but preparatory for one still greater—the killing of a man—and not just any man, but a giant—the most formidable opponent of his people.

 

By analogy, most wilderness readers already know what it is to spiritually grow up through and break out of the concrete put over them by lower level authorities. We have overcome to outgrow the “bears” of family who tried to keep us back from our calling. (Jesus also outgrew the authority of His human family.) Furthermore, we have outgrown the roaring constraints of religious “lions” and their institutions. (Jesus also outgrew the authority of His synagogue’s leaders.)

 

But if we have already wrestled through to the conviction that we were not rebelling by refusing the further constraints of family and church leaderships—then we are ready to wrestle through to the final great conviction: we are ready to outgrow the “giant” of human government itself—as Moses did Pharaoh, as Elijah did Ahab and Jezebel, and as our Lord Himself did before Pilate, and as He promised we too would “stand before kings and governors” (…if you can receive it).       

 

Key to the Kingdom

 

The scripture says the Lord “saw the oppression” and “heard the groaning” of his people in Egypt. In response to the intercessions of so many who have suffered untold generational abuse, injustice and plunder of resources and even violence at the hands of “Egyptian” bankers, politicians and bureaucrats, the Lord is about to release to His mature people the previously elusive “key of David” that will lead them to the new ways of practical kingdom salvation and freedom outside the present systems that He has prepared for us—ways which till now eye has not seen nor ear heard.  

This key is not like a single key you put in a door. It is instead like the multi-staged keys or “key codes” government officials possess for authorizing the opening of top secret vaults or the detonation of a nuclear bomb. Each official has part of the code, but all must come together with their part of the code to produce the single key that authorizes the detonation.

 

Similarly, God has already imparted strategic partial “key codes” into the body of Christ—codes containing revelation for the new kingdom order to be established through exodus. What happens next is that those with the various parts of the “exodus code” are to be strategically led to discover each other as the Father sovereignly orchestrates. In this and in conjunction with the revelation of the glorified manchild people, we will see a new governmental leadership emerge that will put the first face on this new incipiently manifest kingdom society.

 

As the various leaders with the code pieces making up the exodus key are strategically brought together, it will release a spiritual detonation opening the previously sealed “top secret” vault door out of the world system for those with the ears to hear and with the hearts prepared to bear the new responsibility that comes with kingdom government.

 

Make no mistake. The exodus will not be without friction. As the key code leaders come together, and the Father orchestrates the larger strategies for our departure, an unavoidable clash will develop as the beast powers seek to repress our burgeoning life and keep us from leaving. Great conflict is on the horizon—just as Moses, Elijah and our Lord all experienced before the “Pharaoh-giants” of their day.

 

And so as God’s worldwide people of liberty, we will together in faith toward God—not rebellion against men—stand up as one to this repression. But only those that are willing to take up this last great cross of world system-denial—letting the Father purge them of the slave mentalities of dependency on the world’s societal structures—will be released in this exodus. Again, the shakings we now begin seeing are for our proving, determining who shall “be counted worthy to escape all these things, and to stand before the Son of Man.” All the rest will fall away to be trampled in the outer court and overcome by the beast.

 

Help from the Unexpected

 

To close out this section, I want to add just two interesting side observations regarding this nearing exodus. The first is that, as the “woman” (church) of Revelation 12 exits the world into her new position of fledgling kingdom government in exile, God will surprise her by bringing help from those from whom she would not expect it.

 

Revelation comments, “And the serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, so that he might cause her to be swept away with the flood. But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and drank up the river which the dragon poured out of his mouth.” Just as Pharaoh chased Israel after he let them go, so will the dragon chase the woman. The church will need help, but from where?   

 

The earth is a picture of those who are indeed “part of the earth.” They are people of the world to whom the woman would normally minister, but who for whatever reason do not believe in what their system is trying to do, and so become instead a ministry to the woman in her severe need at that hour. In the day of exodus, the Lord will use just such people to assist in our escape to freedom.

 

The Lord’s use of outsiders to help His chosen people in times of need is a recurring pattern to which we should pay heed. Jethro the Midianite provided shelter to Moses; Rahab the harlot sheltered the spies of Israel; and the widow of Zarephath helped Elijah at their mutually critical hour.

 

In Part I we mentioned the American Pilgrims. One special twist to their story is noteworthy here. An important objective of the Pilgrim’s gospel was to bring the word of eternal life to the Native American Indians—the “savages.” But in an important irony, it turns out the “savages” were first critical to saving the lives of the Pilgrims! Had it not been for the Indians, the Pilgrim colony at Plymouth would never have survived at all.

 

So it will be that in the day of exodus, the Father will use some of the earth’s people furthest from our eternal life to help us during our transition to societal freedom. Mark it. Watch for it. The Lord’s patterns are faithful. It is for assuring our humility.

 

The Nature of Our Flight

 

The last observation regards the nature of our flight. When the woman flees into the wilderness, although it will occur under duress, it will not be a flight based in fear marked by the survivalist attitude of “run for your life, baby.” It will be a flight based in the power and certitude of faith. It will be made with haste as at the first Passover, but it will not be harried.   

 

Contrary to the reactionary alarmist calls to flight perpetually stoked by prognosticators of evil, speculative prophetic “Chicken Littles” and all other bottom dwellers who feed on the news of wars and rumors of wars as if it was prophetic revelation, the kingdom freedom exodus will be made as was Moses’ flight from Egypt, “not fearing the king’s wrath.” It will be made under the same spirit of faith in which Joseph and Mary made their flight from Herod—not in fear, but in obedience to angelic warning.

 

Those however who live off a spirit of alarmism masked as “revelational prophecy” will in fact have no part in the new kingdom administration about to be established. For the woman will not be listening to their voice. We will not “fear the king’s wrath,” but we will be following the calm collected warning voice of our Shepherd. We will simply be “following the Lamb whithersoever He goes.” And He will be the one leaving Egypt and leading us out of Babylon —as it was the first time.

 

[ Part IV ]

Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck,  Rhode Island

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

2/09

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