“For some people, who were designated for this judgment long ago, have come in by stealth; they are ungodly, turning the grace of our God into sensuality and denying Jesus Christ, our only Master and Lord.” Jude 4 CSB
In view of the continued unfolding of sex abuse scandals in the mainstream prophetic / evangelical church, I want to discuss this title as used by Jude from a place of deeper insight into the divine nature.
The word grace speaks about a standard of divine righteousness from which a judicial release (forgiveness) has been secured because God has supplied a supernatural means for meeting that standard. Grace further speaks to the supernatural help provided for the ongoing meeting of that standard, especially in times of testing. Grace therefore is always with respect to a standard found in God’s nature, specifically respecting His Holy Will.
The word sensuality, however, speaks with respect to an underlying experiential release found relative to God absent regard for any concept of a judicial standard which needs to be met and repaired. In this article, we are going to trace the spiritual meaning of this word sensuality behind its apparent meaning to understand what this illicit grace conversion really entails and how it occurs.
God’s judicial release (to which grace applies) and His corresponding experiential release (which brings pleasurable liberation from inner bondage) are not the same thing though they both originate in the divine nature. The grace of judicial release, as already said, pertains to God’s Holy Will, being His supreme governing attribute. Experiential release however pertains to the full-orbed body of God’s Passions which exist within Himself subject to His governmental Will. (Hint: God is not a Self-indulging “hedonist.”)
When God sets us free, He does so both judicially and experientially. Judicially, all decrees against us due to our sins are expunged and we are further empowered to live in conformity with His will. Experientially, our souls and bodies feel the release that comes to us through deliverance, healing, and most of all, the inherent pleasurability of both the atmospheric and indwelling Presence of God.
The question for us as partakers of the divine nature(s) then becomes, what relationship rightly exists between our judicial release and experiential release in God? We must deal with this question because, as we shall see, failure to properly apprehend this relationship is directly responsible for the turning of God’s grace into the sensuality of which Jude speaks, especially in the context of the modern “Spirit-filled” church.
The Passions and Will of God in Perspective
Let’s break this open more fully in terms of God’s own nature so we can understand what has been happening. Shortly ago, we made the point that God is not a hedonist. A hedonist is one who seeks pleasure for the sake of experiencing pleasure. Now we know that God is a pleasurable Being. The Psalms tell us that “At your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” And they exhort us to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” In the mouth of the believer, the word of God is as “sweet as honey.”
Yet God has taught us throughout creation and His Word that everything pertaining to passionate pleasure must remain in subjection to His Will. Why is that? It is because this is what is true of the Creator Himself. The Creator subjects the pleasurability of His own passions to the standard of His will. He is not ruled by His passions—specifically His passion for mankind. (Let that sink in, intercessors.)
God especially finds pleasure in that which He has made (see Rev. 4:11). But in this, He will not and can never allow His pleasure in creation to sway His will pertaining to creation. (Again, let that sink in deeply.) For if God were ruled by His passions, He would thus Himself become an Idolater of what He has made.
This standard of relationship between God’s Holy Will and the pleasurability of Who He Is and of His own desires strongly instructs us concerning the relationship between His judicial grace that satisfies our violations of His will, and the experiential releases we otherwise “feel” in our beings—spirit, soul, and body—resulting from God’s Presence that attend that judicial salvation.
The fullness of judicial and experiential release is revealed in the Son, Jesus Christ, who came to prove that God alone is capable of flawlessly stewarding this dual divine nature in perfect intercourse. And He proved it not only by never surrendering His will to His own personal desires, but also ministerially by subjecting all of the Spirit’s experiential releases toward people to the Will of the Father.
All those pleasurable works of deliverance, healing and need-satisfaction—all those “kindnesses” geared to repentance—were conducted in subjection to the Will of the Father. Not once is the divine passion for people this way ever expressed apart from a sense of subjection to the divine will. Nor is God’s passion for mankind much referenced. At the end, Jesus’ concern is not that the world know that “God loves you,” but rather “that the world may know that I love the Father” (Jn. 14:31). This is the government of divine Passion under divine Will on full display.
Now we have the platform for understanding what it really means in the Spirit-filled context to pervert the grace of God into sensuality. For what the church has historically understood in the natural about subjecting all human passion to the will of God, it has hardly understood relative to ministering the passion of God toward man in subjection to the will of God.
The Developmental Revelation of God’s Dual Nature in Church History
Historically, the evangelical church of past generations had an excellent understanding of the primary judicial meaning and operation of the grace of God. The church understood that foremost, grace is God’s provision of a Savior from the penalty (and later from the power) of sin. The church also understood that further, grace is given in time of need and of testing to enable us to walk in faithful harmony with God’s will. Thus whenever the gospel was preached, it’s this message of grace through faith for salvation from sin’s penalty and power that was faithfully conveyed. This was before the days and otherwise in those places where the Holy Spirit had not been fully poured out.
But then something happened. A turn in spiritual history took place. The Holy Spirit began to be poured out and to manifest Christ in a way that had been sorely lacking previously. For up to this time, there was a nearly complete emphasis on the will of God apart from any belief in the manifestation of Christ to bring the experiential releases that also belong to salvation, not just the grace of judicial forgiveness and the help to endure.
But, and so, with the new outpourings began to fall all the pleasurable experiential releases we have afore described and for which the Pentecostal and later Charismatic / Prophetic movements became renown. “Freedom” became the cry throughout the land. First came freedom from “the power of cancelled sin.” Then came freedom through divine healing. Then came liberation into the flows of the Holy Spirit for the expression of supernatural gifts, most notably tongues and praying in the Spirit, then deliverance ministry, then prophetic and apostolic power, then faith for miraculous provision, then the overflow of worship together with the prophetic and intercession.
All of these outpourings brought to bear the depths of the pleasurability of God’s corporate presence and His personal indwelling. Most importantly, all these outpourings communicated God’s great passion for His church.
The Meaning of Grace Begins to Change
Naturally, the concept of grace (always understood to refer to God’s judicial nature) became expanded to apply to this passionate-side display of the divine nature. No harm there, except for one thing. Over much time, due to the overwhelming prominence of the Spirit’s displays of God’s passion, the meaning of grace began to undergo a subtle conversion.
What was at first but an expansion of the meaning of grace, then developed into a substitution for that meaning. What this substitution did was to abandon grace’s fundamental judicial meaning grounded in repairing the violation of God’s will, to be replaced by a passion-based meaning centered in God’s desire to meet the needs of mankind. As a result, God’s people developed an image of God wherein His passion is no longer a “Helper” in support of God’s judicial grace, but rather, God’s Will is now seen as subservient to His Passion for men.
The effect of this substitution has been to make God into an idolater first of the church, and ultimately of mankind in general. This has come so far now that the basic gospel of judicial grace by salvation from the violation of God’s Holy Will, has been almost fully replaced by a “grace” that instead preaches the passionate “sensuality” of God toward mankind. This is the fully prophetic meaning of “turning the grace of God into sensuality” as spoken by Jude.
God’s grace is no longer depicted in terms of our relationship to His violated Will. It is depicted primarily—if not exclusively—in terms of His desire for our well-being through healing, deliverance, miraculous provision, and our future “destiny” through prophetic proclamation, etc. (The “prophet” Kim Clement was notorious for this.) Naturally, worship followed suit, moving from building a sense of reverent awe of God’s Holiness and salvation from sin to building feel-good jam-fests where we can bask in an aura akin to an opium den that medicates our pains and woes. This is spiritual grace converted to spiritual sensuality.
From Spiritual Sensuality to Natural Sensuality: Completing the Grace Conversion
But it does not stop there. And this is the point of all the current exposures. When God’s judicial grace is substituted by a divine sensuality centered on making people feel good because “it makes God feel good,” then the barriers that inhibit us from violating God’s Holy Will become removed. There is no more obligation under this perverted “grace” to live a morally pure life. God’s Will as a standard has been reduced to irrelevance, because God has been reduced to One whose will is subject to His passions, no differently than that of the ancient Greco-Roman gods.
It is then but a short step from there to justify our own acquiescence to sinful physical passions once again. This final acquiescence to fleshly sensuality completes the circuit in which the grace of God is turned into sensuality. If we believe God is fundamentally driven by His passions for mankind, then there is nothing to stop us from yielding physically to the same in His name. This is how it was in the pagan societies with their gods. In effect, we have gone pagan as well, just with one God, that’s all. (This is in effect what was driving the personal theology of Mike Bickle at IHOP-KC.)
The main point of this article is to show how this grace conversion does not just go straight to physical sensuality. It first travels through a conversion of God Himself in our minds, whereby, through false reception of the demonstrations of His passions, we elevate His Passions for us above His own sacrosanct Will, making Him out to be a sensual idolater of us. Under that atmosphere, any immorality can be justified. And that is what has been surfaced for all to see.
Let us be clear, this has not just happened over one generation. It has developed slowly over many generations. (Followers of this ministry know that we have been prosecuting this false view of God for almost a half century.) We are now only seeing it come to a more vast ripening point than it has ever reached before in American Christianity. And it has seemed fit to God to wait all this time before openly dealing with it.
We can be sure however, that we have only seen the beginning of these dealings. Eventually, the Passionist view of God is going to collapse under the fires of world tribulation. When that happens, the church of true manifest sonship, which displays the Passion of God in full righteous subjection to His Will as Christ did, shall come to the fore.
(No more “mama God” pastors then.)
Blessings to all the faithful watchers.
Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org04/25
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