HE TURNED IT ALL OVER TO HIS SON

HE TURNED IT OVER TO HIS SON

                In English we make things plural by adding an “S”. In Hebrew, words are made plural by adding an “im.” One Seraph becomes 2 or more by adding “im,” making Seraphim. Or Cherub, verses Cherubim.

                So Elohim makes God more than one right from the outset and consequently Genesis 1:26 correctly says, “Let us make man in our image.”

                So the divine council at the very least would consist of at least the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and possibly other high ranking angels called sons of God maybe even including Lucifer. After all the book of Job says: “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, Satan also came among them.” (Job 1:6) So the sons of God were perhaps also privy to the divine council and apparently Lucifer had been put in charge of earth and somehow became Satan when he allowed pride to set him on his own course. He then sought out the new human race to be his subjects. He wanted to be worshipped as God and who better than those created in God’s image?

                Jesus, we know, was a part of the divine council not only as one of the sons of God, but as a part of the tri-unity of the Godhead known as the Word, or the Logos of God. WE know that Jesus was not just one of the sons of God because all of the heavenly hosts were created by Him and apart from Him nothing was created that was created. Jesus has always been God Almighty and He would be the Father’ss mouthpiece and the Holy Spirit would carry out whatever Jesus spoke since it carried all of the authority of the Father.

                So isn’t it interesting that while on earth Jesus said that He did only what He saw the Father doing and said only what He heard the Father saying. He was in fact playing the same role that He had played in creation and when He had forged out a way of salvation for us through His cross and resurrection He then commissioned the Holy Spirit to carry out His Word, His will and His promise to all who would accept Him as Savior and Lord. So, just as the Holy Spirit brooded over the waters before creation, He also broods over the hearts of men, waiting for them to respond to the words: “Let there be light.” And when mankind responds to that word, then the Holy Spirit comes in and sheds His light abroad in our hearts.

                We see this same pecking order played out on the day of Jesus baptism. The Father spoke and the Holy Spirit came down and anointed Jesus for His ministry to the world. The entire godhead (Or Trinity) was involved in our salvation just as they were in creation.

                It is interesting to note here that the age of 30 was the age of full maturity in the Jewish economy. It was the age when a son could take over the family business and it was the age when the Levites could become priests. So Jesus fulfilled all of the patterns of the Law as He walked upon this earth in order that He could bring to us a New Covenant that was promised by the Law. It would no longer be based upon the blood of animals, but upon His own blood. Neither would it be a covenant based upon the Levitical priesthood, but upon the Melchizedek Priesthood and it would no longer be based upon the Letter of the Law, but upon the Spirit of the Law as the Holy Spirit would write it upon our hearts.

                I talk about these transitions very often because there is a lot of confusion within Christianity about these transitions and how to walk in them. Some cling to the Old Covenant Law, while others throw it away and neither of these ways is exactly right. For one thing, you don’t just throw away the Law. You first enter into Christ’s death where you die to the Law. In other words the only way of escape from the Law is to die and so Jesus provided that death for us so that we may enter into His death by faith and that death separates us from the jurisdiction of the Law… forever.

                The big problem is that many Christians today try to put away the Law without actually dying… without actually being crucified with Christ as Paul says in Gal. 2:20. As such they are still under Law whether they want to be or not.

                Our subject today has to do with the Father putting Jesus, His mature Son, in charge of everything including the creation of the physical universe and the redemption and salvation of the human race when they fell from grace.

                The reason the subject of the Law is so endemic to this subject involves the authority that the Father put upon the Son when He put His Son in charge of both creation and redemption. The disciples and the apostles had gone everywhere announcing the good news of the Kingdom and millions were becoming followers of Christ and filled with His Spirit. But then certain Judaizers were following the apostles around telling the people that they must continue to be circumcised and to otherwise keep the Law.

                In essence what they were saying is that the New Covenant that Jesus brought us was insufficient and that it could only be made complete by continuing to keep the Old Covenant as well.

                Today the same issues still apply as we must ask ourselves these questions:

1.       Is Jesus really God and did the Father really turn everything over to Him?

2.       Did Jesus really have the authority and power to offer us a New Covenant?

3.       Was His Melchizedek Priesthood adequate to replace the Levitical priesthood?

4.       Were Jesus’ commandments sufficient to fulfill the Law of Moses?

5.       Was the New Covenant infinitely superior to the Old Covenant or must we borrow from the Old Covenant to make the New Covenant complete?

6.       Was the death and resurrection of Jesus sufficient to exit us from the Old Covenant and to enter us into a completely New Covenant with a new priesthood and new blood and new laws of the Spirit?

7.       The bottom line is this: Can Jesus really save us apart from the Law as Paul teaches?

                These are serious questions to ask because Christians today represent every possible ray of the spectrum from Half Law and half New Covenant to the other end of the spectrum where Christianity is embraced without a death and resurrection and infilling of the Holy Spirit known as the New Birth. In other words they treat Christianity as a philosophy, or a tradition rather than being an agent of death to one covenant and resurrection into another.

                There is a saying that sort of capsules the issue by saying, “Jesus didn’t come to make bad men good. He came to make dead men live.

                The cross is the end of the Old Covenant. The Old Covenant can only bring us as far as the foot of the cross. There we either turn around and take up the Law again or we by faith enter into Christ’s death and when we do that, we die to the Law and we are born again by the same Spirit that brought Jesus back from the dead and we live by that same Spirit. And true to this gigantic truth Paul tells us saying: “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.

                This transition does not make us lawless. In Christ our new life far exceeds what the Law could accomplish in us. In other words, the Law could only tell us not to kill someone, but now by the Spirit of Christ in us, we love them and forgive them. The law tells us not to have other gods, but in Christ we are branches connected to the Vine and His life is flowing through us. He is now in our hearts and even in our mouths as we speak. We have become His temple. The Law commanded a day of rest, but now we have entered into rest from our own works to trust in the merits of Jesus Christ. We are now saved by His righteousness and not our own… now that is true REST such as the observance of a day could never bring us. Israel tried, but Hebrews 4 says that they never entered that REST. It can only be found in Christ.

                I believe that the final revival and harvest of this world must be somehow connected with our fully understanding and entering into the New Covenant that Jesus brought to us. We need to better understand the Melchizedek Priesthood. We need to know and experience what it means to enter into Christ’s death and resurrection so that when we do so we actually begin to live by the Spirit of Christ. In other words, Christianity today as become a faint facsimile of what Jesus envisioned for His Bride and we need to seek with all of our hearts to enter into the real thing… to live the real life and to be transformed into the sons of God for whom all of creation anxiously longs.   Romans 8:19-23

                In other words Jesus is looking for mature sons who have been conformed to His image by His Spirit. The medieval monks had the right idea. They knew that the flesh must die in order for the Spirit to have control. They went about it the wrong way, by physically flogging themselves, but nevertheless they preserved something of the truth of Jesus when most of the church had fallen away into paganism. Who knows but what their prayers during those dark times actually preserved the true church for future generations. There were other groups of true Christians during the Dark Ages as well who were forced to hide in caves and mountains and they faced grave persecution if caught, even being burned at the stake.

                One thing we know today is that Jesus brought us a New Covenant and we must pay particular attention to Paul’s writings because he is the one whom God commissioned to sort this issue out and to bring us fully into the New Covenant that Jesus brought to us. If we simply ignore or gloss over what Paul is saying, we will miss the point.

                Interestingly enough the redeemed on the sea of glass will be singing the song of Moses and the Lamb. The ministry of Moses brought us to the banks of the Jordon River, but it was Joshua that took them into the Promised Land. Likewise the ministry of Moses brings us to the foot of the cross and there his ministry  finished as we die in Christ and are born again by the Holy Spirit to now live by that Spirit.

                Paul is very clear about this and his teaching is very consistent with the types and shadows of the Old Covenant. The ministry of Moses was a ministry of death. It served then and it still serves as God’s agent to bring us to the foot of the cross. So, we will finish with Paul’s summation of the matter in 2 Cor. 3:2-8.

                “You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all men; being manifested that you are a letter of Christ, cared for by us, written NOT WITH INK, but with the Spirit of the living God , NOT ON TABLETS OF STONE, but on tablets of human hearts. And such confidence we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God who also made us adequate as servants of the new covenant, NOT OF THE LETTER, but of the Spirit, for the LETTER KILLS, but the Spirit gives life. But if the MINISTRY OF DEATH IN LETTERS ENGRAVED ON STONES came with glory, so that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, fading as it was, how shall the ministry of the Spirit fail to be even more with glory?”

                The question is this: Can we add to the glory of the New Covenant by adding the Laws of the Old Covenant back into it? And this question also leads us to ask just how much authority the Father gave to Jesus in bringing to us a New Covenant?

                In Revelation 14:6-10, God announces that Babylon. (Satan’s World system) has fallen and He makes reference to the One who created the heavens and the earth. He is here referring to Jesus through whom everything in heaven and earth was created. Only this One who created everything can also restore everything including the hearts of men. Jesus alone, in all of heaven and earth, has the credentials needed to save us.

                Then a few verses later in verse 12 it says:  “Here is the perseverance of the saints who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus.” Well, is God here sending us back to the Law on stone? I think not, for God said to Jesus’ disciples on the mount of transfiguration. (Recorded in Mt. 17:1-8, Mark 9:2-9 and Luke 9:28-36,) God the Father gave a commandment to the disciples saying: “This is My beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased; HEAR HIM.”

                So the entire plan of salvation from creation, to the new creation has been put into Jesus’ hands and it was Jesus who brought us the Law on Mt. Sinai and it was Jesus who came and died to that Law so that He could bring to us what the Law promised and that is a New Covenant in which, having died to the Law, we are now being made into temples of the Holy Spirit not by Law but by the Holy Spirit.

                Today in Jerusalem plans are being made to build a third temple complete with sacrifices and it is the ultimate statement that Jesus was not our Messiah… that the shedding of His blood for the remission of sins was not adequate to replace the blood of animals and that the High Priesthood of Jesus was not adequate to replace the Levitical priesthood. In short they are building a temple for the antichrist (Ein Sof) and this temple represents the ultimate in blasphemy. (It is important to think clearly here, for if the Jews have not yet received Jesus as Their Messiah, then they are not building this temple for Jesus. It can therefore only be built for a false Messiah and that is the antichrist.So why are Christians gleefully helping to fund this temple as if to replace the New Covenant with the Old Covenant once again.

                These are the issues we face in these last days and we must make a firm commitment as to which covenant we are in and who has the authority to bring us this New Covenant. How much authority did the Father give to Jesus? Jesus Himself answers this question.

                “And Jesus came to them, saying: “All authority (power) has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I (not Moses) commanded you: and I (not Moses) will be with you always, even to the end of the age. Mt. 28:18-20

                Moses had a very important ministry and a necessary one for the Law defines sin and brings us to the foot of the cross… and everyone who has not actually by faith died with Christ is still under the Law whether they want to be or not, for not one jot or tittle shall be removed from the Law until all is finished. But we need to understand that the Law is not for the righteous man, but for the sinner… to usher him to the foot of the cross.

                Until we all get this right we will be preaching a wrong Gospel, for the Law has its purpose in bringing us to death and the New Covenant offers us that death through the cross of Christ and then offers us new life through the resurrection power of Jesus Christ to live a life that is pleasing to Him.

                The Father indeed turned all things over to His Son and His Son brought to us a New Covenant with a new Priesthood and a new Law which is the Law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. Romans 8:1-4 and this is His new commandment that we love one another even as He has loved us.