RUGGED UNIQUENESS

RUGGED UNIQUENESS

                Today Bonnie and I are travelling to east Tennessee to visit our granddaughter. Today is her birthday and she is now 8 years old. She is our precious gem, totally unique and beautiful, with tastes and preferences of her own and opinions of her own and she is one of God’s unique masterpieces.

                Actually all of our children and grandchildren are wonderfully unique. No two of them is the same. My two sons are totally unique from each other. Completely different personalities, talents and interests and yet they love each other and would defend each other to the death I have no doubt.

                God loves uniqueness. In all of creation there are no two of anything the same. Everything that comes forth from His hand is a one of a kind treasure. This is why Jesus was so set against the legalism of the Pharisees. They were using His laws to enforce pagan style conformity and since God’s laws were not enough to make everyone the same, they added hundreds of manmade laws in order to force everyone into the same mold.

                It is amazing that when people rebel against God, they break away from God’s laws that in their original form would have made each of them uniquely wonderful. But the more they try to be unique the more they begin to look the same. Orange or purple hair, audacious clothing styles, bodies covered with tattoos… rioting in the streets, they are really fighting for the one who already controls them through the media, through propaganda, through demon spirits… they want a demon leader, a global dictator who will force the uniqueness out of Christians and to make them conform to pagan molds. But the more they try to be different, the more they look the same.

                Nimrod was the architect of the first pagan religion. He was said to be a mighty hunter in the face of God. He hunted men. He sought followers that would come under his command. After the flood, God had told them to spread out and re-inhabit the earth, but Nimrod wanted to make a name for himself and the kind of kingdom he wanted to build would take lots of men…men pressed into slavery and servitude.

                Then Nimrod decided to build a tower that would reach all the way to heaven. It would become a portal to the gods of the pre-flood world…fallen angels… inventors of war and perversion… gods who took the uniqueness of God’s creation and mixed seeds… creating chimeras and monsters of destruction… Nephilim and demon slaves of corruption.

                So Nimrod wanted to harness those powers and rule the world in what would become the first Babylon. And Nimrod had an idea. He said, “Let’s build our tower with bricks instead of stones. But bricks speak of conformity… manmade, pressed into molds… all of them coming out of the fire the same size and shape… created to conform to the rebellion of Nimrod and glued together with a mortar of pitch, or tar.

                Stones, on the other hand are all unique. Forged in the cauldron of heat and pressure and the randomness of creation, stones are all one of a kind… but they make wonderful masterpieces when they are fitted together to make a building.

                God told Moses, “When you build an altar to Me, make it out of uncut stones. It was in Exodus 20 right after He gave Israel the Law that He said: “And when you make an altar of stone for Me, you shall not build it of cut stones, for if you wield your tool on it, you will profane it.” Exodus 20:25

                God had called His people out of pagan Egypt where they had been forced into pagan conformity and slavery and what were they forced to do? They were forced to make bricks… manmade bricks, build by a people forced into slave labor to make bricks of pagan conformity.

                So God called them out. He delivered them by the blood of the lamb. He caused them to eat the entire lamb as well so that they would have strength for the journey and we are told that when they came out of Egypt there was not a feeble one among them. Then God called them to become a peculiar people… uncut stones… serving God with 10 little commandments written on stone… the perfect law of liberty that allowed uniqueness rather than slavery to conformity.

                God marched them through the Red Sea to wash the evil of Egypt off of them. He killed Pharaoh and his army who had pursued them to make them slaves again. But God had delivered His people to make them unique in all of creation. Hundreds of years later, the Pharisees tried to do something. They meant well... they really did. They were trying to restore the rule of law to a people that had begun to worship Egypt’s idols once again, but they tried to do it through legalism… through pagan style conformity, by multiplying rule upon rule… forcing conformity from the outside rather than inspiring greatness from the inside.

                When Jesus came, He saw that by their legalism they were making bricks rather than uncut stones. They were enforcing their own brand of slavery upon the people and then calling it God’s will.

                Did you ever stop to think that we as Christians have been in exile? The very church of Jesus Christ, created to be a temple of living stones, abandoned the simplicity of Judeo/Christianity and they took those living stones of Christ and began to turn them into bricks of pagan conformity. Judeo/Christianity became pagan/Christianity… man made… man in the place of Christ… no longer spirit filled and free, but forced under the iron hand of religion… forced into conformity… every person who dared to live by the dictates of his own conscience was labeled a heretic  and  tortured, imprisoned or burned at the stake. In today’s language, they were not politically correct. They had dared to step outside of pagan normalcy and they paid for it with their lives.

                This is why the Bible speaks to us in these last days saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great, she who has made all of the nations drink of the wine of the passion of her immorality. If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives a mark on his forehead or hand, the same will also drink of the wine of the wrath of God.”(Excerpts from Rev. 14:6-10)

                God hates pagan conformity. Religion sets itself up in the place of God and then demands our allegiance… making bricks instead of living stones… wielding their tools upon the stones until they conform to man’s image rather than God’s.

                Even to this day, whenever legalistic conformists see Spirit filled people, they are scandalized by their freedom. Spirit filled people are a little too noisy, a little too wild, shamelessly worshipping God like uncut stones ...daring to worship God with shouts of joy and the blast of shofars, with dancing and singing and the sounds of many instruments.

                God is calling us out of Babylon just as He called Israel out of Egypt. He wants to deliver us by the blood of the Lamb and by the eating of His flesh.

                Jesus shouted out to the people after feeding the five thousand saying.” I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and they died. This is the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he shall live forever; and the bread also which I shall give for the life of the world is My flesh.” John 6:48-51

                The Jews therefore began to argue with one another, saying, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?”

                Jesus therefore said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of Man and drink His blood you have no life in yourselves. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life; and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food and My blood is true drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” John 6:53-56

                What was Jesus offering them? He was offering Himself. He was offering them the breath of creation, the blood of salvation from pagan normalcy and the conformity of bricks. One can only become truly authentic when he is re-created by the Creator… who makes no two things the same.

                God rules, not by outward control, but by inward inspiration. Man likes to make bricks, but God likes to make living stones, each one a masterpiece… each one a one of a kind work of art.

                Jesus explained what He meant to those who stuck around to hear the rest of what He had to say. Many left Him at that point. They had become used of the brick life. They had found their security in sameness. But to those who stuck around, Jesus said, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”

                Today we see earth’s final global kingdom of the antichrist being formed. We are witnessing the building of a new Tower of Babel… made of bricks instead of stones…built in defiance of God… all religions being pressed into one… the seeds of many gods being mixed with the seed of Christ… made to worship the whore of Babylon. A faithful wife will receive seed only from her husband, but a whore will receive the seed of many men… many gods and mix the seed together just as today’s globalist pope is seeking to mix the seed of all religions into one. This is an abomination to God and yet many so called Christians are even now drinking the wine of her immorality… making pilgrimages to Rome to kiss the ring.

                Do you want to be a brick or a stone? Do want to be uniquely formed by God as a living stone in His temple, or do you want to be conformed to the shape of a man made brick in Satan’s new Tower of Babel?

                “For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are the sons of God.” Romans 8:14