In about 600 B.C., God spoke through the prophet Jeremiah with what I am sure appeared to his people, the Jews,
words that were incomprehensible and mind-blowing: “But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.
No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.” (Jeremiah 31:33, 34).
The existence-determining, earth-shaking prophecies in these verses were fulfilled when Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, rose from the dead, and ascended to Heaven. Upon arriving there, His Father gave Jesus the whole earth and everything on it as His kingdom! Then, 10 days later, Jesus delegated that kingdom, not just to His earthly people, the Jews, but to all mankind, those from every nation, tribe and tongue, at Pentecost. We are now Jesus’ Vice-Regents, as He rules over the earth by His Holy Spirit, living His life through us, by faith (Galatians 2:20!
We can see that this prophecy has already been fulfilled. These verses in Jeremiah are a right-now reality. We don’t need to try to get anybody to do anything; we just tell them to REALIZE what God has already done! These truths become a reality for us in our experience, BY FAITH, i.e., when we simply believe in our hearts, not just in our heads, that Daddy has already done exactly what He said He would do in these verses!
However, Satan and his earthly principalities and powers are arrayed against us, desperately using their only weapons of lying and deception to keep us from seeing and believing this TRUTH!
This is pictured for us beautifully In our familiar Ship of the Kingdom diagram. As we have studied it, we have seen that the expansion of God’s Kingdom on the earth began at the very top of the mast of the ship, where God the Father initially delegated the Kingdom to Jesus at the Ascension. Then Jesus, at Pentecost, delegated that Kingdom to us.
We have been investigating in these blogs, for the past few weeks, this Kingdom delegation to us. Yes, it occurs through the institutions of the FAMILY, the CHURCH, and the CIVIL GOVERNMENT. In the diagram, we see HOW that delegation occurred initially IN FACT (the Bible relates God’s creation of all three). Now, it continues to occur in our experience BY FAITH. Jesus makes that delegation: by giving us, 1.) His AUTHORITY to extend His Kingdom, 2.) the RESPONSIBILITY to do so, and finally, 3.) holding us ACCOUNTABLE for how we handled 1). and 2).
So, biblically in the diagram, the Kingdom of God has now flowed down to us through the sails and its rigging of authority, responsibility, accountability. We have reached the deck of the ship. Here we see how the three Kingdom Institutions relate to one another. These are the horizontal lines that form the deck. Notice that no one institution has any authority over any other!
1.The Family. Following these horizontal lines, we can see that the Family’s contribution to both the Church and Civil Government is to SUPPLY. It supplies well-trained, educated young men and women to the Church where they will be equipped to rule. The Family also supplies these young, law-abiding, patriotic citizens to the Civil Government, ready to rule by serving their nation.
2. The Church. The church not only EQUIPS its families to rule in all of life, but also stands strong biblically and SPEAKS PROPHETICALLY to the Civil government the truth of God’s word. It has no authority to change the civil government; only to speak biblical truth to it. (My book, A Glorious Church – Attacking the Gates of Hell, is a 300 page summary of what I believe is a description of the New Testament church. Appendix A is a brief history of this church. Appendix A – The Decline and Restoration of the New Testament Church
3. TheCivil Government. Finally, the civil government’s only job is to PROTECT LAWKEEPERS and to PUNISH LAWBREAKERS, with biblically prescribed punishment, All other functions currently performed by the Civil Government are performed by the free-market and the other two institutions.
This has been a several-week long investigation of the Kingdom of God, much-referenced in the New Testament. I sense its time to dock this Ship of the Kingdom and turn to reminding ourselves of the ONLY WAY this ship ever sets sail in the first place! That’s next
