But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light (1 Pet 2:9).
We are royal, and we are a priesthood.
What kings do is rule. And as priests, as we saw last time, we have access to stand in the courts of heaven.
“The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matt 11:12). This does not happen easily. God commanded Adam to subdue the earth and rule (Gen 1:28). You do not just rule, without going through a battle; you do not subdue unless there is something to be subdued; you do not have dominion unless there is something to have dominion over. In our own lives we all have plenty that needs subduing and dealing with.
We must be militant about this. We cannot sit back and be passive, then expect to enter into rulership. Coming into our identity, coming into our destiny: those things happen when we pursue them, grasp hold of them, and fight for them. Paul said “I take hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of me” (Phil 3:12). The kingdom suffers under forceful ones, and forceful ones occupy by force. There are opposing forces in the heavenly realms whose aim it is to stop us ruling, and we have to deal with them.
It must have been in late 2008 or early 2009 that God gave me four words. I understood them (up to a point) but I did not immediately understand all the implications of them. Those words were:
- Investiture
- Succession
- Enthronement
- Coronation
Investiture
God wants to invest us with authority. I still remember King Charles III’s investiture as Prince of Wales in Caernarfon Castle in 1969. In the UK, being Prince of Wales goes along with being heir to the throne.
Succession
But you also have to come into your authority. Prince Charles did not succeed to the throne and become King while Queen Elizabeth II was still alive and reigning. He did not succeed until she died. In the same way, we will not succeed until some things die. Some of those things will be in our lives, but some of them will be in the heavenly realms. We need to see those things defeated so that we can come into that succession.
Enthronement
And succession is not enough. We are called to occupy thrones, as we have seen. Put simply, thrones are where we rule from. If we leave those thrones unoccupied, there will be no government in those areas. Or, worse still, the thrones will be usurped by others who do want to rule, but draw their authority from the kingdom in darkness.
Coronation
Ultimately, God will display our rulership on the earth. The sons of God will be manifest. The kingdom will be on earth as it is in heaven. Heavenly authority is higher than earthly authority. That is why we need to rule in the heavens. It supercedes all the authority that operates here. The laws of the spiritual kingdom are higher than (and have precedence over) the laws of the natural kingdom.
Heaven to earth
The traditional (Greek) view of the heavens goes something like this:
We live in the first heaven. The Bible tells us that Paul visited the third heaven, the realm where God is (2Cor 12:2). In between there must obviously be a second heaven – so says Greek, linear thinking – and that is where Satan and his angels and demons operate. The enemy has used this broken imagery to his advantage: if we are in the first heaven and God is in the third, then we have to go through that second heaven to get to God. And it is full of darkness. That whole pattern of thinking has stopped us from even thinking we could possibly access the heavenly realms.
Some people have tried to do it. They have attempted to go through the second heaven, but have usually been beaten up because they were coming against a higher level of authority with only their earthly authority.
The reality is different. The heavens are not linear, and we do not need to go through anything to get there. Here again is my representation of what the heavenly realms are really like. If this is the first time you have seen it, you might find it helpful to go back through the past few blog posts and read more about it:
As we saw before, we can choose to turn into the kingdom of light, or into the kingdom that is in darkness. This earthly realm is connected to a spiritual realm which is where God created it from. In fact it is only the word of God that holds this realm together.
He is inviting us to go into the heavenly realms so that we can bring higher authority from those realms into this one. When we do, then nothing here or in the atmosphere of the earth will be able to stand against us.