On the day of Pentecost, the first city church was born, and it began to function as the first manifestation of the spiritual heavenly Jerusalem. Within about two years, the church in Jerusalem had the structure and numbers of a spiritual city.
Within two years the church had grown to about 20,000 members, which was about 1/3 of the city’s population.
Through the mighty one accord prayer meetings in the upper room and the revelatory teaching of the Spirit of God, the newly born church emerged with great power and authority, demolishing the spiritual strongholds over the physical city of Jerusalem. This was immediately evidenced by the great harvest of 3000 souls when Peter preached his first sermon Acts 2: 14-41.
This first successful city church in Jerusalem plus the other biblical examples of Antioch, Thessalonica, and Ephesus teach us many important principles regarding the establishing of spiritual cities today.
We have mega churches today but the proper government and pastoral care has not been established. The people come and go as they please without being properly committed or cared for. In most cases, the people are just a part of a large, anonymous crowd. They attend the meetings and are blessed by the glory that fills the atmosphere and by amazing worship music and the ministry of the word. But, as individuals, most of them have little influence inside the church; likewise, most are having no effect on the world outside the church.
Some of these churches also lack the caring intimacy and the training for bringing individual believers to maturity. After years of attending church, they are still babies have many needs often still being harassed by the devil. The careful discipleship training capable of bringing individual believers to mature, victorious living and spiritual fruitfulness is best accomplished in-house groups and smaller congregational meeting.
Some of these great churches, such as the one led by doctor David Yonggi Cho in Seoul, Korea, have entered all of the three levels of church life, namely: evangelizing, home groups, congregational meetings, and large celebration meetings. In addition, there is considerable attention to teaching the people how to develop powerful, continuous prayer lives. Because of this, they were much more successful in retaining the harvest and bringing the believers to maturity.
Small is beautiful, but less powerful
The Lord is leading us to create one Church of several congregations in our region with one Apostolic government over them all.
We need to recognize the special function of certain churches like Jerusalem and Antioch, which were clearly regional centers and not ordinary local churches. These churches had formed a regional residential base for apostles, prophets, and other Ephesians 4: 11 ministries and were regional in their authority and influence, as well as increasingly worldwide in their impact.
Zacharias vision
Zachariah 1: 14 so the Angel who spoke with me said to me, proclaim, saying, thus says the Lord of hosts: I’m zealous for Jerusalem and for Zion with great zeal. I am exceedingly angry with the nations at ease; for I was a little angry, and they helped-but with evil intent. Therefore thus says the Lord: I am returning to Jerusalem with mercy; my house shall be built in it, says the Lord of host, and a surveyors line shall be stretched out over Jerusalem. Again proclaim, saying, thus says the Lord of hosts: my cities shall again spread out through prosperity; the Lord will again comfort Zion, and will again choose Jerusalem.
Then I raised my eyes and looked, and there were four horns (powers). And I said to the Angel who talked with me, what are these? So he answered me, these are the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem. Then the Lord showed me four Craftsman. And I said, what are these coming to do? So he said, these are the horns that scattered you that so that no one could lift up his head; but the Craftsman are coming to terrify them, to cast out the horns of the nations that lifted up their horns against the land of Judah to scatter it.
When the Jews returned to rebuild the city in 538 BC, they had first concentrated on building the temple. While it was still at the foundation level, they lost heart to continue, and everything remained on hold for 14 years.
At this point, Haggi prophesied and roused the dispirited Jews to start the work again. At the same time, Zachariah also began to prophesy and, was carried in the Spirit to see beyond the present, small, physical reality of the partly rebuilt temple to the great, end time spiritual reality that this allegorically represented.
Zachariah was taken by the Angel and saw 4 horns (figuratively the Hebrew word for horn means power and is often used prophetically symbolize power or authority). Here it represents four mighty demonic powers ruling over the nations that had scattered the people of God so that no one could lift up his head- Zachariah 1: 21. Then Zachariah lifted up his eyes and saw four craftsman. He learned that these craftsmen have come to terrorize these horns, destroy them, and cast them out of the nations.
The horns represented these four strong satanic powers that have been able to wreck havoc among God’s people, the Jews, because they had not been obedient to him. There was much discouragement among them because of the way that Satan had been able to scatter them so effectively.
But God was causing Zachariah to run his prophetic eyes down the centuries yet to come to see if our greater fulfillment at the end of the age involving the church in all the nations of the earth.
In a similar way, these strong satanic horns have been at work in a fourfold attack to undermine the pillars of our society. This demonic attack started among the western, traditionally Christian nations, as they entered the 20th century. It was a progressive fourfold attack as follows:
The first phase was an attack upon God himself as creator and sovereign ruler over all that he had made. This happened through embracing the so-called age of reason based upon the ancient philosophies of Greece, which taught that people were now progressing to become like God through the power of their own reason. This really takes us back to the first temptation by Satan to entice Adam to step out from God dependence into independence and become like God by developing his own intellectual resources.
The second phase what’s an attack upon God’s word and its infallibility. So-called higher criticism began to question even the trustworthiness of the translations as well as the original documents. This destroyed the foundation for faith; as a result, people were restricted to only believe what they could intellectually understand.
The third phase was to challenge all the laws of morality and righteousness upon which our society was based. These laws were derived from the scriptures concerning marriage, family, sexual purity, covenant, honesty, and truth.
The fourth phase was to totally embrace a philosophy of evolution. This not only affected physical creation, but even our minds, the way we think, and views as to what is right and wrong. No longer would anything be seen as being eternally right or wrong, good or evil on the basis of God’s say so. Instead, everything was open to question and redefinition according to what seemed best to the individual at the time.
In Zachariah’s vision, God’s answer to this terrible destructive work among his people was the raising up of the four Craftsman. They had the power to utterly direct demonic powers and cast them out of the nations.
We need to know prophetically who these Craftsman are. We need to understand what they did that was so terrifying and effective in destroying the demonic powers typified by the four horns.
I believe we must understand this truth in order to defeat the powers of darkness that hold such influence in our land today.
Ephesians 4: 11 gifts and the zachariah’s vision.
There is a connection between the Epheians 4: 11 gifts and the vision given to zachariah.
There has been a fair amount of debate over many years as to whether the ministries mention in Ephesians 4: 11 are fivefold or four-fold. Some have suggested that the pastor and teacher are one and the same person; there is a slight hint in the Greek to possibly support this.
What I have begun to see is that both positions are actually right. There are only four different ministry skills, but they reside in five different kind of leaders who function in what is usually called the Ephesians 4: 11 ministries. Most often called the fivefold ministries, they are also known as the ascension gift ministries.
The fourfold ministry skills are: prophet, evangelist, pastor, teacher.
The apostle is not just another ministry skill, but an anointed person with exceptional leadership skills and special wisdom from God to build the Kingdom on his unshakable foundation- 1st Corinthians 3: 10. Apostles also have a unique ability to lead and put to work the other four ministry skills already mentioned.
When true apostles direct the activity of the ministry skills, they make each of them much more fruitful and effective. At least one of these ministry skills would always be resident in the apostle, but the apostle can draw on the skills in other men and women and put them to work as a team with the wisdom and leadership skills that are the mark of a true apostle.
The fully formed, mature apostles have all these four ministry skills within themselves, just as Jesus and Paul did. This enables the apostle to emphathize with all the different ministries, direct them, train them, and activate their gifts and callings more effectively because the apostle already has first hand experience and is familiar with the practicalities of the work they are called to do.
If all these ministry skills do not reside within the apostle, it is even more essential that the apostle work in close relationship with other well developed ephesians 4: 11 ministries who have the skill or skills the apostle lacks. This particularly applies to the biblical need for apostles to work in partnership with mature prophets. When these other ministries are joined to the apostle, they not only supply any missing skills; they also enable the apostle to fulfill the apostles ministry.
The chief purpose of the apostle is to develop and direct the ephesians 4: 11 ministries and building the city church to be Effective in the region and to the nations of the world as God directs. It is not enough to just give advice, counsel to pastors and elders on how to run better local churches.
Emerging present day Apostolic ministries really need to see the heavenly city of Jerusalem and understand that they’re called to build it as a first priority. When this happens, we shall see all that Zachariah saw in the Spirit being manifested in the church today. In particular, we will see the releasing of the four craftsmen with the power to terrorize the demonic rulers who control this present darkness. We will then have the authority to cast them out of our nations. The means of achieving this is by building strong, fortified, spiritual cities that can wrest the rule of the heavens from the powers of darkness and establish the canopy of heavenly Jerusalem and the rule of the Kingdom of God over those earthly cities instead.
Immediately after seeing the Craftsman, Zachariah was shown the heavenly city of Jerusalem, for that was what these Craftsman we’re called to build. He then saw an Angel with a measuring rod in his hand. The angels job was to check the accuracy of the building. In every detail, it must be built to the exact pattern and dimensions said by God.
The city of zachariah saw
Zachariah 2:1 then I raised my eyes and looked, and behold, a man with a measuring line in his hand. So I said, where are you going? And he said to me, to measure Jerusalem, to see what is its width and what is its length. And there was the Angel who talked with me, going out; And another angel was coming out to meet him, who said to him, run, speak to this young man, saying: Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls, because of the multitude of men and livestock in it. For I, says the Lord, will be a wall of fire all around her, and I’ll be the glory in her midst.
Apostles live in the glory with Ephesians four men and women, and get their revelation there, and rule the city and the region for the king.
What Zachariah saw when he lifted up his eyes was the city made-up of a number of small towns or villages. They did not have walls separating them from one another because they were all dwelling together in unity. This caused a multitude of people to come together to form one great city with no divisions within it. The exterior of the whole city was surrounded by a wall of fire, not stone, and the glory of the Lord was in its midst.
In reality, at the time that Zachariah prophesied, he was looking at the physical foundations of the new temple that the Jews were rebuilding in the ruins of the destroyed city of Jerusalem. It was small and not very impressive compared with the temple that previously stood there. But in the Spirit, he was not seeing the physical temple at all. His prophetic eyes were looking down the centuries and seeing the heavenly reality that his temple allegorically represented.
Jesus, we are told, would build a spiritual temple made out of living stones, as described in several places in the new and old testaments 1 Corinthians 3: 11-16; Ephesians 2: 19-22; 1 Peter 2: 4-10.
Zachariah was also seeing the heavenly city whose builder and maker was God, which God had first shown to Abraham- Hebrews 11: 10. The glory Zachariah saw in the midst was the New Testament heavenly equivalent of David’s Tabernacle. This initially was the upper room in Jerusalem where the apostles, prophets, and the physicians 4: 11 ministries had come together with a small crowd of others to pray and worship and war and seek the face of God-just like David’s mighty men had done in the past. There they receive revelation, wisdom, and strategy for establishing the city, governing the Kingdom, and successfully waging spiritual warfare against their enemies.
Each village within the city represented a local church with all the qualities of local church life. But each village was also a segment of the city. There were no walls around any of the individual villages within the city, but there was one great impregnable wall of fire completely surrounding the whole city and protecting all that was in the city from demonic invasion.
Individually, the villages had all the benefits and intimacy of the family life of a local church, but corporately, with all the villages joined together, they had the power, visibility, and impact of a mighty city church!