The Scripture says, “Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). Don’t you feel as if the sun is about to rise on a whole new day! Let us determine to be believers, and not allow circumstances or anything that comes from the nephilim spirits and demon powers to affect us. Let us break out of that level and set ourselves on a course of seeing the creative fulfillment of God in the earth: resurrection life, breaking the back of Babylon, and possessing everything that God has promised us.
Do not say in your heart, “Those giants are too big!” This is the attitude that made the Israelites shrink back from taking Canaan. They said, “Oh, we can’t do it. We’re just like grasshoppers in their sight” (Numbers 13:33). Well, who cares what we are in their sight? God has a way of drawing people out so that they make complete fools of themselves.
In a world that gauges everything by how arrogant a person is, God tells us to be meek (Matthew 5:5). But that meekness is not a hangdog attitude that whines, “Oh, I’m nothing.” Meekness is the absence of arrogance. It is a way of saying, “I’m not arrogant. I’m not aggressively ambitious. I’m not ruthless in my desire for a position or a place.”
We are determined to walk in that meekness. But what about those who feel free to attack and harass the apostolic ministry with no fear whatsoever? Don’t they appreciate what God has said? Don’t they realize what He is doing? I realize that I am in a position similar to that of the twelve tribes of Israel when they were standing at the Red Sea. The Egyptians said, “We must go after them and subdue them! They have to serve us!” That is the attitude of many concerning the apostolic ministry. Throughout the past years, they have felt that I was raised up by God to serve them, when in reality I was raised up by God to serve them. There is a great difference.
. When people try to use the man of God, they cannot use him; but when they submit to the Lord, then the man of God serves them. It is a paradox. Many have thought, “He is not going to do what we want him to do, or be to us what we want him to be. Let’s go after him!” God responds by simply letting them be drawn into His dealings.
What about “Pharaoh”? Doesn’t the Word of God say that we should have respect for the rulers over us? (Romans 13:1.) Yes, but does this mean that we dig Pharaoh out of the Red Sea after he has drowned as a result of the judgments of God? No, for the Word says, “You will see him no more forever!” (Exodus 14:13.) As the judgments of God come forth in the earth today, we are in something different than the Church has ever faced before. There is a real expectancy in our hearts that very shortly many of the limitations and restrictions which have been upon us for centuries shall be broken. I realize how conditioned I am in my mind to accept limitations and restrictions, and I have been constantly repenting for that. If you want to follow an apostle, follow me in repentance over the way you have failed to appropriate and to act upon your freedom and liberty.
I am in favor of doing much more than we have ever dreamed of doing. I pray, “Lord, increase our vision, so that we may know the greater works which we are to do.” So far, we have not even been able to define the greater works. Jesus said, “The works that I do shall you do also, and greater works than these shall you do” (John 14:12). Can you name the works that would be greater than those Jesus did? We certainly have not raised a Lazarus yet. How about turning water into wine? Think of the many things He did that we have not done, and yet we are to do even greater works.
One of these works which Jesus did is described in John 9, where He healed a certain blind man. There we read about the observations of a man who had been born blind; yet he had eyes to see that the religious people had a blindness of heart which prevented them from seeing all that God was doing in their midst.
And as He passed by, He saw a man blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, saying, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he should be born blind?” (How could a man have sinned before he was born?) Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was in order that the works of God might be displayed in him.” John 9:1–3. What a different perspective you get when the Lord begins to talk!
Then the Lord made a remark that seemed to be incidental. Often He made casual remarks which were apparently out of context; they did not seem to mean anything at the moment they were spoken. However, you must realize that the Son of God spoke with a knowledge of eternity past and eternity to come. In every incident, He was relating Himself to the will of the Father and to all that the Father had sent Him to do. He said, “We must work the works of Him who sent Me, as long as it is day; night is coming, when no man can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Verses 4–5. In each instance, He proceeded to do the work that He had to do at that moment.
We must understand what Jesus was saying. In the Greek text, the phrase “the night is coming” reads erchomai nux. A famous minister of the past used that phrase on his stationery, realizing that a time was coming when he could not work. However, that was not at all what Jesus was talking about. What did He mean when He said, “The night is coming”? Scarcely had He and the apostles—those whom He had chosen to introduce and bring forth the Kingdom Word, the whole gospel of the Church age—left the scene, when the world began to go into the Dark Ages. Before long the world was in chaos.
It is almost unbelievable that such a thing could happen to a literate world. In that first century, long before the age of printing, most people could read and write. Many were able to speak two or more languages and were conversant in the sciences of that day. The writing of the New Testament in itself was an amazing accomplishment; it astounds us even today. With a careful translation of the Greek text, we still have difficulty understanding what the Scriptures are saying. Now imagine that in the early Church they were able to speak and write that Word in various languages. It is amazing. Then the night came. The darkness came upon the earth. It was like an eclipse—no one could see anything. They could not move, nor did they know where to go from that hour on. As we look back to that period of time, we search in vain to find much happening.
Finally all of this situation began to change; things started happening. The dawn of a new day was coming. Hosea prophesied of this time, “Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the Lord.” No one can hold back the dawn. The Lord is revealing it to us, and as He does we are finding that once again everyone can work.
We are privileged. I do not think we know how privileged we are. As much as we love the Scriptures, we must confess that they came forth in a lesser age. This we can see by looking back to all the ages covered in the Scriptures. Do you realize that more Words for the Kingdom have come in this day than during any other period of time? More light has come today than ever came in the past. How many people were ready to stand with Moses? How many were ready to stand by Elijah or Elisha? How many stood with Jeremiah during the time of his prophesying? Look back at all these men of God. Few if any of them had even a handful who really believed them and stood with them. How many do you think are standing with the apostolic company today? Already they number in the hundreds. For the first time in the history of the world, a company of Timothys is coming forth. In Paul’s day there was one Timothy; how many do you think there are now?
Think about this in realistic terms. Some people say that we live in a lesser age. I do not believe it is a lesser age. They point out that the men we read of in the Bible spoke the Word of God. What are we doing? We are speaking a Living Word. Stop and consider: How many sermons could those men preach? How many churches could they touch? How much communication and publication was there of that Word? Compare that with the thousands of tapes of the Living Word that are being circulated today throughout the world and the number of people who are being taught that Word. Church after church is springing up. Eventually there will be one thousand New Testament churches on the west coast of the United States alone—more than existed from the beginning of the Church down through the medieval ages. More churches will result from this one phase of the restoration alone than existed during all those past days. Of course, it is true that there are many churches in the world today; but I am talking about churches where people are believing God, living under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, believing for the Kingdom, believing for the full restoration (Acts 3:21).
Jesus said, “The night cometh.” The night did come, and now comes the dawning of the new day. Before anything can appear on the earth, it has to be spoken into existence. Soon after Jesus spoke the Word in John 9, the world went into darkness; the night came. What He had said and what He had done threw it into motion. Genesis tells us that when He created the world, the evening and the morning were the first day. First came the evening; then the morning. Whenever God brings forth a day, He speaks a Word; and first comes the night, then comes the day. First comes that which is unexplainable, causing us to wonder why such darkness has come upon the earth.
The Word affects our individual lives that way also. For example, God spoke a Word over Joseph by a dream and a vision, and for the greater part of his life he was thrust into darkness: in prison, slavery, and bondage; hated by his brothers and living on the verge of death. Suddenly the night was over and the day came, just as the new day is coming for us. We do not realize how limited we have been until we begin to enter into the glorious liberty of the sons of God (Romans 8:21). It is coming to us now.
God has been working in my own life, and I feel that while I am breaking out of something, I am also breaking into something. It is astounding. Although I have been thrust into unbelievably complicated situations on the personal level, it is not affecting the Word that God is speaking. We find that the Living Word is coming with a far greater depth than ever before. How did this happen? Did I plan it? No, it is because the Spirit of the Lord has come upon me, bringing a new anointing. I have been released into something greater than ever before. What shall we say of this? The Christ that is coming forth in you and in me is not coming forth to be crucified afresh or to be put to an open shame (Hebrews 6:6). That is not going to happen. What the Lord is bringing forth in His Body is going to be for His glory, and it will come forth through His glory.
God has been preparing us. He has dealt with us to the point that we rarely see anyone in a ministry of authority striving for a place any longer. The selfish striving for money is also disappearing. Everything is being brought under divine order. For several years, the Word has been coming on repentance. That Word shook the churches so thoroughly that they did not know whether I loved them or hated them, but I was doing the will of the Lord. And I was doing it with a great love for the people, whether they understood that or not. As a result of that shaking, the pastors have gone through a great change. By the grace of God, they experienced this transformation along with me. Sometimes all of us wondered what it was all about, but we had to go through it. This was the way God tested the pastors and the ministries whom He had raised up to stand with me.
It is the same pattern as described by Jesus when He told His disciples, “You who have followed Me in this regeneration shall sit with the Son of Man upon thrones of glory” (Matthew 19:28). He said, “I have a cup to drink,” and He had to drink it (John 18:11). “I have a baptism to be baptized with,” and He had to enter into it (Luke 12:50). In the same way, everyone who is walking with the Lord now must go through the shaking and the testing. But praise God, we are coming through it. The night was filled with much weeping, much terror and fear, much testing of the souls of men; but as we come out of it, we are entering into something new that we have not walked in heretofore. Prepare yourself for the greater works! Loose yourself! The cage door is open—come on, let’s fly! Let us loose ourselves into the fullness of all that God has spoken for us.
The problem we face today is the same problem that existed in Jesus’ day. In fact, it is even accentuated. John 9 presents one of the best scriptural pictures of the contest that takes place as the Christ comes forth. That contest is not between God and the world of sin; it is between God and the world of religion. We have heard that before, but we must hear it again. When there was a contest on Mount Carmel, it was not the starving people who wanted to kill Elijah. He was battling against the prophets of Baal; they had to die. In this day there are a lot of arrogant, proud, religious, pharisaic spirits that will have to come down in order for the Kingdom of God to prevail. The battle is between God and the world of religion.
What did Jesus do for the man who had been born blind? John 9:6–7: … He spat on the ground, and made clay of the spittle, and applied the clay to his eyes, and said to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which is translated, Sent). And so he went away and washed, and came back seeing. What a simple procedure! A man had been born blind, so Jesus put some mud on his eyes and healed him. Imagine that! Now when people in the bars say, “Here’s mud in your eye!” they may wind up “blind.” But when Jesus said it to the blind man, he came back seeing.
The neighbors therefore, and those who previously saw him as a beggar, were saying, “Is not this the one who used to sit and beg?” Verse 8. Notice that not only had he been healed so that he could now see, but he was also no longer begging. In other words, after the cage door had been opened, he flew out. There are some people who will never throw away their tin cup. Even after God heals them, they still sit there with a tin cup, full of pencils, feebly crying, “Help the blind! Help the blind!” It makes you feel like telling them, “Open your eyes! You can see! Get up and go to work.” Take the responsibilities that come with every blessing from God, and move into them. There is always a responsibility that comes with everything God gives you.
Others were saying, “This is he,” still others were saying, “No, but he is like him.” He kept saying, “I am the one.” (There were some who simply would not believe him.) Therefore they were saying to him, “How then were your eyes opened?” He answered, “The man who is called Jesus made clay, and anointed my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam, and wash’; so I went away and washed, and I received sight.” And they said to him, “Where is He?” He said, “I do not know.” They brought to the Pharisees (the good religious people) him who was formerly blind. Now it was a Sabbath on the day when Jesus made the clay, and opened his eyes. Verses 9–14. Here the Pharisees saw their opportunity to bring religion into the situation.
Every time religion gets into something of God, it wants to kill it. Some young believer may be very excited, ready to rush into the Kingdom of God; but he had better be careful, because there will probably be a Pharisee there sticking out his foot to trip him. You can almost hear the heart of the Pharisees: “We’re united. We stand fast. We won’t let anyone into the Kingdom. We’re not going to enter in, and we don’t want anyone else to go in either, because we are the very religious people!” Jesus rebuked the Pharisees, “Woe to you, Pharisees! You refuse to go into the Kingdom yourselves, and you will not let anyone else in either. The publicans and the harlots will go in ahead of you” (Matthew 21:31; 23:13).
Religion is a hangover in the Adamic nature of something which was once good. Once people had a desire to walk with God. There was no religion in the Garden of Eden when man walked with God. There were no Methodists, no Baptists, no Presbyterians; there were no Pentecostals or Charismatics; there was no one like that in the Garden of Eden. There was no chapel; there was no church. But at eventide, you could hear Adam call, “Yoo-hoo! I’m here, Lord! It’s time for our walk. We’re going to talk a little bit; it couldn’t hurt!” And they went down the path together.
There were no churches in Eden. There was no religion in Eden. It takes a people who have no walk with God to become religious. By the end of the fourth chapter of Genesis we read, “Then men began to build altars and call upon the name of the Lord” (verse 26). What were they doing? Very piously they were saying, “Oh, we miss it! This old, Adamic nature of ours is very religious, and we must seek God. We must build a way to reach up to the heavens to God!” So they built the tower of Babel (Genesis 11). But God cursed the whole thing. Religion is some depraved quality in the nature of man that was once an honest desire to worship God. With the Fall it became a drive that makes people want to worship something, even if it is only demons, spirits, or trees. Something went haywire. Men have a desire to worship, but it has been perverted.
Again, therefore, the Pharisees also were asking him how he received his sight. And he said to them, “He applied clay to my eyes, and I washed, and I see.” (That was the shortest testimony in history!) Therefore some of the Pharisees were saying, “This man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath.” (“We’ve got Him now; He’s not religious!” Imagine saying this of the One who is the very Sabbath rest of the ages!) But others were saying, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And there was a division among them. They said therefore to the blind man again, “What do you say about Him, since He opened your eyes?” And he said, “He is a prophet.” Verses 15–17. Isn’t it amazing how a blind man could see so much, and those who never had a blind day in their life could not see a thing!
The Jews therefore did not believe it of him, that he had been blind, and had received sight (people who do not want to believe in a miracle will also not believe that the previous condition which has been changed ever existed), until they called the parents of the very one who had received his sight, and questioned them, saying, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? Then how does he now see?” His parents answered them and said, “We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind; but how he now sees, we do not know; or who opened his eyes, we do not know. Ask him; he is of age, he shall speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews; for the Jews had already agreed, that if any one should confess Him to be Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. Verses 18–22.
The Jews had all those scrolls full of prophecies of the Messiah’s coming, yet they had made a religious rule: Anyone who says that he has come to fulfill those prophecies, out he goes, along with all who believe in him. It isn’t logical, is it? One quality of “religion” is that its followers are never expecting their creed to happen. They are never expecting their own doctrines to work. They are never expecting their own prophecies to be fulfilled. Therefore, they take measures to prevent it.
For this reason his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.” So a second time they called the man who had been born blind, and said to him, “Give glory to God; we know that this man is a sinner.” They themselves were totally unable to perform any kind of miracle. Yet when they learned that Jesus had healed a blind man, which was truly a great miracle, all they could say was, “It was done by a sinner, so give the glory to God.” (Evidently, we need more sinners!)
He therefore answered, “Whether He is a sinner, I do not know; one thing I do know, that, whereas I was blind, now I see.” They said therefore to him, “What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?” He answered them, “I told you already, and you did not listen; why do you want to hear it again? You do not want to become His disciples too, do you?” And they reviled him, and said, “You are His disciple; but we are disciples of Moses.” Verses 23–28.
It is easy to become a disciple of someone who has been dead for a few thousand years. When you tell people that Christ is coming forth today, many of them say, “We do not want any part of that.” They want to believe in the Christ who is still hanging on a cross. You can tell them that the Word says He is coming to be glorified in His saints (II Thessalonians 1:10), but they just reply, “We cannot understand that.” It is true in every case that religious people will build monuments and sepulchers to the prophets whom their fathers killed about a hundred years earlier. Why does a man of God have to be dead for a hundred years before anyone will see him for what he is? Because then they do not have to walk in the Word that he speaks. The contest is over the present Word, and that is where men stand or fall.
And they reviled him, and said, “You are His disciple; but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses; but as for this man, we do not know where He is from.” The man answered and said to them, “Well, here is an amazing thing, that you do not know where He is from, and yet He opened my eyes.” The blind man was probably thinking, “There is nothing else like this happening in the whole earth, and you don’t know anything about it. You disciples of Moses ought to go up on Mount Nebo and jump off!”
“We know that God does not hear sinners; but if any one is God-fearing, and does His will, He hears him.” (That blind man wasn’t so blind after all, was he?) “Since the beginning of time it has never been heard that any one opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, He could do nothing.” Verses 28–33.
At this point, the Pharisees had to shift their approach. What do religious people do when they cannot win an argument with someone? They make an accusation against the person; they smear him. Look at any of the men who stood before the Council—the Lord Jesus Christ, Stephen, Paul, Peter. The accusations brought against them were never logical. When the Jews wanted to kill Jesus, He asked them, “For which one of these miracles, these good works, do you stone Me?” (John 10:32.) All they could do was to make a railing accusation that was not based on fact. This is what the Pharisees did to the blind man: They answered and said to him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?”
The Lord had already said that this man was not blind because of his own or his parents’ sins. That fact had been established by the revelation of the Lord, but no one accepted it. According to the reasonings and the philosophy of people, whatever happens to you is your own fault; it is always a matter of cause and effect. Never do they reason that things happen so that God can be glorified in the situation. Never do they see that God will raise up a weak man so that He can show His strength through him. Never do they see that even if a man stumbles and falls seven times, God will raise him up because He has called him a righteous man (Proverbs 24:16).
They answered and said to him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you teaching us?” And they put him out. Jesus heard that they had put him out; and finding him, He said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered and said, “And who is He, Lord” (or, “Sir”), “that I may believe in Him?” Jesus said to him, “You have both seen Him, and He is the one who is talking with you.” And he said, “Lord” (here the Greek word is translated “Lord”), “I believe.” And he worshiped Him. It was that simple. At first he was polite because he had been healed, and he called Jesus “Sir”; but later he acknowledged Him as “Lord.”
And Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see; and that those who see may become blind.” Jesus healed one man, and he saw. But how many Pharisees were there who never saw another thing from God as long as they lived? Those of the Pharisees who were with Him heard these things, and said to Him, “We are not blind too, are we?” (Can you hear the anger and the arrogance in their voices?) Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you say, ‘We see’; your sin remains.” Verses 34–41. The sin of religion is not that it is blind; the sin is in the liars who say that they see when they do not see. A man who sincerely acknowledges, “O God, I don’t see it; help me, Lord,” is not sinning. But the man who does not see at all, and yet insists, “I see,” is the sinner. It is the arrogance of unbelief that will never acknowledge its need. Therefore, the sin remains.
In John 8, the Pharisees told the Lord, “We are the seed of Abraham. We have never been slaves to anyone.” Of course, that was a big lie. At that very time they were being ruled by the Roman Empire, and throughout history they had suffered under terrible persecutions. Back in the times of the Judges, they were actually bond servants of the Philistines, the Midianites, and other nations. So we see that there was an arrogance in them that did not even acknowledge their own history. They claimed that Abraham was their father, but Jesus told them, “No, you are of your father the devil, and his works you will do.” Yet at one time, way back in their ancestry, the Jews had served God. And because they had had a Moses, an Isaiah, a Jeremiah, and other prophets, they had an advantage—they had the Word. To them had been committed the oracles of God, which Paul made plain in Romans 3:1–2. But there is something in this that you must understand. Those religious people were of the devil, and they would not realize it. Instead, they were expecting Jesus to hand them bouquets for being religious!
We must realize that the day is past when we give bouquets to Lucifer just because he was once an archangel. No longer will we cater to people—no matter what they have been in the past—if they have now become the instruments of Satan. We must face the fact that religion lends itself very much to the satanic thing. May God open your heart to understand the wisdom of this in the days to come. Open your heart to it, for the day must come when we understand that it is not important what a man seems to have been, or even what he seems to be now; what matters is how God sees him.
In John 5:44, Jesus said to the Jews, How can ye believe, which receive honour one of another, and seek not the honour that cometh from God only? They were seeking honor from one another; then how could they receive the true honor that comes from God? The Lord made this Scripture very real to me. I do not want to be called “Doctor.” I do not want the honor that comes from men; I want the honor that comes from God. God taught me that when you are spiritual, you seek no honor from man. Only religious people do that. That is the danger of religion. The arrogance in the heart of a Pharisee leads him to seek a preeminent position and a degree, the honor that comes from man. We have only one desire—to be bond servants of the Lord Jesus Christ.