Protected by Blood                                                                    Zion Fellowship 16.7.17

Introduction

With those with ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches (Rev 2:7 etc.) alarm bells are ringing constantly and they show no sign of stopping. This is not the first time I’ve experienced a heightened need to be alert and pray for divine protection. Late in 2014 I was a part of establishing a regular night of prayer based on the words in Joel 2:1 called, “Blow the Trumpet…Sound the Alarm”. (We were eventually forced to drop “Sound the Alarm” by the host church.) One of our most moving meetings came several months later in response to a video placed on the internet by Islamic State. It showed the beheading of 21 captive Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Christians for their faith in Christ. The church was full that night, including with many young people who stood in the place of the martyrs, but as news of the persecution of Christians across the Middle East became more regular the dynamic for urgent prayer became less felt and those meetings petered out. Since “judgement begins at the household of God” if our Father can’t get our attention by distant things he will begin to shake things closer to home (1 Pet 4:17).

Near the start of the year we had the Riverview financial fiasco and the resignation of its senior pastor, then I started to have people coming to me with more and more stories of pastors having breakdowns, let alone marriage breakups, of prophetic people being “moved on” from places of ministry and the suicide of the youth pastor at Life City Church seized the attention of many. The Spirit of the Lord is shaking the Church in Perth but few know how to interpret the signs of the times (Matt 16:3; Heb 12:25-28). The people of God seem paralysed in terms of how to enter into God’s protective presence.

We seem stuck, even in our thinking about revival, in the cycle characteristic of the Old Testament period of the Judges. In times of prosperity Israel forgot her covenant with the Lord and turned to idols, so God subsequently handed them over to enemies as a punishment, in pain they called out to the Lord who faithfully delivered them, then they became prosperous only to have the whole pattern repeat itself (Judges 2). In the New Testament the strong discipline of the Lord on a self-confident church is represented in Corinth (1 Cor 10:12; 14:37) where Paul needs to explain to the Christians that because of their disunity, “That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.” (1 Cor 11:30). The relative rarity of healings across the church is a sign we are under the discipline of God, and he will hand us over to more suffering until we accept his ways of Fatherly correction and protection. Pastorally speaking however the most obvious sign of a spiritual crisis in Church and culture is confusion about marriage. Not everyone is called to marry, but in God’s order everyone is meant to be able to see through Christian marriages the glory of the eternal relationship between the Church as the Bride of Christ and Jesus as her heavenly Bridegroom. To understand the roots of our current confusions about marriage and gender we need to go back to Eden.

Marital Protection

Before the creation of Eve Adam was charged by God to “serve and guard”[1] the Garden as a place of holy beauty for his coming bride (Gen 2:15). Essential to his vocation of watching over Eden was the wisdom of the Word of the Lord spoken to him not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:17). The preservation God’s presence in Eden depended on Adam as a husband taking up the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God and using it to repulse the devil when he entered Eden to seduce Eve (Gen 3:6; Eph 6:17). In practice Adam’s passivity in the face of evil meant he denied God’s Word was “living and active” and most marriages have been devoid of the power of the all protecting Word of God ever since (Heb 4:12). The absence of the Word will always mean the presence of evil.

Paul lays out the spiritual foundation of marriage by quoting from Genesis 2 and asserting; ““Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.” (Eph 5:31-32). Human marriage exists as a sign of the eternal marriage between Jesus and the Church. Most men have a huge problem understanding this. Two Saturdays ago I was asked to read from Ephesians 5 on husbands and wives at a wedding and afterwards I was mobbed by people with quite strong responses. The men have no idea how to draw out submission from their wives because they haven’t taken initiative in laying down their lives in spiritually protecting them in Spirit and Word. Walk in this way of self-sacrifice men and your wives will respect you; that’s certainly my experience (Eph 5:22-32).

My main point here is not about the state of marriage but the state of the Christianity. In 2 Corinthians 11 Paul applies matrimonial language to the ravaged state of the Church, “I feel a divine jealousy for you, since I betrothed you to one husband, to present you as a pure virgin to Christ. 3 But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.” (11:2-3). The church in Corinth was in disarray because they had accepted those preaching “a different Jesus…a different kind of Spirit and a different kind of gospel…” than that brought by the apostles (2 Cor 11:4 cf. Gal 1:6). Wherever the people of God are stained by the sins of the world (Eph 5:27; James 1:27) rather than a radiant Bride it is because they are submitting to a “different teaching” from the Word of Christ (1 Tim 6:3). This is our problem across the churches today.

In God’s great purposes all should be able to see shining through the holiness of the Church and the splendour of Christian marriages that the ultimate state of the universe is marital bliss. In the nineteenth chapter of Revelation the heavenly hosts announce the impending “marriage supper of the Lamb” (vv.6-9) and John records a scene alarming to unbelievers but comforting to the followers of Christ; “Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war….13 He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. 14 And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. 15 From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations…” Elsewhere in scripture Jesus is called “the second Adam” (1 Cor 15:45) and here he does what Adam and all his cowardly imitators have failed to do, he appears as the true Husband who fights for his Bride the Church with the all conquering all protecting Word of God.

If this Word of God is rarely manifested across our churches today, if few are taking up the spiritual arms of the Word of prayer in union with Christ in his conflict with the powers of evil the reason is clear. Satan’s strategy is to gradually dim the light so our eyes become adjusted to the darkness. When evil is no longer named as the horror it is the consequences for church and culture is disastrous. When seeker sensitive preachers try to replace the old fashioned offensive word “sin” with terms like “mistake” you will find that the ultimate power which cleanses the Church and keeps her holy and protected from the ravages of the world, and the painful discipline of God, is lost. We lose the power of the blood of the cross.

The Protection of Blood: Israel

The need for blood sacrifice goes back to the very beginning of human rebellion. Adam and Eve tried in vain to cover over their shame with fig leaves but God covered them with animal skins (Gen 3:21). The provision of a blood sacrifice to cover a sinner speaks powerfully to a guilty conscience that there is yet hope for undeserved mercy from the Judge. It was in Moses’ time however that the importance of the protection of blood was made unmistakably clear.

At the time of the first Passover in Egypt God promised; “For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians, and when he sees the bloodon the top and sides of the doorframe, the Lord will pass over the door and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you.” (Ex 12:23). Only those whose doorposts were painted with lamb’s blood were protected from the destroying angel. Do you know that God commanded that the lamb destined for the slaughter be cared for in the Israelite houses for 4 days before Passover? A beloved family pet was to be slain teaching a lesson of the painful price to be paid for the covering love of God. For us the Passover lamb is a prophetic symbol of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (Isa 53:7; John 1:29).

Throughout the Old Testament there are hundreds of references to sacrificial blood as a gift given by God to protect Israel from his judgement on sin (Ex 30:10; Lev 4:25; 16:15, 27; Ezek 45:19 etc.). When a faithful Israelite took an animal to the tabernacle cut its throat and watched the priest throw its blood against the altar they had a wonderful experience of “atonement” i.e. being covered (Lev 1). In their conscience they knew they were being guarded by a God-given provision; “blood” meant forgiveness (Lev 4:20-35; Heb 9:22). A forgiveness that however that was never complete and could never impart a sense of eternal security. To understand how sinful humanity could be fully covered and protected from God’s judgment and the power of sin, Satan and death we must speak of the death of Christ.

Jesus

Longing to supply divine protection to his people Jesus laments, ““O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings”” (Luke 13:33-34). Such an invincible protection could however come in only one way. If the blood of the prophets needed to be shed to seal the sincerity and veracity of God’s marital and covenantal word of appeal to Israel then the blood of the Word himself must be shed (Luke 11:50-51). Commenting on Ephesians 2:13, “in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.”, Markus Barth says: “Spilled blood speaks louder than a voice.  If God hears the prayers of oral petition and intercession – how much more does he hear the cry of his beloved Son, the Messiah!  Blood augments/empowers the urgency of intercession.” The link between shed blood and prayer is expounded by the writer to the Hebrews who witnesses from a heavenly perspective, “you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem…. and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” (12:22, 24). If the blood of the murdered Abel reached heaven with its cry for vengeance (Gen 4:10) the blood of Jesus fills heaven with its plea for forgiveness. If, as the psalmist says, “Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints.” their “blood is precious in his sight” (Ps 116:15; 72:14), then the pleasing sacrificial aroma that arose from the cross has infinitely overwhelmed the stench of the world’s sins (Eph 5:2). In Christ God has no wrath (Isaiah 27, John 19:30; Eph 2:12-16; Col 1:20). If, as John tells us, “as he (Jesus) is so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17), the Lord can God can no more strip away his protection from you than he could abandon his Son in heaven. But it is exactly at this point that the consciences of Christians get stuck. Where was the all protective Father when Jesus cried out, from the cross ““My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”” (Mark 15:34).

If Jesus is to die not only for the least, last and lost, as politically correct preachers would put it today, but for sinners, ungodly, wicked, lawless, defiled, immoral and perverted people, as Paul puts it, he must die unprotected (1 Tim 1:9-10). Christ’s holy conscience must be plunged into that place where sinners are, a Paul puts it in his exposition of God’s wrath in Romans 1, “handed over” to the consequences of their own depravities “freed” from all divine Fatherly protection (Rom 1:18, 24, 26, 28).  What does this look like? Someone sent me a doctor’s blog from the UK recently, there people are saying Bible believing Christians not be allowed to be politicians, there are calls for the complete decriminalisation of abortion, plans to combat ‘”non-violent extremism” (i.e. conservative Christians opposed to gay marriage) and so on. The title of the article was “Troubled times – Is God giving Britain over”? I am not so polite as this Englishman; God is giving over not only the UK but Australia, to the weight and pain of our ever intensifying sins. Morally, relationally and spiritually our culture is becoming more and more blind and mad because the Lord’s hand of protection has been removed. We must however not lose hope for this is all part of a greater purpose.

As things get harder in the lives of people, as their addictions to food, fun, sex, travel, drugs and other hedonistic activities fail them, as more and more relationships fail to fulfill, through the witness of Christians people will discover that the one person who understands the depths of their hopelessness and hellish pain is the person who has been there and conquered, it is Jesus! what the Church must understand in this terrible hour of need is that the blood of the crucified Christ possesses a powerful wisdom surpassing human imagination (1 Cor 1:24). When John is transported to the heavenly world and comforted by the words of the angel, ““Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah…has conquered” (Rev 5:5) our natural human response is to expect him to see a muscled up super-Saviour (like Aslan in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe) who will overpower the devil who “prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” (1 Pet 5:8 cf. Mark 3:27). But at the summit of his vision of God’s plan to protect his people John sees the exact opposite. He sees a creature famous for being weak and defenceless, “a Lamb standing, as slaughtered” that is, a resurrected and crucified Lamb whose sacrificial blood has achieved what no amount of supernatural strength could accomplish, it has “freed us from our sins” we are fully forgiven (Rev 5:6; 1:5). The world today needs the Church more than ever before, it needs a Church with a wisdom to understand that God not only protects us from pain but protects us through pain (Heb 5:7-8). The world needs a Church powered by blood.

Powered by Blood

One of my Arabic speaking friends said Islamic State made a big mistake in releasing the video of the beheading of the Coptic believers onto the internet with the audio turned on, because at the very last moment of their lives these men cried out in one voice, “Jesus”; “they have conquered him (Satan) by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death.” (Rev 12:11).  These young men were so able to confess Christ in their moment of supreme need because they felt the all protective presence of God in the blood of Jesus. Few understand the mystery of such power.  Let me illustrate.

When I visited the World Prayer Centre in Colorado Springs in 2007 the entryway was peppered with quotes from famous Christians. Only one struck me as particularly Spirit-inspired. Jack Hayford said, “Direct access to heaven’s throne through the Blood of Jesus is the grand privilege of prayer.” Hayford understands that the blood of the Lamb is the key to connecting with God’s throne of grace (Heb 4:16; 10:22). The blood of the cross speaks with crystal clarity of an absolute love sacrifice powerful enough to crush the assaults of all evil powers in their accusations against the children of God (Job 1:9; 2:5; Zech 3:1; Rev 12:10). Under the blood of the cross a faithful Christian is unassailable; “We know that everyone who has been born of God does not keep on sinning, but he who was born of God protects him, and the evil one does not touch him.” (1 John 5:18 cf. Ps 5:11). Christ’s blood testifies  to our consciences that for us God is wrathless and in Christ we are guiltless and without shame or blame (Rom 3:25; 5:1; 8:1; Eph 1:4; Col 1:22; Rev 14:5 etc.).

The power of the blood can never however be experienced by an easy going lifestyle Christianity which turns away from the path of self sacrifice. Many of us love this scripture; “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” But few understand its dynamic is contained within the verse which precedes it, “As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” (Rom 8:36-37). Only those who are willing to be slaughtered for the sake of others can share in the power of the Lamb slaughtered and resurrected who is at the centrepiece of all of God’s prevailing purposes (Rev 5:6). Only true disciples can know the protective cover of the Blood of Christ has annihilated the threat of sin, Satan and death once and for all time (1 Cor 15:54-56; Heb 2:14-15; 10:12, 14).

Church under Assault

The Church in Australia today is under Satanic assault like never before and needs to discover the power of prayer that penetrates the heavens. I remember when our youngest son was in junior high school and he used to take the train to school every day. As I was driving to work early one morning I felt compelled to pray for his safety. When he came home later the same day he told us how someone on the train had pulled a knife on him and demanded money; he was not frightened at all and simply told the person that he wasn’t going to give them anything, at which point they became afraid! God gave him a word of testimony that overcame the present power of evil. Prayer, prayer and more prayer is what we need. Let me raise a few urgent examples.

In our day we are witnessing the sexualisation of everything! Unless there is a revival of prayer in the Church the avalanche of indecencies confronting girls and young women on the internet, and with the “Safe Schools” project coming, the moulding of young minds towards sexual permissiveness will become overwhelming. To resist this tidal wave of perversion God is calling for a tsunami of contending prayer (Col 4:12); bands of women travailing in the power of the Spirit of the cross giving birth to new spiritual life amongst multitudes of young women and girls marked by the devil for the debasement of the flesh (Isa 53:11). The Spiirt wants to raise up thousands of “Fighting Women” (http://cross-connect.net.au/fighting-women/).

There is an equally strong call for men to rise up in the face of the onslaught of dark powers against masculinity and to resist the grip of lying pacifying evil powers that say men are useless. Men begin to lay down your life in prayer and enter into what in Australia is the culturally unthinkable, bands of men praying together for their marriages and families taking hold of the Word of God and breaking off the bonds of evil forces (Eph 5:25ff.).

When Ephesians 6 exhorts us to “take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one” it uses the plural participle indicating this is something that the Church should be doing (v.16). Where then are those bands of pastors gathering across the suburbs united in prayer to protect the Body of Christ from the arrows of accusation, suspicion and condemnation raining down upon the people of God? We are in a bad state when Australia’s largest interdenominational Christian newspaper (Eternity) runs an article by a well known local pastor (John Finkelde) with the title, “Hillsong Perth is launching – should pastors panic?”  Is it the case that the Church is attacking itself?  Does the Church need to be protected from itself  because it is full of the competing visions of insecure leaders? In many places the answer to these questions is “Yes!” But it doesn’t have to be like that because Christ has triumphed by his blood. Let me quote twice from Ecclesiastes.

In an age which believes “money answers everything” (Eccl 10:19) we need to learn “the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money,” (Eccl 7:12). When the people of God and their leaders lay down their lives for one another (John 13:14) a spiritual canopy of protection will be raised up over our city (Is 4; 54), a cover of love far above the reach of the “rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Eph 3:10), a cover under which the work of God prospers to maturity and God’s kingdom will mature amongst us.

Conclusion

In conclusion, let me finish where I began. Alarm bells are ringing in the Spirit because the Church of God is under attack from within and without and our only recourse is to learn again the victorious power of the blood of the Lamb.  More remains to be learnt from the story I began with from Libya. After the beheadings the Coptic Church released the names of their martyrs, but there were only 20 not 21 names on their list. It was later learned that the 21st martyr was a man from Chad. He was originally not a Christian, but when he saw the immense faith of the others, and when the terrorists asked him if he rejected Jesus, he reportedly said, “Their God is my God”, knowing that he would be slaughtered. This is the testimony of Jesus, the invincible witness of the blood of the cross to a love that can protect our hearts and keep them faithful to God not only by protecting us from pain but even more protecting us through pain (John 19:34-35; 1 John 5:6ff.). To be a martyr for Jesus you may not have to shed physical blood, but you do have to be willing to bear whatever cost he calls you to carry. I am exhausted by the stupidity and superficiality of so much of the church in our city, so I want desperately to share in the testimony of the blood of Jesus, whatever it takes; how about you (Rev 1:2, 9; 12:17; 19:10; 20:4)?