The Eternal Purpose of the Church By Art Katz www.benisrael.org Paul is now going to reveal the heart of the mystery of the Church and its purpose for being, particularly in relation to the principalities and powers of the air. It is the same mystery as the mystery of Israel spoken of in Romans 11, insofar as the fulfillment of the one is also the fulfillment of the other. To me, the very least of all saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light what is the administration of the mystery which for ages has been hidden in God, who created all things; in order that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places (Eph. 3:8-10). There is nothing in the world that can fit us to understand this. In fact, everything in the world is calculated to keep us from understanding it. God's wisdom is at odds with every assumed rational, sane and conventional understanding of life, its purpose and its meaning. Unless we understand this reality, we do not understand the purpose of the Church, and we will therefore condemn the Church to some kind of Sunday addendum, some kind of institutional function that has for its purposes "us" rather than Him. That is a fatal mistake. We are not true church until this mystery comes into the central place of our consideration. We are too rooted in the immediate, rooted in our needs and in the visible and temporal. God intends for us to have a view of the unseen that alone is calculated to free us from the bondage of narrow self-interest. This is God's genius and wisdom. He did not give us His eternal purposes because He wants to 'get fancy.' He knew that if we were not occupied with something that is beyond this age, we would become so rooted in this age that we would be null and void to address this present age. God's eternal purposes can only be performed through the Church, a demonstration of a certain magnitude that is not primarily for the benefit of mankind as an evangelistic witness to the nations. This is beyond that and more ultimate than that, even though mankind will be instructed by this demonstration. It is cosmic, beyond the earth, and occupies all the ages to come. God is delighted by it; it is something that He wants, and He has created all things in order that this should take place. It has absolutely nothing to do with our success or our well being, with our enjoyment or any of those things with which we are so occupied. It is totally irrelevant to the practicalities of our daily life, and yet our daily life will suffer in exact proportion to our indifference to the eternal purposes of God. Is that not why we have insoluble problems in our daily life? Is that not why we are sickly? We are suffused and suffocated and taken up with myopic concentration upon ourselves. We like to feel our spiritual pulse and the programmatic activity of the congregationžall centered in an egocentric Christendom. We will never be saved from sins, lusts and the distractions of the world unless our souls are preeminently occupied with God's purposes for our salvation. The only thing calculated to liberate us is to be taken up with the eternal purposes of God in Christ Jesus. Nothing else has the power to counter the powers of the world and the things that are secular, mundane, and that clutch at usževen things that have a seeming legitimacy. Good, respectable, conventional and legitimate things can occupy us as much as, or more than, the more blatant orgies of materialism. To take this seriously will alert the principalities and powers that we have now become something formidable, and that they need to regard us with a certain tremor of apprehension and fear. Let them see a people who are earnest for the eternal purposes of God and there will be a war being waged in the heavenlies that we will feel and encounter. At the same time, that very opposition is part of God's strategy to prepare us for our participation in His millennial rule. The Manifold Wisdom of God There is a hint here of a primeval, cosmic struggle or conflict between light and the powers of darkness, preceding even the creation of the world. It is a struggle between two value systems, namely, the gods of this world and the God of creation. We are entering the last of this struggle, and the sparks will fly fiercely right until the last resolution. It is so enormous in God's sight that He did not think it too extravagant to create all things in order that this drama could be played out. The world was created in order that it might support an entity called the Church that would bring this conflict to its final conclusion by something that it alone can demonstrate, namely, the manifold wisdom of God. The Church has languished for millennia long without an understanding of this, and has therefore been the victim of these very powers of the air instead of being God's answer to defeat them. This manifold wisdom of God is not to be demonstrated to the world, but to the invisible spirit realm of the principalities and powers of the air. In other words, this mystery has nothing to do with anything that we can recognize as being valid or important for the Church, nor has it anything to do with benefit that the world will receive by our believing. Rather, it has only to do with something that pleases God-a calculated demonstration of His wisdom to an invisible angelic order, and it must be made exclusively through the Church. It is totally other than anything that we might have taken for ourselves as the purpose for the Church's being. God does not tell us why He wants this demonstration, but it is important to Him, and therefore we need to heed it. If we think that God owes us an explanation, then we need to radically examine the roots of our conversion. The phrase "all things" that He created includes the cosmos, the planets and their cycles, an earth that would be life sustaining, whole species of beings, economies, civilizations and a whole supportive structure. And out of it all, one thing should rise up that could not have risen without all that supportive structure and that one thing was so important in God's sight that it was worth it all-and that one thing is the Church! To Him be Glory in the Church We have been brainwashed, and have consciously or unconsciously accepted the world's definition of Church. The government gives their tax-deductible status to us because they want us to agree that the Church is only a humanly defined institution serving human need. That mindset is an absolutely perverse definition of what the Church is. Serving human need is incidental. The Church's whole purpose is to serve divine need and to glorify God, and there is no other agency given in the earth whereby that glory is to be obtained other than through the Church: To Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen (Eph. 3:21). Any church that has lost the sense of the meaning of that word "glory" has voided itself as church. If the purpose of the Church is that He might be glorified throughout all generations forever and ever, and we ourselves have lost the sense of what glory is, then what are we about? Glory is not some fanciful word. God intended His glory to be normative, and there was to be a radiance of this glory that was to permeate His creation. The world has no inkling what glory is. They are certainly the victims of its absence, and God has so calculated it that the Church is the only means by which His glory is to find entry into the earth and be made known. A church that has already opted for programs and for things that will serve the needs of men has, by that very means, disqualified itself from being the agency through which His purposes can be fulfilled. If we miss that God's purpose for the Church, we have missed everything; we condemn ourselves to being only institutional and accommodating to men and their human need. We miss their greatest need, namely, to make the glory of God known. The whole of our modern Christianity is more or less predicated upon the needs of men, rather than the glory of God, but we shall never come to kingdom righteousness so long as our need is the predicate of our lives and the hub and pivot around which all things turn. We will never come to sanity and wholeness, nor will we ever come to the end of all our deliverance and inner-healing ministries. Our real sickness is our self-centeredness. To come into the eternal purposes of God will ruin us for church programs and the multitude of things we think we need in order to satisfy the saints. The present day proliferation of programs is a statement that the Church has lost this apostolic view, and like the world, it has got to provide services and benefits to hold the attention of its congregations. We must not allow the world to define the Church for us and allow them to fit us into their box as a kind of amenity, a little religious and spiritual service that is offered on Sunday. We are not jealous enough for the perfect and have not recognized that the good is as much an enemy of the perfect as evil. We are, therefore, ameliorating the needs that are about us and think that that is the purpose for which we are called. We have not understood that the central and foundational calling as the Church is "Unto Him." Saved for His Purposes This was in accordance with the eternal purpose which He carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord (verse 11). What expression of the Body can there be that does not make as its first priority the taking to itself of God's eternal purposes? A church that does not live for the eternal purposes of God is not living. Is it not little more than a succession of mere services? It has lost, or never had, this vital perspective as the reason for its being, and we are not truly saved until we have been fully apprehended by the purposes for our salvation. We are in an unbroken continuum with those who have embraced the purposes of God and for which reason they were hacked to death, sacrificed and cut up, murdered and butchered in a kind of satanic fury that seeks to nullify this ultimate intention of God through the Church. That is why there are so few who want to hear the call of God, because God calls us to His purposes and not to our own. We will no longer have an ear for the "faith-prosperity" message when once we are taken up with the purposes of God and the things that redound to His satisfaction. It will be a foul thing in our nostrils to "have faith" for a Cadillac or a healing. Is the whole purpose for the glory of the faith that we rub a genie lamp and exercise a principle that will redound in a Cadillac? What a travesty and heresy! It is itself a statement of judgment on a church that has fallen asleep and has lost sight of, or never had, an apostolic and ultimate purpose. And into that vacuum have come other equally infantile and deceptive things. What is the wisdom of God? The wisdom of this world is predicated on self-interest, namely, "What is in it for me? What benefit do I gain by believing?" God is wanting another wisdom to defeat that wisdom, namely, a people who will give their lives for something that has no immediate or practical relevance or consequence for themselves. It is a demonstration of another wisdom that is heavenly. It powerfully frees that person from self-interest. It gives him a motive for being and for doing in things that are outside himself. The world's system does not believe you can do it. They want to bring you into their vortex and have you march to their beat, "You have got to take care of number one. Be practical! After all, what about your responsibility? What about your children? Why leave your profession and thrust your family into insecurity and risk because you think God is calling you? If you do not take care of yourself, then who will? Self-preservation is the law of life. Creation will tell you that. Don't get absurd about it, and radical, and consider your life as nothing. Do what is required to preserve it, to advance it and to promote it. And in the last analysis, if you have to use a shady thing or two, or even employ a threat, or an inducement, or an enticement, or an encouragement for promotion, or the use of intimidation, well, that is the way the world goes." That is the voice of conventional wisdom-and the voice of the world. It is a wisdom that makes mankind to fall in line and do their bidding and worship them as false gods. Whatever the manifold wisdom of God is, we know this much, it will be contrary in every point and particular to the wisdom of the gods of this world. It is another wisdom, a heavenly wisdom, and when the Church can demonstrate it, the powers of the air, who have kept nations and races of men in bondage and subjection to false values, are finished. Where there is a church that can see through them and live independently of them and demonstrate true values, then those powers have no further influence whatsoever. Unless we break through to an understanding of this, our spiritual life will be stifled and church will be nothing more than a succession of services, and we will not be part of the fulfillment of the mystery. We have to decide whether we will be part of this or not. We do not have to be, and unhappily, if we are not, we will be in something that is called "Christian" but it will likely be apostate Visionary Advancement Strategies Permission is granted (and you are also encouraged) to reprint these articles in hard copy form, as well as sending them to your own email lists and posting them on your own websites. We ask only that you keep all website, email contact info, and author contact information intact. -- To unsubscribe, send ANY message to: bbinspire-unsubscribe@...