We are entering into a period of great revelation that transcends any the church has ever known, yet a period that is also one of greater spiritual deception than we have ever known. This advanced entwined revelation / deception power requires a greater discernment and maturity in the Spirit of Truth than we have ever known. As a whole, we are not trained or used to functioning revelationally, certainly not in the degree of revelation that is now at the door.
Due to our revelational immaturity, we are unknowingly open to the correspondent power of deception that is competing with God’s true revelation. From my vantage, it is safe to say that most prophetic ministry today is being espoused by saints who do not have an adequate maturity in the Spirit of Truth to protect them from the correspondent tare power of deception behind our power of revelation—and here I am talking about ministries that are otherwise esteemed as “respected” and “mature,” but really they are not.
This opens the question,
“What can we do to establish maturity and familiarity with the Spirit of Truth so we can handle the increasing revelation without falling for the power of deception at hand?”
I’m going to offer a two-fold answer at this time. There is certainly more than this, but I do see two particular areas to which we need to pay great heed in order to safely steward the level of revelation that is beginning to come upon us.
Moral Purity
The first area is that of moral purity. Do not ask me why this is so, but sexual immorality is a key issue tied to the ability to steward pure revelation. Throughout history, God has demonstrated a relationship between false prophecy and sexual impurity / immorality. If we have a power of revelation from the Lord, but we have not learned how to obtain the sanctification of our bodies regarding sexual issues, then we are, at best, immature stewards of revelation and are destined for complete deception unless we obtain that sanctification.
I do realize that God has given us a revelation of grace for the forgiveness and healing of sexual issues and aberrations. But that grace has been over-extended to allow for a licentiousness in the prophetic body that rivals that of the world; and in this we are witnessing the perversion of the prophetic ministry itself.
Today, divorce for any cause and second and third remarriages are common place in the prophetic body of Christ—often due to the fact that new converts to the Lord are products of the lawless culture of our age. But the Lord wants us to know we cannot expect to live unpurged relative to this area and long steward pure revelation, especially the level of revelation that is on the way.
We must understand that true grace does not excuse licentiousness, but rather leads us to a higher standard, once we have received it. The same is true of love. Love is always to a standard of truth. If there is no standard of truth attached, there is no love involved—only licentiousness masking as love.
What this means is, as this higher realm of revelation begins to be poured out, the prophetic body of Christ is going to have to step up to a higher standard of moral purity in order to safely possess and transmit that revelation. And if we don’t come to that standard, we will fall prey to the deception stalking our revelation.
There are inescapable hidden soul consequences and effects resulting from immorality. Those consequences unavoidably negatively affect revelational perception. This means that as the new power of revelation begins pouring out, we are going to have to begin playing more of an investigative role into the sexual purity of prophetic ministers before we entrust our ears to their revelations. Don’t ask me how the Lord will orchestrate this, but it will have to happen.
We are going to have to begin transparently proving areas of past moral failure to establish our cleansing rather than covering them up in the name of grace. This includes issues of perversion, adultery, fornication, divorce, remarriage. If we have been subject to these things, we need to be able to transparently demonstrate how God has cleansed us from the associated soul issues so that everyone may have confidence in our revelation. And if we are unwilling to do this, we will have to accept the consequences of coming into deception in days to come.
Frankly, over the last 25 years, I have seen just so much perverted revelation attached to perverted lifestyles that I am now at a place of automatic caution regarding anyone prophesying or teaching revelation, who is walking out a second or third marriage or has a history of adultery or perversion and who has not passed through a demonstrable bona fide accountable cleansing process of restoration relative to these things.
Please be warned: we are all headed for serious trouble in the days ahead if we are not willing to look at this. We will be deceived.
Scriptural Grasp
A second main area I see as necessary to safely steward the coming revelation is our expanded grasp of the whole scriptures. The coming revelational breakthroughs are of such epochal proportions that if we do not develop a commensurate anchoring grasp of the whole scriptures already laid before us, we are going to depart into serious error stalking the new revelation.
At the first coming of Christ, the majority error of the culture was legalism, including scriptural legalism. And that is still a great error today in the historic fundamental and evangelical wings of the church. However those wings are fading in prominence and effect. And at the second coming of Christ, we find that the majority religious cultural error is not legalism, but lawlessness. The corresponding biblical error is revelational lawlessness, or “revelationism.”
This is where the immaturity of the prophetic movement shines. We are stewarding increased revelation without increasing our base of scriptural grasp for grounding what we are seeing. We are, instead, merely “spicing up” our revelation with token scriptural references. We are just “dressing up” our revelation with the few scriptures that “fit” it the best. And I contend that this is leading to revelational deception in our midst.
Allow me to become more specific here. We are coming to an interface with spiritual revelation of such a dimension and magnitude that our entire grasp of biblical cosmology is at stake. What do I mean by “biblical cosmology?” I mean the biblical presentation of the universal order of all things from before the foundation of the world to the final destiny of man and angelic kind.
Right now, advanced revelation is coming forth that has the power to expand our grasp of the biblical cosmology. But equally “advanced” deception is also coming forth that is determined to overthrow that cosmology. The most pernicious deception in this regard in our midst is the deception of “Christian Universalism” or “Total Restorationism” as it is alternately called.
Prophetic teachers are increasingly turning to a deceived revelationism that seeks to rewrite the entire biblical cosmology that has already established a clear impermeable and irreconcilable divide between satan and God. The reason? They do not adequately embrace the whole cosmology as it has already been delivered to us, and they want revelation that will satisfy their own image of how they want God to be rather than submit to the truth of what He has told us about Himself.
The vast majority of prophetic teaching and belief today is based in an “anthropocentric” view of God, meaning—man and man’s redemption is seen at the center of everything God wills and does in His cosmological purpose. In true biblical cosmology however, Christ the Lamb, not man and man’s salvation, resides at the center of all divine purpose.
The inscrutable will of God in His eternal counsels, not the expressed desires of God regarding man, form the true expressed scriptural foundation of all Divine Purpose. This means there are things about the way God says He deals with man that we do not like (such as election, eternal consignment to hell, and similar starters).
As the new revelation comes forth, if we don’t get hold of a complete biblical cosmological purpose in which Christ the Lamb is God’s central purpose and we embrace God’s inscrutable decrees over our desired wishful preferences regarding man and creation, we will be inescapably deceived as the new dimension of revelation comes forth. God is warning us now so that we won’t fall then.
The Man of Sin
More than once we have discussed how the man of sin is a clone of our coming Lord. While he looks like the Lord on the surface, on closer inspection we find an incredibly conniving deceptive counterfeit centered in his own ways. The next realm of revelation before us will bring us closer to Christ in His eternal reality than ever before. But it will also provoke the unveiling of the man of sin in his unspeakable deceptiveness as never before. And without a change on our parts in the areas I have described, we will defect to him.
The man of sin is a man of utmost moral depravity and revelational lawlessness. And his greatest prize is the seduction and winning over of the pure truth-dedicated prophetic overcomers of the church. Given this knowledge, it behooves us to take stock of ourselves in these areas.
There has never been a greater call to sexual purity than now. And if you can’t hack that, for your own sake get out of the prophetic ministry. If you’ve fallen, or been divorced and remarried, and you have not certified your accountable soul-cleansing resulting from it (not just your forgiveness from God), then drop the prophetic now and grab the horns of the altar before you become one more in the list of casualties out there too numerous to count anymore.
There has also never been a greater call to become grounded in the entirety of the revealed written word of God. And if you can’t hack that, for your own sake get out of the prophetic ministry before you become deceived by your new revelation and a deceiver of your followers. The man of sin is waiting for you. Start embracing everything God says about Himself and His ways, whether they meet with your approval or not. Settle it now in your heart that God is bigger than you and than all of mankind put together, we are not the Center of His Purposes, and all His ways are just whether they look that way to you or not.
This is what is coming, beloved friends. It’s going to get tough out there. But I’m writing you in advance so that you will overcome. This is what the Lord has put on my heart to write today.
Love in the faith,
Chris Anderson
New Meadow Neck, Rhode Island
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org11/09
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