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The High Cost of Geopolitical
Intercession
Before you can save a drowning swimmer, you must first become significantly unlike the victim—either by learning to swim, or by climbing a platform from which to throw him a rope. The rescuer must be in a superior position to the drowner to be of any help. Otherwise both must drown.
So too with the church in relation to the soul-drowning affairs of this world. Before God’s people can safely venture earth’s watery conflicts to save men, they must first prove to be sufficiently anchored in Eternal reality—giving them the commanding authoritative platform from which to take on the earth without drowning in its seething, heaving issues. They must have an actualized realization of being seated (identified) with Christ in the heavenlies.
The only way to ascend to this platform is by Saturation into the Name of the Father—a Name greased in an Oil that cannot sink in soul-water. To obtain this Baptism, one must pay the price of burying (or losing) his natural ancestral soul identity. Only by death to natural identity can spiritual identity in Christ surface, to the prevailing of the Lord’s redemptive Kingdom agenda through us.
Measuring the Waters
Of gravest concern right now is the prophetic/intercessory foray into the global waters of geopolitics. Insufficiently oiled through Baptism into the Father’s Name, we are being submerged by the international issues we have dared to engage. We can’t float because we are water logged under the soulish weight of national identifications and the seeking of recognition by human governments. Rather than providing an eternally saving platform above global affairs, we are being pulled by the torrent toward drowning in them. (In all the tumult over war with Iraq, when was the last time you heard a global prophetic/intercessory ministry speak to the basic yet paramount issue of eternal hell?)
The waters of geopolitics are not like the back yard swimming pool. They are like the North Atlantic in winter. No rubber ducky float will suffice here. Nor a rowboat. Even great tankers navigate such waters only with great difficulty. Yet the church has taken its swimming pool-class experience (“please pray for Aunt Emma in the hospital”) into these waters.
Personal intercessory and prophetic ministry is able to function reasonably well without first enduring the cross of national identity surrender. Immature believers can pray and prophesy as well as proven disciples. But that is not the case with national and international-class dealings.
Lacking tested identity conversion, the prophetic/intercessory community’s unfitness to enter the geopolitical arena has been exposed by its inability to remain focused on salvation and unmoved by human politics, or to present authoritative Eternal counsels to world leaders. Dueling e-lists with “thus saiths” take nationalist sides on nearing world war. In reality, all we are fighting is a more spiritually refined version of the Crusades. (And we think we’ve left the Dark Ages behind.)
One can get a good objective historical feel for this problem by watching movies on the U.S. Civil War. Nothing is more spiritually unseemly than to see how devout military men could pray so humbly to the Lord, then turn toward their opponents with that glazed look of the eye and yell, “Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em all!” This is what the dual “God and Country” allegiance mentality always leads to.
Under today’s anointing, nothing has changed. As “prophetic intercessors” we are still at it. After centuries of increasing revelation, we still fail as a mortal assembly to perceive our relationship to humanity through an eternal identity. This maxim stands true: the church can neither prevent nor win war by taking nationalist sides. And that goes for World War III.
Separation Precedes Co-identity
Currently and for the last ten years, there has been a strong untempered emphasis on reconciliation and repentance through intercessory national “co-identification” as a way to change human affairs. The concept is honorable. And the Lord honors it to a measure. But the problem is that co-identification only has value after one has first lost the carnal identity with which he is co-identifying.
A drunk cannot “co-identify” with another drunk to his salvation. He can only reinforce his own drunkenness by trying. Only a delivered former drunk can do this. Neither can those still intoxicated under national loyalty “co-identify” with nations to any saving end. They can only reinforce their own drunkenness on ancestral heritage.
Today, many are “repenting” for the sins of national forefathers whose soulish identities they still own. Such co-identificational repentance accomplishes nothing except to help a generation reinforce its own patriotism and evade its own responsibility for sin. Before the church confesses the sins of forefathers, she needs to confess and be delivered from that sinfulness within herself.
Please mark this down: the global body of Christ will never prevent world wars, effectively change societies, set God’s Kingdom agenda in the earth or come into unity within itself until it first outgrows and disowns original national identities—no matter what new line of praying it follows.
The Lord’s End Time Admonition to Us
This sober admonition from the Lord for the end times still remains: “See that your hearts are not overcharged with the cares of this world.” This is a strategic condition for end-times world engagement.
The call to prophetic intercession is a noble one. God really does want us to exercise a mighty kingdom voice on global affairs. But apart from the true disciple’s platform of saturation into the Father’s name through death to national esteem, all global-class prophetic intercession morphs into a deceptive mirage—working a counterfeit parallel to the true eternal Kingdom agenda.
All the declarations and wailings concerning nations we now hear may sound convincingly spiritual and mature. But we must listen underneath for the platform of objective eternal reference. If it is not there, then we are being conned out of our true inheritance. We are not rescuing. We need to be rescued.
May the Lord illumine the applications of these things to the perfecting of our redemption.
Chris Anderson
Riverside, RI
03/03
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created June 16, 2004