Truth in the Inward Parts Also Means Truth in the Private Parts
“Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts,
And in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom. Ps. 51:6 NKJTwo points of human misbehavior bring shame and hence scandal on the church and ministry above all others. One is the abuse of church funds for personal gain and unethical purposes; the other is sexual promiscuity, infidelity and perversion.
Of the two, sexual misbehavior carries the most intense shame, producing utterly devastating consequences to the soul, body and intimate family relationships of all involved. All humanity instinctively knows this, despite the empty statements by those who say, “All sin is forgivable, therefore sexual immorality is just like any other sin.” (It is not like “any other sin.” If that were true, it would not produce scandal above any other sin. Forgivability is not the issue.) And although the animalistic world now no longer cares about its perverse shame but rather flaunts it, the earnest faithful church of Jesus Christ still does care, and is therefore still rocked when such scandal hits, which is why we are here now.
The question as to why sexual misbehavior produces such shame in humanity from the creation is not one we are here to fully unpack except to say this:
Humanity reflects God. God made man in two genders, not one, not three, not anything else. Those two genders and their intended relationship say something about the divine nature itself—that a dual sub-stream exists within the divine heart. It is evidenced throughout scripture in the relationship between God’s own solid determinative Will and His more fluid emotive Passion toward man. He Himself uses gender to describe His relationship to man. (We have written exhaustively on this in our website section on The Mystery of Spiritual Gender.)In view of all this, we may rightly judge that, as there is an unspeakable sacredness of covenantal physical intimacy for which the private parts of a man and a woman are reserved and which, when violated, produces intense public shame, so it reflects that there is first an unspeakable sacredness of covenantal spirit intimacy for which the private inner man is reserved for our jealous God which, when violated, produces intense shame in heaven itself!
Heaven is rocked and scandalized when God’s “ministers” turn to lavish on the public what God gives us of His most intimate secrets (“Have you heard me blab my latest revelation?”), when we dote on the Spirit’s “power” and “prostitute” our own personalities on the god of our own corporate energy called “ministry.” Therefore, it is to jealously protect this spiritual sacredness that the blazing eyes of Jesus are constantly testing and proving our inner hearts by how we convey public ministry.
This convinces us that there is also a direct connection between how God’s people steward their inward parts for God and how they steward their private parts for their spouses and otherwise for God alone until God gives them a spouse. This means that God is often proving the one in connection with proving the other. And when there is failure in the one, it is oft because there either already is or is about to be a failure in the other!
This has incredibly great bearing on the physical scandal with Mike Bickle and IHOP, a ministry ostensibly devoted to preparing the “Bride of Christ” as a “Friend of the Bridegroom.” By exposing Mike’s physical infidelity now with His fiery X-ray vision, the “Groom” is making a prophetic statement about spiritual infidelity at IHOP and throughout the global “public” worship-intercessory movement itself.
Prophetically Spiritualizing Sexual Immorality
Before proceeding directly to IHOP, we want a fuller grasp on the triangle between spiritual intimacy, sexual fidelity and ministry. The inability to get this chemistry right has been our greatest historic fail-point as the Lord’s people across salvation history.
We just set forth a correlation between God’s testing of natural sexual fidelity for perfecting personal holiness, and His testing of inner spiritual fidelity to Him against the seductive power of ministry. When speaking of testing, let’s be clear: the actual seducing agency in testing is not God (Jms. 1:13), but satan, along with our own flesh and the world. God’s part is but to prove how we respond in face of satan’s temptation. This has been the pattern since the Garden. Thus we expect satan to be doubly active trying to destroy ministerial integrity and sexual fidelity at the same time in the same context. For him, it is two kills for the price of one.
This is why ministerial sexual scandals are so potent and God takes such personal umbrage to them. It’s also why He interchangeably identifies idolatry (for our purposes, ministry idolatry) and sexual immorality so passionately together in His complaints against Israel. The premier event in that regard is the “sin of Peor” (Num. 25) where the false prophet Balaam gets Balak to seduce Israel’s men to fornicate simultaneously with Moab’s women and their gods. The price of God’s jealousy? 24,000 men dead!
Drilling down, we want to now bring in the prophetic element to all this, since this is the orbit we engage, having special relevance to the Bickle matter (whose notoriety arose over prophetic ministry). Notice above the role of Balaam “the prophet” in the double seduction of Israel. The prophetic makes for an especially skillful tool under satanic corruption to create dual ministerial and sexual infidelity. Let’s see why this is.
- The Prophetic Connection
We have shown above how gender and marriage specifically image the interplay between God’s own sovereign determination and His creational passion. Anything serving to portray God is prophetic, which means gender and marriage are inherently prophetic.
This prophetic aspect to marriage runs throughout the Bible, from God’s claims of betrothal to Israel, to the Song of Solomon, to Paul’s depiction of God’s betrothal to the church, to Revelation’s rendering of the marriage of the Lamb. In particular, God uses the natural marriage and gender struggles of some prophets to represent His marriage and spiritual fidelity struggles with His people—Hosea being the classic demo of this.
See in this the special proving to which a prophetic minister can thus be subject regarding gender relationship issues. He is not only tested against the usual sexual and ministerial infidelity, but uniquely against both together by the lure to manipulate his gift and office as to spiritualize his lusts in order to justify illicit extra-marital behavior.
Example: A prophet can be seduced to believe he has a superseding “word” or “dream” or “vision” or “revelation” from the Lord (maybe “based” in some spiritualized scripture), persuading someone of the opposite sex that “God has given” the two of them a special “grace” or “dispensation” or “permission” or “freedom in Christ” to engage in (what for the “less mature” is) sexual misbehavior—as a “prophetic sign and witness to the church” of the kind of relationship God longs to have with His people.
This is not a stretch by any means! For while, to anyone without a prophetic call, this example might seem obviously delusional, to one with such a call, especially with a known call to be a sign or type of the Lord in a way similar to Hosea or Ezekiel or Isaiah, it is not so obvious! Such a one can be cunningly deceived by his/her own gift in context of wrestling with his/her own human passions. (Accept this as true from one who has faced this type of seduction first hand, escaping his own fall only by God’s sheer pre-emptive grace and mercy!)
Who knows but that King David, himself a prophet, the great lover of God who desired to do nothing but to “dwell in the house of the Lord forever,” yet succumbed to some similar perverse spiritualization of his kingly office in order to justify his lust for Bathsheba? Needless to say, such spiritualized disobedience proliferates both among prophetic cults and frontline prophetic churches. Also needless to say, satan takes great cause to blaspheme when successfully taking down a prophet in the third degree this way. Prophets succumbing to the triple potion of sexual lust, ministry idolatry and prophetic abuse are among his greatest trophies in hell.
Has the reader understood all this? Hopefully so, for with this, we have at last reached the environs of IHOP and the fall of a man so otherwise centered on the idea of “Passion for Jesus.” Let’s go there now.
[Continued in Part 4]
Chris Anderson
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org12/23
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