In my profession as an English teacher, I run summer activities for children in the months of June and July each year when school is over. These activities have two-fold benefits: as other such activities, organized by schools and parishes around the nation in that period of time, they offer parents the opportunity of a place to keep their children between the time school finishes and the holidays month, which is August. Secondly, children who choose to do a week or two activities with me have the chance to work up their English in a fun and non-conventional setting.
Role-playing
is the most popular activity with these kids and one of the stories we role
play is the “English dictation lesson.” In it, the teacher, Miss Lake, has a dictation exercise with Sally and Daisy.
Sally, who understands that in English you don’t pronounce words the way you
write them, studied hard and got all the dictated words right. Daisy, who takes
English for granted, thinking that in English, as in Italian, words are written
the same way they are pronounced, wrote the words the way the sound, so getting
her dictation all wrong. In the end Sally gets ten marks for her work while
Daisy gets zero. Daisy’s really sad.
Today, the
kingdom of God is guilty of this way of thinking. God himself has been loud and
clear several times over about his communicative approach and style with
humans, and particularly so when he made the following declaration in the book
of Psalms. we read:
Ps 78:2, I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things
from of old NIV.
Whereas God
has made it clear that his style of communication is parables, symbols and
allegories, not plain language, we who are his interlocutors, his audience in
other words, tend to insist on taking the content of his communication by its
face value. Whereas the Father warned that he will interact with his children
through allegories and symbols, his children choose the seemingly easy way out.
This stance can either be interpreted as implying a share unwillingness to lay
hold on what it takes to understand the coded messages of the Father or as pathetic
inability to perceive that there could be a second meaning to that which seems apparent.
Twice the Father
admonished all men to listen to his only beloved son in whom he is well
pleased. If the he is well pleased in the Son, and he highlights this fact,
there must be a reason and that reason must be known to all men. There is no
secrecy with God. Well he first invited us to listen to the Son at the time when
Jesus was still standing right in the middle of river Jordan, after he’d been
baptized by John. Then the second time when he went up the mount of
transfiguration with his most loved disciples, Peter and John. Let’s read these
passages:
Matt 3:16-17. As soon as Jesus
was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened,
and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. 17 And
a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well
pleased." NIV
Matt 17:5 While he was still speaking, a bright cloud enveloped them, and a voice from the cloud said, "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!" NIV
As I said, for God to affirm and reaffirm the importance of our listening to the Son, there must be something of vital importance about the character of the Son.
Now, it may not have dawned on us yet the reason for which God created humans with two ears. It certainly wasn’t by chance neither was it for the sake of mere better audio perception of people. Rather it is for a designed purpose. Let’s find out the answer in the word of God. In the book of Revelation, John saw the Alpha and the Omega and among the massages that were given to him to relay to the seven churches scattered in Asia, there was one destined to the church in Pergamum. Let’s listen to the content of the message:
Rev 2:12-16 " 12 To the angel of the church in Pergamum
write: These are the words of
him who has the sharp, double-edged sword. 13 I know where you live — where Satan has
his throne. Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in
me, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in
your city — where Satan lives. 14 Nevertheless, I have a few things against
you: You have people there who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak
to entice the Israelites to sin by eating food sacrificed to idols and by
committing sexual immorality. 15 Likewise you also have those who hold to the
teaching of the Nicolaitans. 16
Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them
with the sword of my mouth. NIV
In the
twelfth verse of the passage above we hear the Lord Jesus introduce himself to
the Saints in Pergamum as the source of the sharp two-edged sword. He throws
light on what this means in the same line when he started off by saying, “these
are the words of ...” In the sixteenth
verse Jesus admonished the Saints to repent otherwise he would come and fight
them with the sharp double-edged sword in his mouth. Let’s remember that God uses a lot of graphic
representations to make his spiritual and abstract thoughts and concepts
concrete to human understanding. We understand this from the book of Romans.
Let’s read it together:
Rom
1:18-20 “The
wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and
wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may
be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities — his eternal
power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what
has been made, so that men are without excuse. NIV
Verse twenty
of the passage above has it that what is perceivable with our five senses is
only a teaching aid God uses to unveil our mind of understanding to have
insight into the spiritual attributes of the Father’s, which is called the wisdom
of God.
Therefore,
God’s using the double-edged sword here to denote the character of his words is
to imply that his communication has a two-fold effect or a dual connotation. It implies that the word
of his mouth has a natural application as well as a spiritual one. For instance
in the old testament, God used only one side of the sword to operate, that’s
the natural or the veiled side of the sword. As such all the perception of God
of the men of old was veiled and shadowed. But time has changed now and the Father
is now using the other side of the sword, the spiritual side, to operate on the
hearts of men. But the church continues to hear in shadows and replicate in
shadows. It keeps on listening with the spiritual analogical ear. But the
message to be decoded in this dispensation is digital(Spiritual) and, as such,
can’t be perceived by the analog( natural.) there must be a “switch off!”
For instance
the principle of sowing and reaping has a natural and apparent application. It works for the farmer who goes
out to sow his seed in Spring time and waits with expectation for summer to set
in so he goes in for the harvest; it
does for a businessman who puts their money in an economic activity and toils
day and night through varying business strategies, hoping to rake in a dividend
at the end of the day; it works for a church person who practices the principle
of sowing and reaping because they heard it preached in church. It most
certainly works for the non Christian person in the remote part of the middle
east who generously gives gifts as a religious gesture. In fact, you will
realized that some of the most generous nations are most invariable some of the
richest ones, Christian or not.
This aspect
of the word of God or what is called the “breath of God” is what is meant to be
understood or perceived with one of the
our ears the natural one. Humans, including church people, have always
exercised this part of their hearing. This is what the old testament folks
perceived of the contents of the communication of the Father’s. Though the source was God, who is life, they
died spiritually all the same because what comes in through that ear is not
properly decoded enough to generate life in the hearer. In fact, it kills
because it’s the letter and not the spirit; it’s the shell, not the nut. With
this ear we hear the letter. Let’s see what the bible has to say about his
truth:
2
Cor. 3:6 He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant-
not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit
gives life. NIV
The problem
is that the new testament church must switch ear from the natural to the
spiritual and activate the function of the other ear, staying in tune with the
spirit. Why? Because this is the dispensation of life and life comes through
hearing and hearing the spirit! Let’s read a passage that affirms this truth:
Rev 5:6-7 Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain,
standing in the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures
and the elders. He had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.
NIV
In the
passage we discover John seeing the agent of resurrection, the seven spirits of
God, which simply means the perfect holy spirit of God, who has been sent into
the dark lower realms of our humanity to wake us up from our graves and bring
about an ascension in our understanding. So the era of the switch off has
dawned on all men! The function of our
analogical ear(natural understanding) must be sized down. We must ask the Father
to activate our digital ear(spiritual ear) so we are able to decode his voice
to us.
Anyway, going
back to the sowing and reaping case at issue, we mustn’t fail to realize that
as far as sowing and reaping is concerned that’s how far it goes naturally. The
results we see in the natural practice of giving is the natural teaching
instrument the Father is using to teach all men that the whole gospel or,
better still, the whole essence of God’s divine project of salvation is about
one thing and one thing only – giving and receiving, sowing and reaping. It’s
all about sowing our humanity to him in order to reap God’s divinity! The
prophet Hosea has something to say about this profound truth. Let’s read it
together:
Hos. 10:12 Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to seek the Lord, until he comes and showers righteousness on you. NIV
Humanity is the nature that all men acquired in the fall, which is completely different from the nature of the Father. The nature of God which was the original nature we had before the foundation of the world was laid. In our humanity or the false or mistaken identity we can’t see the Father and we can’t relate to him or interact with him because, in that consciousness, we are not compatible with his nature. The nature of the Father is one and that is what we see in Christ. He doesn’t give birth to another thing apart from what Christ reflects. God gives birth to only children who have the nature of the son, thus the Father’s. Anyone who doesn’t bear this name of the Father which comes through the new birth is none is his. They may be as religious and actively fervent as they can, but the Father doesn’t recognized them as part of him. The book of John loudly amplifies this truth when it says:
John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. NIV
True children of the Father’s are those who have been resurrected from their deep sleep of death, in which at one time all their awareness or consciousness was limited to the natural, to true kingdom life of insight and understanding of their true self in Christ. These ones are in tune with the spirit; these ones are alive in the land of the living; these ones have an ear to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.
For seven times, at the end of every massage to the seven churches in the book of revelation, the Alpha and the Omega would make this conclusive and warning statement, “he who has an ear, let him hear or understand what the Spirit is saying to the churches”.
Note that he didn’t say he who has ears as if talking in plural, but rather an ear, in singular. Note also that he didn’t say what the letter is saying to the churches, but rather what the Spirit is saying to the churches. Therefore, when the Father thundered from heaven saying, “listen to my beloved son,” he was referring to listening with the other ear, the spiritual one because with that we hear the spirit and we live.
God bless you.
Jonas Opoku-Forson
