The psalms of Ascent are an incredible study. I have blogged a whole post on them:
http://080808onnowto.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/gods-building-companygbc-psalms-120-134.html
Psalm 120 describes the negatives which drive us to find an answer. Originally being outer people, we naturally have already formulated that what we want are outer solutions, but God who is wise knows what we are really after is inner answers. Inner answers control the outer world.
Psalms 120- 130 describe some of our story en route to these inner discoveries.
When does redemption occur?
One of the perennial puzzles among Christians is if Passover is the start of our God story, and actually includes the event known as the supernatural tearing of the Veil, how come the actual Day of Atonement is so much later in the Jewish year? It is the start of the last Feast, the Feast of Tabernacles?
Psalm 130 seems pretty penitent, how come it isn't the first psalm of the Ascents?
See, what initially drives us to God is really just the beginning of our tale. We become believers. We become Christians. We experience what 1 John 2 describes as our Child stage of spiritual discovery. The forgiveness of the Lord is real to us. We gaze upon the Passover Cross and we receive forgiveness through the Blood shed by Jesus Christ.
But this is really not our story. This is Christ's. As Daniel Yordy and others have pointed out God is giving us a story. We are our own story. And by psalm 130 we learn Christ inwardly. Psalm 120 taught us forgiveness inwardly, but God is about producing a race of co-brethren, people who actually know Christ grown within them. A people who operate in the same way as Christ. Matthew 5 explains some of the awful awful paths we go down, but as real as childbirth pains lead to the reality of a child, so Christ says we give birth to the reality of the Christ person within us. Yes this is a mystery. It is one of the mysteries labelled as such in the New Testament.
The Day of Atonement happens much later, after we come to a different realisation. I not only need Christ for forgiveness....I need Him in the whole of me...to do anything. I realise the lie of independence and secularism. The lie of the middle man of Genesis 3. The posturing independent self who is meant to then choose between right and wrong. Except through story, God convinces us this very position IS BOGUS. I have only one choice. To have Satan live by me,using my vessel, or to have Christ live by me, again using my container, my vessel.
Adonai, I call to you from the depths;
2 hear my cry, Adonai!
Let your ears pay attention
to the sound of my pleading.
3 Yah, if you kept a record of sins,
who, Adonai, could stand?
4 But with you there is forgiveness,
so that you will be feared.
5 I wait longingly for Adonai;
I put my hope in his word.
6 Everything in me waits for Adonai
more than guards on watch wait for morning,
more than guards on watch wait for morning.(excerpt)
DEPTHS!
PLEADING
LONGINGLY
WAITS>>>MORE THAN GUARDS WAIT FOR THE MORNING
desperation in the extreme....utter utter weakness and helplessness
This is altogether different from being desperate for forgiveness....this is being
desperate that I can do nothing other than sin...my whole being is bent in this direction.
Some crash right into this, like Mary Magdalene....he who is forgiven much loves much.
Some like the rest of the disciples took longer.
The Truth of the day of Atonement.
The Truth of the Cross as related in John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress a good way into the book
The Truth of Psalm 130 way way after Psalm 120....
is really when the KINGDOM STARTS.
Here is what it looks like.
Psalm 131 states you are wounded...
Like Jacob after Peniel you will limp for the rest of your days.
In this manner....
Adonai, my heart isn’t proud;
I don’t set my sight too high,
I don’t take part in great affairs
or in wonders far beyond me.
2 No, I keep myself calm and quiet,
like a little child on its mother’s lap —
I keep myself like a little child. or as a weaned child.
Weaned means, we are nolonger the central person in the universe.
A baby: I get hungry. I get fed. I am happy again.
We content ourselves with the "next thing" that Christ is doing through us. No more. No less.
This is the very same walk as Jesus. "I only do what I see the Father doing."
Psalm 130 and Psalm 131 are foundational to the life of the Kingdom. Yes other things up to now have been Christian. Have been God. We have blessed others. They have blessed us. But it is now the KINGDOM truly kicks in. We are down to the Rock. To Jesus as my sole source of Life. Before, some measure of all that we were doing was on sand. This helps to explain why such a lot of Christian things appear to implode. That which is built on Rock...may be pruned...but it cannot implode, it is in Christ.
These are individual foundations. They have to occur personally within EACH KINGDOM SAINT....but here's the shocker....in the next two psalms we find we have COME HOME to other walkers in the Covenant. We were never alone. The KINGDOM IS, and always has been CORPORATE.
But you can't BUILD corporate. YOU BUILD by speaking Word to individuals, who then COME HOME to the ROCK which is Christ, the original and ONLY SOURCE OF LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE. All other forms of life are derived forms of this one life...but if you want the TRUE form FIRST HAND....FRESH FROM THE FACTORY...it Has to come from God through Jesus.
"I am the Way(Your STORY), the Truth (of all that you are NOT and All that I am in you) and the LIFE (fully forming itself within you organically as you keep believing upon me by faith)"
For five centuries since perhaps the lowest ebb of the church world wide,since Martin Luther's faith stand, the Church has been picking a fresh corporate path along the psalm of Ascents. Pentecostalism began as being quite an individual experience. A baptism in the Holy Spirit. The later charismatic move through all the church denominations and out among the fresh independent house churches began to renew their vision as Christ building His Body. Not just piles of unrelated stones, but stones knit together, relating in love and faith.
I could see, and I told a leader so, that until at least the 90s, the whole move was built on jelly. There was no real firm foundation, because the inner excavation surrounding the truths of what went wrong in Genesis 3 hadn't been plumbed.
Some had begun, and really to this day, unless I am very much mistaken, this is where they dwell...the glory of psalm 130 and 131...but no further.
Christ in me is insisting that we go further. And Fred Pruitt himself caught something of a whiff of this new Priesthood order that Jesus instituted after His baptism in the Jordan.
http://080808onnowto.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/fot9-change-in-priesthood.html
“I will not enter the house where I live
or get into my bed,
4 I will not allow myself to sleep
or even close my eyes,
5 until I find a place for Adonai,
a dwelling for the Mighty One of Ya‘akov.” Jacob
For Adonai has chosen Tziyon,
he has wanted it as his home.
14 “This is my resting-place forever,
I will live here because I so much want to......
Everyone that has seemed to rediscovered the great Union truths of us being Vine branches to His Vine, and this includes Daniel Yordy who has to be one of the most farthest seeing of all, fails to see what Paul sees in Romans.
The story is Jesus gathered out from many nations, but ONE with, no dividing wall of hostility with , Israel, who eventually look upon Him who, they have pierced.
Their Unity is our Unity, Jesus in Us in God as a heavenly community. God the All in All. Jerusalem literally will manifest the Spirit Word spoken over it in Psalm 48....the joy of the whole earth.. But current israel is boobytrapped. Ezekiel 28 uses the term briars and declares itself ruled from Sidon....or as it is in fact Tel Aviv area.
Psalm 133 is an incredible thing. It is unity but it is entirely within the context of the Holy Spirit having already established His Covenantal story, His covenantal walk in His people. That's why it couldn't work before. When Jesus announced His Corporate Word of John 17, the very next day the disciples all ran away apart from John.
Psalm 133 is a miracle. The miracle of the Gentile Mount Hermon dew falling on Mount Zion. I believe this is literal, but this picture is repeated over and over. God unites in that which is separated and in that which is impossible in man. The other picture is Aaron. Who is Aaron? Effectively the first high priest. Why does it refer back to the first office, and why not the rest of the Levites? Because this indicates the corporate High Priest, the Body of Jesus in the earth, binding that which can be bound and loosing that which can be loosed. We as a Body share the anointing oil of the Priest of the Order of Melchizedek, the One who ever lives before the Father to make intercession.
Psalm 134 is this new Priesthood going into action while "standing by Night" in the coming events.
The same spirit of psalm 132 is upon me to stir up the individual stones and say you have no option. The Spirit is stirring stones to build a Body on better foundations. A Covenant not made with pen and ink, but one drawn in the Blood of a Saviour and energised and upheld by the indestructible life of Christ
Heb 7:16 who has become such not on the basis of a law of [g]physical requirement, but according to the power of an indestructible life. We are not a Body or church , like a club, to live unto ourselves, just for the sake of it. No this is specific. We are being raised as a particular priesthood with specific tasks. There is absolutely no option of living unto ourselves. Even just of sharing on an individual basis of the truths of Psalms 120-130. No God is on the move. God Himself is breathing, is breathing His breath and prophecy into piles of rattling dead bones, and saying Bones LIVE.
Take your place priesthood. Kings and Priests of our God. All hell is lining up to prevent the people of God from taking this seriously. If they do, Darkness knows it is finished.
