Posted on November 30, 2012
Mike Parsons – put up on Facebook by Annalize Mouton
As we saw last time, God will have His way: His will is going to be
done, and our choice is whether we want to be part of it or not. All the
earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord.
Moses’
generation came to the borders of the land… and chose not to go in. As a
result, God told them, “your corpses will fall in this wilderness, even
all your numbered men, according to your complete number from twenty
years old and upward, who have grumbled against Me. Surely you shall not
come into the land in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb… and
Joshua” (Num 14:29-30).
Those aged 20 years and up were
responsible. There were a whole lot of people under the age of 20 who
wandered round in the wilderness with their elders; but when their time
came to make a choice, they chose to embrace their destiny. God is
calling that people forth today. Caleb and Joshua were of the older
generation; but how they lived, how they believed, how they acted, what
they did – that was what set them apart from their contemporaries and
inspired the younger generation. They are a key to understanding what it
takes to inherit, what it takes to become a Joshua generation.
The Moses generation failed to receive their inheritance, and died in
the wilderness. The Joshua generation, I believe, are going to equip a
harvest of a billion labourers in the supernatural. I say ‘in the
supernatural’ because we cannot succeed by natural means in all that
lies in store for us; it is going to have to be achieved by supernatural
means, and by a people equipped to operate in the fullness of God’s
kingdom power.
That is why we have to take back ground that has
been given to the enemy. Occult and New Age people are operating in
spiritual power and doing things most of the church would not begin to
know how to do, but they are occupying ground in the counterfeit that we
should be ruling in the authentic by operating in the true power of
God. We need to stand up and be counted. We need to take back that
territory, in the face of intense opposition. And to do so we need to
begin to operate in the realm of the supernatural beyond what any of us
have experienced so far, if we are to see this next generation raised
up. We have to be ready for a whole new revelation of the supernatural,
and when we are ready, God will lead us into it.
We need to
equip a generation who will see Jesus return. To see a final harvest in
which everybody who is going to be saved will be saved. The Joshua
generation will be forerunners who have spied out the land. Many of us
have already been forerunners. We have experienced a foretaste of some
of the things which are going to take place. We have glimpsed it. In our
spirit and in our heart we know there is more. We have been hungry for
more, some of us have been that way all our lives. And there are more
forerunner experiences still to come. It will be like spying out the
land. We will not yet have received the complete fulfilment of all that
God intends, but we will have glimpses of it, get a taste for it, begin
to realise what it is going to be like.
The Church is crossing
the Jordan, and it has been happening for a while. I look back into the
eighties and I can see the beginnings of it. I remember some of the
things that were prophesied then (and people didn’t really know what
they were prophesying): about Joel’s army; a whole different breed; a
nameless, faceless army of God’s people who were going to be raised up;
no superstars, just ordinary people, operating in the supernatural power
of God. They were prophesying some of the very things we are now
beginning to see take place. This generation has been entering in over
that whole period of time, but we have not progressed beyond just the
other side of the Jordan. The church is still at that place
calledGilgal. For Israel that was where the reproach of the past was
removed, where they were all circumcised again, where they took the
Passover again: the things which were necessary for them to do as
preparation to going in to fight the giants and take the whole land. I
believe that this is where the church is in these days, days of
preparation.
We have experienced the Wine, Fire and Wind of
God, but there is more coming. We have to be able to lead and equip the
Jesus generation to possess – the Hebrew word means ‘to inherit by
seizing, dispossessing, and become heirs of’ – the land of promise. This
is about the violent taking the kingdom by force. The Joshua generation
is a warrior generation who will fight on behalf of others and bring
them into the land. They will bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in
heaven: fulfilling Adam’s mandate in both realms. They will rule in the
spirit realm and influence in the natural realm, to see God’s glory fill
the earth (Num 14:21).
The Joshua generation will experience
the land for themselves, but will also equip others to be able to live
in the Promised Land and to fully possess it. It will mean living in a
completely different dimension in terms of the supernatural.
We
are all called to enter: some of us are called to go before, and to
equip, but all of us are called to enter. Or you can choose to be like
those who turned down God’s invitation and died in the wilderness.
Everyone has that choice, but God is inviting people to enter in. Even
in Joshua’s day, there were people who crossed the Jordan, were part of
fighting the battles, and yet they chose to go back and live on the
other side. Two and a half tribes, or nearly a quarter of them.
There are some ministries who have been forerunner ministries, who have
been in the forefront of what God is doing, but who will choose to go
back, and as a result will miss out on the fullness of their
inheritance. I do not want to be one of those. I want to be part of a
generation who enter in, possess, and enjoy the land; and who equip
others to come in and do the same.
Characteristics of the Joshua Generation (#1-5)
Posted on December 7, 2012
Mike Parsons -
We have seen that in our time God is raising up a Joshua generation,
who will enter into their inheritance and enable others to do the same.
This is what that generation will be like:
1. The Joshua Generation will be victorious warriors, dependent on God’s Spirit for supernatural victory.
Do you remember the story in Exodus, when Moses was standing and needed
support for his hands, because as long as his hands were raised, Israel
was winning the battle? Even at that point, Joshua was being prepared
to succeed Moses, and there was a supernatural dimension to what was
happening:
‘Then the LORD said to Moses, “Write this in a book
as a memorial and recite it to Joshua, that I will utterly blot out the
memory of Amalek from under heaven.” Moses built an altar and named it
The LORD is My Banner; and he said, “The LORD has sworn; the LORD will
have war against Amalek from generation to generation”’ (Ex 17:14-16).
We need to know the Name of God, Jehovah-Nissi: the Lord our banner or
victory. ‘The Lord is my banner’. There is something here that we need
to get hold of in our spirit. We use banners in this dimension of
warfare, and that banner of victory is what will enable us to overcome.
This battle will be in every generation. This is something which God
wants to equip us for, to see Amalek destroyed.
There is a
reason God wants it destroyed. The Amalekites were descended from Esau –
they personified evil, and were inheritance robbers. They were those
who competed for the Promised Land. For us they represent the tares, the
leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod, who seek to rob us of our
inheritance. We need to destroy them; and there is going to be a battle
in our generation. We need to know the Name of God, Jehovah-Nissi,
because of the level of warfare which is going to come. When the world
is falling apart, we have to be able to be overcomers in the midst of
everything that is going on around us.
2. The Joshua Generation will have a servant heart.
“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you
rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and
humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is
easy and My burden is light” (Matt 11:28-30).
This is a key
scripture to understand about being servant-hearted. It is about not
doing things in your own strength but in knowing your identity and being
of gentle and humble heart. That’s what Jesus said, “if you take My
yoke upon you, learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart”. A
servant generation will know true authority and true identity through
submitting it all to God.
We need to understand that Joshua had
a call, and yet he was Moses’ servant: ‘So Moses arose with Joshua his
servant, and Moses went up to the mountain of God’ (Ex 24:13).
3. The Joshua Generation will know the glory of God as a consuming fire.
We are already beginning to experience this in the heavenly realms, but there is so much more of it still to come.
On Mount Sinai, when God gave the commandments to Moses, Joshua also
went up with him to the mountain top. Most people don’t read that or
realise it, but that is what it says. And what happened there was that
‘the glory of the LORD rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it
for six days. .. And to the eyes of the sons of Israel the appearance of
the glory of the LORD was like a consuming fire on the mountain top’
(Ex 24:16-17).
God is inviting everyone to come to the mountain
top, to come into the fiery smoke, and to meet Him face to face. It is
an awesome thing to look into His eyes. Face-to-face encounters with God
will characterise the Joshua generation.
4. The Joshua Generation will be hungry and thirsty for the intimacy of God’s Presence.
We will not be satisfied with anything less. We need the intimacy of
God’s presence. We need to press into it. We need to be so hungry and
thirsty for righteousness, and for the presence of God, that it is going
to transform our lives. And God is going to start stirring that hunger,
by giving you experiences that make you crave and hunger for more.
Don’t be satisfied with just an experience: it needs to become a
lifestyle. We need to live in the presence of God in the dual realms of
heaven and earth. We need to press in.
‘Thus the LORD used to
speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. When
Moses returned to the camp, his servant Joshua, the son of Nun, a young
man, would not depart from the tent’ (Ex 33:11).
Joshua stayed
in God’s presence even after Moses left, and that will be a
characteristic of the Joshua generation. When some people give up, when
they have had enough, the Joshua generation will press in for more. You
are not going to be satisfied until you have received the fullness of
your inheritance.
5. The Joshua Generation will be chosen as forerunners to enter the Promised Land.
Some of you are going to have experiences that go beyond, and you are
going to help other people to come into it. When I went on the fast two
years ago, and began to enter into heavenly encounters, my desire was to
facilitate others coming in. Our intention is always to open the door
for others. We are not exclusive. The purpose of being forerunners is
not to keep others out, but to encourage everyone to come in.
Joshua and Caleb were sent out as spies: they saw the promises – and
they saw the giants – first hand. But they had a different attitude to
the others: they were willing to press in.
These are just the
first 5 of 40 characteristics of this generation which I believe God has
shown me. Do you recognise these things in you? Is this a generation of
which you are called to be a part?
6. The Joshua Generation will be men and women of faith, who speak and live by the word of God.
That was the difference between the generations: being able to speak – and live – the words of faith.
‘Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “We should by all
means go up and take possession of it, for we will surely overcome it”’
(Num 13:30). In spite of opposition, Joshua and Caleb spoke out the
promises of God.
There is going to be plenty of opposition to
come. Most of it will be religious opposition, because the institution
of the church is out to rob the true church of authority and power.
There is going to be warfare. It has taken place before: whenever God
starts to do something new and fresh, whenever He starts to pour out His
Spirit in a new way, the previous generation opposes it because they do
not want to give up control. But you cannot control this stuff: you
have to go with what God is doing. The Joshua generation will not be
into control: as we have seen, they will be gentle and humble of heart.
We need to be men and women who are willing to live by faith and are
unashamedly able to speak out the truth, challenge people’s
understanding, and challenge the doctrines and mindsetswhich have robbed
people of their true inheritance. You know this is going to cause
trouble, but we have authority, and we are going to see people rescued
from those things.
7.The Joshua Generation will have (and operate in) a militant spirit, and will fully follow the Lord.
‘But My servant Caleb, because he has had a different spirit and has
followed Me fully…’ (Num 14:24). If you look at how Caleb entered the
Promised Land, he was basically saying, “Bring it on! Give me the land
of the giants, because I’m going to go in and take it”. And even when he
was in his eighties, he was still strong to go in and out to battle and
to war. He was still overcoming. The Joshua generation may have people
in it who are 80, 90, or over 100. It is not about age, it is about
attitude. They have a different spirit, a militant spirit – as Jesus
said, it is the violent who take the kingdom by force.
It is a
breakthrough spirit. These are people who are willing to be breakers,
who will break things open so that others can come in and receive. That
is what God is calling us to do, and to follow Him fully (not
partially). It will take a militant breakthrough spirit to push through
into the dimensions to which God is calling us, and we need to be
prepared for that.
8.The Joshua Generation will be sensitive to and feel grief over sin.
We do not look back at a previous generation and say, “Well, tough on
them, they have missed it”. We look at people and see they are still
needing encouragement to come in. Over the church in general we have to
have an attitude of intercession, an attitude of standing in the gap.
Not an attitude of pride, but of willingness to do what we can to see
more and more people drawn in.
And where we see the church as
an institution in sin, our spirit needs to be moved to act. In Num 14:6
we read that ‘Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, of
those who had spied out the land, tore their clothes’. When the others
said, “We are not entering in”, they tore their clothes as an expression
of sorrow and of intercession for them. That is how we need to be.
9.The Joshua Generation will be men and women of the Spirit
‘So the LORD said to Moses, “Take Joshua the son of Nun, a man in whom
is the Spirit”’ (Num 27:18). We need to be filled with the Holy Spirit,
to be baptised in the Holy Spirit in fullness, and to be so continually.
It is not a one-off experience: we need daily to be filled, to be
overflowing, and to be operating in the dimensions of the Spirit. In the
gifts of the Holy Spirit, and in the fruit of the Holy Spirit. We need
to go up to whole new dimensions of the glory that is manifested through
the Holy Spirit.
I did a teaching about the five rivers that
are present with us. We can enter into those rivers and be rebaptised
into our born-again experience, into our baptism in water experience,
into our baptism in the Spirit experience, into our baptism of fire
experience, and our baptism of glory experience. We need to continually
enter in to each of these: there is an ongoing relationship with the
Holy Spirit which is going to take us to higher realms. He is willing to
reveal things to us, because He is the Spirit of truth who is ready to
disclose those things that are to come.
If you want to discover
and understand and enter into that whole realm of the Spirit, you can
read and meditate on John chapters 12 to 17. Those chapters are all
about being connected to and flowing in the Spirit of God, and there is
so much more of that for us to experience and uncover.
10. The Joshua Generation will be chosen, anointed and commissioned by God for the task.
It must be about 3 years or so ago now that God just gave me a series
of words: investiture, coronation, enthronement, and so on. I shared
them with some of you at the time, but I didn’t fully understand them or
what God intended by them. As I have kept those words in my heart, He
has continued to give me revelation of them and I have prayed over
people to receive new and fresh mantles of authority.
In fact I
have been to the Mantle Room in heaven and seen row upon row of mantles
of authority and power, waiting to be conferred on people. Some are the
mantles of saints from previous generations, people like Smith
Wigglesworth and Maria Woodworth-Etter, who have carried something of
that authority in the supernatural realm. Many of those mantles are
about to be released.
Some of the wells of past generations are
going to be unblocked and are going to flow again; but also there are
be new wells to be dug, and new mantles released, new levels of
authority to be taken up. People are going to be excercising authority
and doing things that today you might find it hard to even imagine or
conceive of. They will need to do so if they are to be victorious in the
battles which are going to take place. They will include some of us:
because those are battles we may have to fight. We are going to need to
be anointed, because we are chosen, and we are going to be commissioned.
Investiture is just the first part of that commissioning process. I
remember watching Prince Charles’ investiture many years ago on TV. But
although he has been invested, he is still only the heir to the throne
at the moment; he is still the prince: he is not yet King. There is more
to come for him. And there is more to come for us: God will give us
revelation of what that is.
‘Lay your hand on Joshua; and have
him stand before Eleazar the priest and before all the congregation, and
commission him in their sight. You shall put some of your authority on
him…’ (Num 27:18-20).
God is going to release more of His
authority onto His people. We will be commissioned to enter into a
further dimension of our inheritance, our Promised Land.
11. The Joshua Generation will be equipped to enable the next generation to possess the land.
‘Joshua the son of Nun, who stands before you, he shall enter there;
encourage him, for he will cause Israel to inherit it’ (Deut 1:38).
We have to cause others to inherit. This generation who are going to be
saved, who are going to be the laborers for the future: we have to
enable them, to disciple them in the supernatural, to encourage them to
inherit everything in the Promised Land. We must not sell them short in
the fullness of what their inheritance is.
12. The Joshua Generation will witness the awesome overcoming power of God.
We have seen the power of God at work in increasing measure over the
past few years, seen quite a lot of signs and wonders, different
miracles and so on. Those have just been a taster of the things that are
coming.
‘“Do not fear them, for the LORD your God is the one fighting for you.”
“O Lord GOD, You have begun to show Your servant Your greatness and
Your strong hand; for what god is there in heaven or on earth who can do
such works and mighty acts as Yours?” (Deut 3:22, 24).
No-one
can really counterfeit the true power and authority of Almighty God.
Just as Elijah did with the prophets of Baal, there will be some among
you who will challenge the forces of the enemy and call down fire from
heaven, You will challenge some of those who do supernatural signs in
the occult realm, and in the New Age realm; you will challenge them to a
test of authority and power. And our God wins; therefore you win, you
overcome, and you demonstrate true spiritual authority and power. It is
going to be awesome!
You are going to win if you will step out
in the confidence of the things you have already done, having your faith
built up by the things you have already seen. That is what it meansnot
to despise the day of small things but to see it as a time of
preparation for the things that are coming.
13. The Joshua Generation will be strong and courageous.
If we are going to need to be strong and courageous, it is because
there is something to fear or to overcome. And we will find that we too
have giants to overcome, who are exercising authority in heavenly
places. There are dragons to slay, who are robbing the people of God.
True identity and inheritance are being held back from God’s people and
it is for us to see them released.
‘Then Moses called to Joshua
and said to him in the sight of all Israel, “Be strong and courageous,
for you shall go with this people into the land which the LORD has sworn
to their fathers to give them, and you shall give it to them as an
inheritance. The LORD is the one who goes ahead of you; He will be with
you. He will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed”’
(Deut 31:7-8).
God is with us. He is going before us. He is
preparing the way. He is going to be with each of us and with all of us
in this fight and in this battle. But there are going to be things we
really do have to face. Some of the spiritual dimensions of things we
have to contend with – even in this realm – are going to spook a lot of
people. As I have mentioned before, if you have been into developing
nations where spiritual warfare is much more open, and seen what goes on
there when evil is challenged, you can expect those things to be
happening here too. Witch doctors who shape-shift, who change form in
front of you? We haven’t seen that here – yet. The big ministry teams in
some of those places have what they call the ‘snake-pit’, where they
carry out deliverance, because some of the people they are praying for
will change into serpents and werewolves and so on. There is a lot of
stuff in the media, films and TV which is beginning to make this seem
more acceptable to the Western mind, almost like it is quite good really
to have werewolves and vampires; and that is all part of the enemy’s
schemes. Some of the spiritual power that the enemy has will operate in
that dimension; and we need to know that we have authority over them.
Jesus said that ‘as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the
time of the coming of theSon of Man’ (Matt 24:37). We know the Nephilim
were around at that time, and as the coming of the Son of Man approaches
we are going to need to be equipped to handle spiritual warfare on a
scale we haven’t yet seen.
14. The Joshua Generation will be filled with the spirit of wisdom.
We will definitely need the wisdom of God to know what to do in the
face of some of the situations we are going to find ourselves in. Wisdom
will be our equipping, connecting us to the God who knows all things.
He is before all things. Therefore we can have a heads-up on the future,
and on everything the enemy is planning, so that we can take a stand
and be ready to overcome it.
‘Now Joshua the son of Nun was
filled with the spirit of wisdom, for Moses had laid his hands on him;
and the sons of Israel listened to him and did as the LORD had commanded
Moses’ (Deut 34:9).
There will be an authority that comes with
that wisdom, which is going to inspire people to press in and receive
their inheritance.
15. The Joshua Generation will meditate on God’s word day and night.
‘This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall
meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according
to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way
prosperous, and then you will have success’ (Joshua 1:8).
Meditating on the word is a key to entering into the spiritual realm; a
key to understanding how to access the realms of heaven, seeing the word
of God as a doorway into the realms of the spirit. Again, meditation
has become a taboo in the church because of Transcendental Meditation
and other forms of eastern meditation, which empty people’s minds.
Biblical meditation, by contrast, fills people’s minds, fills them with
the truth, and teaches them to engage with the eyes of their heart.
As we learn to meditate and to open up our spirit to that realm of
God’s purposes, the eyes of our heart will be enlightened. As we engage
our spiritual imagination, we can start seeing the Holy Spirit moving
on people, start actually seeing angels (and demons). We can start
seeing – and entering into – the realms of heaven.
16. The Joshua Generation will be obedient to God’s direction.
‘Only be strong and very courageous; be careful to do according to all
the law which Moses My servant commanded you; do not turn from it to the
right or to the left, so that you may have success wherever you go’
(Joshua 1:7).
We know our God, and love Him; and because of
that we want to serve Him. We want to do everything He is calling us to
do, and to do it out of our love, our passion and our desire for Him.
But we do need to be careful: with greater revelation comes greater
responsibility. We cannot mess around with what God shows us. As I have
said before, Ananias and Sapphira situations will take place again, and
we should not be surprised if people who lie to the Holy Spirit drop
dead as a result. If we are to operate in the fullness of God’s power in
the coming days, then the level of holiness required of us is going to
go up, off the scale. That is both because of the level of revelation we
are beginning to enter into and because of the kind of people we need
to be. For those who hear, but turn back and are not ‘careful to do’,
there is a danger – and we need to be aware of it. We do not want to be
in danger: therefore we must be ready to do all that God is calling us
to do.
Yet not out of fear, but out of love.
17. The Joshua Generation will be prosperous and successful.
You see, if we are able to meditate and obtain that revelation from
God, and if we are careful to do the things that God reveals to us, it
will give us success. We will learn to overcome and we will learn to
prosper.
Prospering is not just about financial things: the
word means ‘to succeed to the highest level’. And we need to succeed to
the highest level in the spiritual as well as in the natural realm. If
we are receiving wisdom and revelation to the highest level, then as a
result of that we will be prosperous and successful. Everything around
us may be falling apart, and it will do so when the world’s systems
crash, but we need to be able to operate in God’s systems, in God’s
kingdom. The financial system is just one example of this, in which we
may well need to learn to do miracles and to multiply things as Jesus
did. Jesus told Peter to find a coin in a fish’s mouth to pay their
taxes. There may be occasions when we too can do something like that and
supernaturally find finance. And we must stop saying, ‘Oh, but that was
Jesus’. Everything Jesus did, He did as a model for what we should do.
He said we would do the things He did, and greater things (John 14:12).
‘This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall
meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according
to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way
prosperous, and then you will have success’ (Joshua 1:8).
This generation are willing to press in and receive.
18. The Joshua Generation will know that they walk with God.
Walking with God is the daily lifestyle we need to have.
‘Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous! Do not tremble or
be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go’ (Joshua
1:9).
When we are walking on the path that God has prepared for
us, when we are walking in our destiny, then we know God is with us.
And we need to know what is our destiny, what is written on our scroll:
and if we do not know, then we can ask God to show us.
Psalm 23
is a key to this lifestyle of walking with God. We need to know that
even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death – and to
be honest, that is just daily life, really – that God is with us all the
way. His rod and His staff (the word and the Spirit), they comfort us.
He anoints us; our cup overflows. I want to encourage you to get hold of
this psalm, to meditate on it and draw out the truth from it; because
God is with us, and His goodness and mercy and lovingkindness will
follow us, and will be identifying features of the way we live our
lives.
19. The Joshua Generation will be equipped to prepare provisions, to live by faith.
‘Pass through the midst of the camp and command the people, saying,
“Prepare provisions for yourselves, for within three days you are to
cross this Jordan, to go in to possess the land which the LORD your God
is giving you, to possess it”’ (Joshua 1:11).
We have to be
able to teach people to live under the provision of God. Each one of us
is responsible to possess our own inheritance. We each need to be
equipped with the weapons we will need, the revelation we need, the
lifestyle we need. God will provide everything we need to take the land,
to take possession of all that He intends for us and has promised to
us. We need to know how to access that provision, to take hold of it for
ourselves, and to teach others to do the same.
20. The Joshua Generation will equip the people to be consecrated (or sanctified) – set apart, dedicated and holy.
‘Then Joshua said to the people, “Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do wonders among you”’ (Joshua 3:5).
This is where many of us are in the process. When Israel were at Gilgal
they dealt with the things from the past, embraced fresh revelation of
the truths they had lost sight of, and were set apart for the purposes
of God for their generation.
Do you want to hear ‘Well done,
good and faithful servant’? Do you want it said of you that, like David,
you served the purpose of God in your generation? I do. I want to serve
the purpose of God in this generation that I am called to be part of,
and I believe that God wants to raise up a whole people who desire to do
the same.
“Consecrate yourselves, for tomorrow the LORD will do wonders among you”.
We are halfway through this mini-series on the Joshua Generation.
Let’s remember the questions we are asking:
• Are you ready to be part of the Joshua generation?
• Are you ready to be equipped by the Joshua generation?
If so, I urge you to get hold of these things and press in.
And over the next few weeks, we will look at the next 20 characteristics and begin to press into those too.
The veil is open: we can walk through that veil which is Jesus’ flesh,
into the heavenly realms, in the spirit. So we can live there. There is a
whole dimension here that we need to enter into. The Promised Land is
not just about here on earth, it is about bringing heaven to earth. As
we saw last week, if we are to be truly effective we have to learn to
rule in the heavens and then bring that authority to bear in this realm.
Today we will return to looking into the characteristics of the Joshua
Generation again, but as we do, I want to encourage you to look at them
from that perspective.
First, though, let me mention another
Joshua for a moment, to help us grasp all this. This is a much later
Joshua, who was the High Priest, being called to enter the heavenly
realms.
‘And the angel of the LORD admonished Joshua, saying,
“Thus says the LORD of hosts, ‘If you will walk in My ways and if you
will perform My laws, then you will also govern My house and also have
charge of My courts, and I will grant you free access among these who
are standing here’”’(Zech 3:6).
‘If you will walk in My ways
and if you will perform My laws’: those are the things we do here, in
this realm. We can read Psalm 119:1-40 to understand more about His
ways: His ordinances, His character, His nature. It establishes
precedent when we fulfil the ways of God. Then it talks about performing
His laws: if we follow the principles of the kingdom, here in the
earthly realms, we will see manifestation of the kingdom on earth as it
is in heaven.
‘Then you will also govern my house’: ruling the
house is something to be done in the heavenly realms. The house of God
is a dimension of the realms of heaven. And we are also a house, a
dwelling place, for God.
‘You will also have charge of my
courts’: the courts of heaven are where God administers justice, and the
jurisdiction of God’s kingdom, manifested in the heavens, can be
outworked here on earth.
‘And I will grant you free access
among these who are standing here’: standing before the throne, in
heaven. The High Priest had access to come into the very presence of
God. If we are able to govern the house, and take charge of the courts,
we will have access to stand in the presence of God. In His personal
presence, not just His Presence. It is the difference between smoke and
fire. Smoke tells you there is a fire. The Presence of God that we
experience here in worship is like the smoke. But beyond that there is
his Person, which is the fire. This passage in Zechariah is describing
protocols which we must go through in order to be able to stand in the
fire.
Let’s get back now to our original Joshua:
21 The Joshua generation will encourage people to hear the word of God directly.
Joshua 3:9 Then Joshua said to the sons of Israel, “Come here, and hear the words of the LORD your God.”
It is important for us as individuals to come and hear the words of God
for ourselves, and to train up others to do so for themselves too. We
need to come before the throne, to come into the courts, to rule the
house. My intention in doing so myself, and teaching it to you, is that I
bring you into it.
Entering into the realms of heaven is for
all of us. Separate to that, I have a role which is to bring signs and
wonders and miracles and healing. I am going to pursue that for myself.
But you, too, need to find out what is written on your scroll, and
pursue that for yourselves. We each need to fulfil the scroll of our
destiny (which we can find in the heavenly realms), read it, eat it, get
it inside us, into our heart, and start outworking it.
22 The Joshua generation will be honoured and respected by the next generation.
There is going to be a culture of honour. Jesus said, “if you receive a
prophet in the name of a prophet, you will receive a prophet’s reward”
(Matt 10:41). We have to receive people in their gift and calling in
order to receive the reward in our own lives. We want to honour one
another and receive one another, because every single one of us have
gifts and calls, and we must look to help one another fulfil those and
work them out.
‘On that day the LORD exalted Joshua in the
sight of all Israel; so that they revered him, just as they had revered
Moses all the days of his life’(Joshua 4:14).
23 The Joshua
generation will free the next generation from the reproach and effects
of the past generations, into new revelation of past activities.
‘Now when they had finished circumcising all the nation, they remained
in their places in the camp until they were healed. Then the LORD said
to Joshua, “Today I have rolled away the reproach of Egypt from you.” So
the name of that place is called Gilgal to this day. While the sons of
Israel camped at Gilgal they observed the Passover on the evening of the
fourteenth day of the month on the desert plains of Jericho’ (Joshua
5:8-10).
There are things we have done, and things that we have
within God’s kingdom and within the church, in which we have operated
up to the level of revelation we previously had. But now everything is
moving up to a higher level.
Here they celebrated the Passover
and re-instituted circumcision, which they did not do in the wilderness.
They came to consecrate themselves to God; the reproach of the past was
wiped away, the stumbling-blocks were removed, the purifying and
refining was taking place. When we come into new revelation, even in the
things that we have done already we will begin to appreciate new levels
of meaning as God opens them up to us in their fullness.
24 The Joshua generation will operate with the angelic realm.
This is something which causes Christians a lot of needless problems
and argument. ‘Why do we need angels when we have the Holy Spirit?’ –
you know the kind of thing. Angels and the Holy Spirit are completely
different. Angels have a completely different purpose and function. And
in fact all angels have their own particular functions.
For
example, one night when Ian Clayton was here, he dropped frankincense on
the floor and the aroma of it filled the room. It took me into the
realms of heaven and I saw a canopy, and these big angels being released
from the throne. They had huge wings, and razor-sharp feathers which I
could tell they were going to use as weapons. I knew instinctively who
they were: they were the hunter angels. They go out to bring in a
harvest. Their weapons are about cutting blindness off people’s eyes,
which would prevent them from seeing and responding to the truth. And
God is releasing them right now. They are different from the gathering
angels, and the watcher angels, and other angels that we see. You
notice, we even describe them by their function.
‘Now it came
about when Joshua was by Jericho, that he lifted up his eyes and looked,
and behold, a man was standing opposite him with his sword drawn in his
hand, and Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us or for
our adversaries?” He said, “No; rather I indeed come now as captain of
the host of the LORD.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth, and
bowed down, and said to him, “What has my lord to say to his servant?”
The captain of the LORD’S host said to Joshua, “Remove your sandals from
your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua
did so’ (Joshua 5:13-15).
When you read that he ‘lifted up his
eyes’, it means he was looking into the heavens, and seeing into another
realm, another dimension. As you read the scriptures again, you will
see examples of this in other places too, such as when Abraham ‘lifted
up his eyes and looked’ and saw the three men standing opposite his tent
(Gen 18:2). And in this passage, the captain of the host goes on to
give Joshua strategy that will help him be victorious and successful.
When we praise God, that high praise releases some of these angels. Read
Psalm 149 and you will see more about that, how we execute judgments
that are written, how we execute vengeance upon the enemy.
We are not fighting against flesh and blood. Earthly strategy just won’t cut it.
25 The Joshua generation will hear God’s strategy for warfare.
The LORD said to Joshua, “See, I have given Jericho into your hand,
with its king and the valiant warriors. You shall march around the city,
all the men of war circling the city once. You shall do so for six
days. Also seven priests shall carry seven trumpets of rams’ horns
before the ark; then on the seventh day you shall march around the city
seven times, and the priests shall blow the trumpets. It shall be that
when they make a long blast with the ram’s horn, and when you hear the
sound of the trumpet, all the people shall shout with a great shout; and
the wall of the city will fall down flat, and the people will go up
every man straight ahead.” (Joshua 6:2-5).
When God said,
“See”, how could Joshua see that? It hadn’t happened yet. The answer is
that God was showing him in the realms of heaven what would happen. It
is just like when Jesus said He did the things He saw the Father doing
(John 5:19). In what realm did He see the Father doing them? The Holy
Spirit will disclose things which are to come, before they actually
happen, because we see – and can step into – a different realm.
Again, when this passage talks about a city with its king and its
warriors, we can understand that solely in the natural realm. But above
and beyond that, in the realms of the heavens, there are also mountains,
and rulers and kings. We need to deal with them in that realm in order
to deal with their counterparts in this realm. As I said last week, that
is why we may historically have struggled to overcome in this realm –
it is because we cannot do so effectively without dealing with the
heavenly realm first.
Like Jesus, we also need to see what the
Father is doing, in order to bring it to earth. If that is how Jesus
operated (and He told us it was), then surely that is how we must
operate too. Jesus lived constantly in two realms, in relationship with
the Father.
The strategy God gave for taking Jericho was very
clear, and very detailed. And the strategy that Joshua received in the
heavenly realms, he had to carry out in this earthly realm. We need to
be able to do that, every day, all the time.
That is what it means to be living in dual realms, to see what the Father is doing, to be constantly connected.
And that is what it takes to bring heaven to earth.
26 The Joshua generation will start to be known and get public attention.
Before the revival we experienced here in 2011, virtually no-one
outside of North Devon knew we even existed. Suddenly, because of what
God began to do here, all kinds of people noticed us, from all over the
country, and began to look to build relationship with us. And some of
the other things which have happened since – not least Ian Clayton
coming here, and then mentioning us wherever he goes – have made us
known in countries all over the world. This blog gets hits from the UK
and Europe, but also from Africa, America, Australia and the Far East.
Who would have expected that two years ago? God has a reason for it. He
wants us to help other people come into the revelation we have received,
and He wants us to equip and enable them to enter into their own
inheritance.
‘So the LORD was with Joshua, and his fame was in all the land’ (Joshua 6:27).
Now, ultimately that is really not about our fame – it is about God’s
fame. We are here to make God known in all the earth. But we will have
public recognition along the way, and that will bring public battles.
Those battles will happen because what we are bringing will cause a
reaction both in the spiritual realm and in this one. All sorts of
criticism and all sorts of accusations will be made because of what we
are doing. A lot of people do not understand, yet. They will say we are
doing things by New Age or occult power. They said that about Jesus,
too, and we need to be ready for it. We need to be confident in our
identity and in the revelation God has given us. We will be in the
public eye, one way or another. So we have to make sure there is
absolutely no pride in what we do. We need to be humble. It is about
what God is doing, not about what we are doing. It is all about Him, but
he uses us. Therefore we must rule our house, and deal with anything of
sin or iniquity in us, deal with any stumbling blocks in our own lives.
If we have a need for affirmation or recognition from men, we are going
to have to deal with that, because it is affirmation from God that we
really need. And if we do receive affirmation and recognition from
people, let us receive it with thanks, but then go and trade with it on
the trading floors of heaven. Go and cast your crowns before Him.
27 The Joshua generation will take a radical stand against sin.
Sin is going to get exposed. It is already happening, always has. But
the whole angelic realm are going to become active in exposing sin.
‘Rise up! Consecrate the people and say, ‘Consecrate yourselves for
tomorrow, for thus the LORD, the God of Israel, has said, “There are
things under the ban in your midst, O Israel. You cannot stand before
your enemies until you have removed the things under the ban from your
midst.” … It shall be that the one who is taken with the things under
the ban shall be burned with fire, he and all that belongs to him,
because he has transgressed the covenant of the LORD, and because he has
committed a disgraceful thing in Israel’”’ (Joshua 7:13, 15).
We cannot have things in our midst which stop us standing in victory
against the enemy. We need to see those things removed. That is part of
the function of those gathering angels, who are removing stumbling
blocks from among us. Purification, refining: the heat of God’s furnace
is being turned up, in order to bring all the impurities in the gold to
the surface. Then, when they are skimmed off, the surface of gold is an
absolute mirror which is reflecting the glory of God. That is what our
lives are there to do: to reflect the glory of God – to reflect what is
in heaven – on earth.
We are coming into a time when the story
of Ananias and Sapphira is going to become very important to understand.
They lied to the Holy Spirit and dropped down dead. When we start to
enter into these things which God is revealing, suddenly the levels of
responsibility go up. And with more responsibility, certainly there is
more authority and power – but the level of purity and holiness required
to operate in that dimension also is greatly increased.
I am
responsible to enter into the fire of God myself. And I am putting it
out there for you too, but it is up to you what you do with it. I have
discharged my responsibility, you must decide how you will respond. Are
you going to enter the fire? Either way, the consequences are yours.
28 The Joshua generation will be careful to always seek counsel from God before making decisions.
It is dangerous for us to do things here on earth (going to and fro) without first having been in heaven. We must not do it.
‘So the men of Israel took some of their provisions, and did not ask
for the counsel of the LORD. Joshua made peace with them and made a
covenant with them, to let them live; and the leaders of the
congregation swore an oath to them’ (Joshua 9:14-15).
They made
a covenant with a people who tricked them, who pretended not to be
inhabitants of the land, but to have come from a long way off. And
Joshua did not lift up his eyes into the heavens to see. This covenant
with the Gibeonites was a problem for Israel for generations to come.
They made a covenant with the enemy, because they did not seek God
first.
We must not make decisions based on what looks right.
Looks can be deceiving. We cannot trust our natural eyes: we need to see
in the realms of the spirit if we are to make right decisions. That
will keep us safe.
29 The Joshua generation will put the enemy under their feet.
The enemy here is not people. We do not put people under our feet. We
do not tread all over people. We do not tread people down. We honour and
respect people. We bring people from captivity into freedom. That means
we do cast out demons, we do demolish strongholds, we deal with a
spiritual reality which is beyond what we see in the natural. We need to
see the giants defeated, and the dragons, and all the other
principalities and powers and rulers in those dark realms. So we have to
put the enemy under our feet.
In this passage, the kings represent those rulers in the heavenly realms:
‘When they brought these kings out to Joshua, Joshua called for all the
men of Israel, and said to the chiefs of the men of war who had gone
with him, “Come near, put your feet on the necks of these kings.” So
they came near and put their feet on their necks. Joshua then said to
them, “Do not fear or be dismayed! Be strong and courageous, for thus
the LORD will do to all your enemies with whom you fight”’ (Joshua
10:24-25).
Through the power and victory of the cross, Jesus
made a public spectacle of all the demonic realms, and they are no
longer in authority. We have authority over them. We may not yet have
taken proper hold of that authority, but we are beginning to do so.
We have to rule over them, and put the rulers in those realms under our feet.
30 The Joshua generation will operate in great signs and wonders.
‘Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up
the Amorites before the sons of Israel, and he said in the sight of
Israel, “O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of
Aijalon.” So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, Until the nation
avenged themselves of their enemies. Is it not written in the book of
Jashar?’ (Joshua 10:12-13a).
A supernatural event: time stood still. It gave them opportunity to defeat their enemy.
(The book of Jashar mentioned here, by the way, was removed from the
canon of scripture by the Nicene Council, operating under the authority
of the Emperor Constantine. He did not want any of this stuff to be
known, because he did not want ordinary believers to know they could
rule. He wanted to rule, through the pastors in the church whom he paid;
and that gave rise to the institutional structure that we still have to
see dismantled today. Get the CD, as Ian Clayton says – he did a whole
session on that. They tried and failed to get 1 and 2 Peter thrown out
too, and the book of Jude (which says some very interesting things you
don’t find elsewhere in scripture). Those books talk about entering
these realms, about operating in authority and power in the heavenlies.
But there are a whole lot of books that used to be regarded as scripture
which did get thrown out, and are now not in our canon because the
enemy did not want them there).
‘And the sun stopped in the
middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.
There was no day like that before it or after it, when the LORD listened
to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel’ (Joshua
10:13b-14).
Come Up Here – Bringing Heaven To Earth
Posted on January 11, 2013
Mike Parsons -
Over the past few posts we have looked at the first 20 characteristics
of the Joshua generation. Before embarking on the other 20, this week I
just want to explore something I have hinted at before but not really
opened up fully with you.
Remember how the Moses generation
failed to enter in? They came out of Egypt but turned back instead of
entering the Promised Land. The reason their mistakes are recorded in
scripture is so that we can learn from them.
‘For I do not want
you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud
and all passed through the sea; and all were baptized into Moses in the
cloud and in the sea; and all ate the same spiritual food; and all drank
the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock
which followed them; and the rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of
them God was not well-pleased; for they were laid low in the
wilderness. Now these things happened as examples for us, so that we
would not crave evil things as they also craved. Do not be idolaters, as
some of them were; as it is written, “THE PEOPLE SAT DOWN TO EAT AND
DRINK, AND STOOD UP TO PLAY.” Nor let us act immorally, as some of them
did, and twenty-three thousand fell in one day. Nor let us try the Lord,
as some of them did, and were destroyed by the serpents. Nor grumble,
as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer. Now these
things happened to them as an example, and they were written for our
instruction, upon whom the ends of the ages have come’ (1 Cor 10:1-11).
The Moses generation did not cross over into their Promised Land
because of what they saw they would have to face: giants. Will we cross
over into ours? The Joshua generation are going to equip a harvest of a
billion labourers, equip them in the supernatural, to bring heaven to
earth. Those billion are just the harvesters, who will eventually bring
in the full and final harvest at the end of the age. There will need to
be that many of them because the battle is going to become more and more
intense, as light comes into the darkness, challenges it, and overcomes
it. Those harvesters are the Jesus generation, the ones who will see
Him return.
Some of those reading this will be of the Joshua
generation and some of the Jesus generation; I hope no-one reading this
is of the Moses generation – I do not want you to stay in the
wilderness.
So here we are. God is outworking His purposes, and
the ends of the ages have come: we need revelation from Him if we are
to engage with how things are in the heavenly realms and bring them into
the earthly realms. That is what it means when we pray ‘on earth as it
is in heaven’. It is up to us to bring heaven to the earth.
The
Joshua generation will be forerunners who have spied out the land. What
we may not have realised fully up to now is that our Promised Land is
not only about earthly things. To operate in the fullness of the
kingdom, we need to operate in heavenly as well as earthly realms. Some
of our spying out will be done in the realms of earth, but some will be
in the realms of heaven.
God offered Moses’ generation the land
of promise, but the vast majority of them said, ‘We can’t go in’. And
earlier in their journeying, He had been willing for the whole nation to
meet with Him on the mountaintop, but they were afraid of the thunder
and lightning, the fire and the smoke, so they said to Moses, ‘You go,
and tell us what God says. We can’t go in’.
In the same way God
offers us all access to the heavenly realms now, because Jesus has
opened them up for us – that is what was signified by the veil of the
temple being torn in two at the moment of His death. His purpose is that
we can experience everything He intends for us. Like the children of
Israel, though, many are saying ‘We can’t go in’.
The kingdom
of God is about government, about authority, about rulership. God wants
us to learn how to rule in our own lives, and how to rule in the realms
of the spirit to bring heaven to earth. We need to learn how to lead and
equip the Jesus generation to possess the land of promise. The Hebrew
word for ‘possess’ means ‘to inherit by seizing, dispossessing and
become heirs’. We were made as spirit beings, to have access to the
spiritual realms. When Adam was first created, he had access to the
heavenly realms. There was nothing to stop him. Only sin caused him to
lose that access. The glory that he was clothed with was removed. Let me
put it like this: it is as if a bandwidth of revelation was removed
from him, so he could no longer see into the things which were of a
higher bandwidth – the realms of heaven.
Now, everything about
God’s kingdom has a beginning and an end, but the beginning and the end
are always the same. That is why Hebrew thinking is always circular, not
linear like Greek thinking. Linear thinking speaks about layers of
heavens – first heaven, second heaven, third heaven – but the heavenly
realms are not really that way at all. They are dimensions of authority.
It may have seemed simpler to our western minds to express it as
first/second/third, but it has been misleading. We read ‘third heaven’
in Paul’s writings and leap to the conclusion that there must at least
be layers below that of a ‘first’ and ‘second’ heaven. Hebrew thinking
implies no such thing.
For God’s kingdom to come on earth as it
is in heaven, it will involve us fulfilling Adam’s mandate: to rule in
the spirit realm and by so doing to influence the natural realm. When we
fulfil that mandate, we will see God’s glory fill the earth (Num
14:21).
We have to have experience of operating in the heavenly
realms ourselves if we are to bring other people into it, and that is
what God is doing amongst His people right now. He is opening things up
so that we can gain that access, and begin to operate in two realms,
earthly and heavenly. We learn to rule in heavenly realms, and then we
bring that rule to bear down here.
Before we can rule in this realm, we need to operate in authority in heavenly places.
Perhaps I could put it like this: we have to go up and down before we
can go to and fro. The trouble is, we have tried to bring heaven down
while standing in the earthly realms. That is why we have been beaten up
so much by the enemy: we have been trying to come against the spiritual
forces of wickedness and darkness with the earthly dimension of
authority we have here. We need to bring heavenly authority in order to
defeat them. It is a different dimension of authority. To exercise
heavenly authority we need to go up, and bring heaven down with us.
On the island of Patmos, in the spirit, John heard a voice saying ‘Come
up here’ (Rev 4:1). That voice is still speaking to us today. Do you
hear it?
— with Kathie Wand, Adeyemi Adegbile, Debra Crowley and 43 others.
