(Living Word Just finished our 25 year anniversary celebration. It was a wonderful but tiring time, so I have decided to share some more back posts this week.)
Mark 11:17(NKJV) 17Then He taught, saying to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a ‘den of thieves.’”
In our study of God’s plan for the church in 2012, we have keyed on three things we need to do. We need to possess our “land of promises.” We need to drive out the enemies that keep us from being able to posses that land, and finally we need to occupy the land until the Lord returns.
We have taken our pattern from two places. First, we have studied the journey of Israel from bondage in Egypt to destiny in Canaan. Their mandate as they prepared to enter the Promised Land was to possess the land and drive out all the inhabitants. Part of the definition of “possess” is to occupy, so the end result of God’s command to Israel was that they occupy the land. this land so that the Messiah could be born to them in that place, so you might say that the Lord gave them this land so they could occupy it until the Lord came.
The second place we have seen this pattern is in Mark chapter 11. In this chapter, Jesus comes to the temple and observes what is happening. He is not pleased with the situation, but it is late in the day and he returns to where he is staying. The next morning he returns to the temple and begins to drive out the moneychangers. As he does so, he declares possession of the temple. “My house shall be called a house of prayer.” The fact that he possessed the temple empowered him to drive out the moneychangers.
I believe we need to possess the promises of God. God has given us a life and a destiny in Christ. We need to take ownership of that life and destiny. Once we do that, we will be motivated to drive out the enemies that keep us from our possession. I want to remind you the areas in which these enemies exist. They come from the world system, the flesh, or attacks by the devil and his forces. The final thing we need to look at is the idea of occupying our promised land until Jesus comes.
We get this term from Luke 17. A master gives 10 people a mina each to invest while he is traveling. He tells these people to “occupy” until he returns. This word means to do business or to trade. To occupy our land of promises means to get busy in the work of the Kingdom. To do that, we must possess and we must drive out. However, let us take a closer look at what this means to us today.
In Mark 4:17, we find Jesus having completed the first two parts of our study. He has possessed the temple and he has driven out those “enemies that kept it from fulfilling God’s purpose. Now the word makes a bit of a strange statement. He has just done some violent things in the temple but the Bible says that Jesus next step was to teach.
Teaching does not seem to fit the atmosphere Jesus has created. We might expect some fiery preaching, but not teaching. The purpose of preaching is to stir up, inspire or bring conviction. It is usually not complicated, but it is often high in intensity. Teaching on the other hand brings instruction to provide something a person can use in order to build their life. It is does not need to be fiery or intense, but it must communicate something usable to the hearer.
Why does Jesus teach here? I believe it is because he has made a transition from possessing and driving out to occupying. To occupy we have to know what is expected of us and how to walk in those things. Teaching will accomplish that. One of the ideas expressed in the definition of “occupy is that of a military occupation. A military occupation comes at the end of a war. War is supposed to have rules, but they are few and not easily enforced.
When the United States was fighting Japan in WWII, the Japanese in particular did not really believe in the “rules of warfare.” They believed in winning and, to them honor was do live and die for the Emperor. As a result, they did many things that that eraged those from the west because they could not understand why the Japanese would do them. Things like suicide attacks and the poor treatment of prisoners because the Japanese saw surrender as dishonorable were unconscionable to the Americans.
As a result, the American troops tended to give no quarter either. They hated the Japanese for the way they fought. In the taking of Okinawa, the fighting was horrific. I have seen pictures of the use of flamethrowers. This is a terrible weapon but the US troops used it with no hesitation. The use of the Atomic bomb was the ultimate expression of how far the US was willing to go to bring the war to an end.
Once Japan surrendered things changed drastically. The US troops went from being a fighting force to an occupying force. I am sure their feelings toward the Japanese had not changed. The wounds were still fresh in American minds. The atrocities committed by the Japanese against prisoners of war were just coming out. I can only imagine the anger felt by those troops as they heard what these people had done to their comrades. However, they were no longer at war. Now there were rules that had to be followed.
One of the reasons an occupation must have rules that a war does not is that the goal is different. The goal in a war is to take possession of ground and defeat the enemy. An army must do whatever it takes to get that done. An occupation is meant to restore a people and a society to a functioning condition. It may also have a goal of reeducating that society to keep them from the behavior that led to the war in the first place. In both cases, there are rules and the rules must be understood.
When we are involved in possessing the land and driving out our enemies, the focus is emotional and experiential. Certainly there are rules to how we do that and how we are effective in the process, but the more important thing is our sense of relationship, possession, and our feelings of commitment and intensity. However, occupying is different. To occupy we must grow even more in maturity. We must learn to walk in the Glory of God for a long time. Isaiah 28 tells us that we do that by building line upon line and precept upon precept. In other words by teaching and learning.
I know many Christians who have possessed and who have driven out enemies. However, as time went by, they failed to occupy the ground and lost it again to the enemy. I believe we can no longer afford to do that. We must possess our land of promises. We must drive out enemies. If we do not do those two things, we will have nothing to occupy. Nevertheless, having done that we must occupy the ground, or we have accomplished nothing.
Take some time this week and ask the Lord what you need to learn in order to keep the ground you have taken from the devil. You cannot be sustained by emotion if you want to occupy. You are going to have to know the rules and the principles of the Word of God if you are going to hold onto what you have obtained by possessing and driving out. The Holy Spirit will guide you in the Word. Just remember, to occupy requires constancy.
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