Hosea 4:6 (NKJV) 6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.
At the end of 2019, the Lord spoke clearly to me that I needed to teach on spiritual warfare. I spent all my time in Kenya and Uganda on this topic. As we moved toward 2020, God spoke and said this would be a year of restoration. Hearing things in the spirit is an interesting dynamic. I have learned to identify his voice, but until things begin to play out, I never seem to fully understand what he is really saying. That is why it is so important to obey his voice.
I did not really understand how these two ideas were linked. As I write today it has become crystal clear to me that they are very much connected. Restoration follows war. In war things get destroyed. Once the war is over, countries must be rebuilt. Lives must be healed, and governments must be reformed. All of that speaks of restoration as we have studied it this year. When we are walking in God’s will and purpose the power of God to restore is always far greater than the power of the enemy to destroy. We always come out on the other side of a Satanic attack in better shape than we went in. Praise God!
We see this in World War 2. The two most powerful and destructive enemies of the United States were Germany and Japan. World War 2 was a war that had to be won if humanity was going to survive. In the course of winning that war, great destruction was brought upon those two nations. However, with the United States in the forefront something that never happened before happened. Instead of the conquered people suffering years of depravation and slavery, Germany and Japan rose to the point that by the 1960s they were two of the most prosperous and economically powerful nations in the World. I believe that is due to the influence of Christianity and the Christian God on the conquerors.
We are at war with a virus. I believe we are at war with much more than that. We are at war with our adversary, the devil according to 2 Peter 5. This health crises is the first volley in an attack that may have far greater effects in the future. We are going to have to fully engage in the economic side of this war soon. We are going to need to resist the social and cultural impact as well. Most important we are fighting a battle for the preaching of the Gospel and relevance of the church. Can we win? Absolutely and when we do the full power of restoration will begin to work for all those who will believe it.
In our last posts we have been looking at some of the weapons of our warfare from 2 Corinthians 10:3-6. I want to begin to look at another weapon that we must fully engage if we want to overcome the enemy and be in position for restoration. That is the weapon of knowledge. In 2 Corinthians 10, we saw that we had to come against the things that exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. To do that we must have the knowledge of God.
In the world, there is a saying. Knowledge is power. That is very true. Today we find ourselves inundated with information. From TV to the internet we know more about the corona virus than we have known about any other disease. Much of that information can be helpful but information does not automatically translate to knowledge. Knowledge is usable, information is just information. Unless we take the information couple it with wisdom and use it to formulate a plan of action, it will usually cause more problems than it helps. How many people have searched their symptoms on the internet and come up with the right diagnosis? I do not think there are many. More important how many end up treating the right thing the wrong way or treating the wrong thing altogether.
Information can lead to knowledge and knowledge is important. Do we need to know how to physically protect ourselves from this virus? Yes. Do we need to know what our government is doing so we can reasonably cooperate with their plan? I think we do. There are many things it is good to know, but in time of war certain knowledge is more important than other knowledge. If we accept the reality of the God of the Bible, we must ask ourselves what is the most important knowledge we need in order to win this fight.
In todays verse God says that his people are destroyed by a lack of knowledge. There is no reason for God’s people to be destroyed. That does not mean they never are. Bad things happen to good people. However, that is not the will of God. He says we are destroyed because we lack knowledge. What knowledge is he talking about? Is he talking about physical knowledge? Is he talking about general education? Verse 1 of this chapter tells us the knowledge we need.
Hosea 4:1 (NKJV) 1 Hear the word of the LORD, You children of Israel, For the LORD brings a charge against the inhabitants of the land: “There is no truth or mercy Or knowledge of God in the land.
The knowledge we vitally need right now is the knowledge of God. I am not talking about knowing about God. I am talking about knowing Him, what he desires, what he can do and what he will do for us in this time of war. How can we obtain this knowledge? There is a twofold process to obtaining the knowledge that will stave off destruction. We must know him by experience through the new birth. We know him by spending time in prayer and conversation with him and by the interaction of His Holy Spirit in our lives. That is phase one and it is vital.
The second phase is to know him through his Word. The Word of God is the standard by which all knowledge of God must be judged. The Word of God is the only source of information about him that we can access physically and mentally. As I said earlier, information alone is not knowledge but to have knowledge we must have information. That information must be processed and analyzed through the influence of the Holy Spirit. When that happens, information becomes knowledge, knowledge becomes wisdom and we know how to win victory and move on to restoration.
When faced with the greatest battle to that point in the history of God’s people, the newly installed leader of the nation, Joshua, was given a directive by God as to what to do in order to find the knowledge God needed him to have.
Joshua 1:8 (NKJV) 8 This Book of the Law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success.
We see the outcome of Joshua’s meditation in the Word of God in chapter 5. An angel appeared to Joshua and gave him a play that no one would come up with in the natural. It would look completely foolish to anyone who was not allowing the Word of God and the spirit of God to dominate their thinking. You can read the details of the plan in Joshua 6:1-5. There was no natural information that could have produced that plan, but when Joshua acted on the knowledge that came form God, the walls of Jericho fell.
Meditation in God’s word is the process of interaction between the written Word of God and the spirit of God within. This is the key to both victory today and restoration in the future. What do we need to know? Join me tomorrow!
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