Christ Church International

THE SPIRIT OF

REBELLION

January 20, 2020

BY J.P. TIMMONS

© 2020 CCI PUBLISHING

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

“And the Lord said to Moses: ‘Behold,

You will rest with your fathers; and this

People will rise and play the harlot with the

Gods of the foreigners of the land, where they

Go to be among them, and they will forsake

Me and break My covenant which I have made

With them. Then my anger shall be aroused

Against them in that day, and I will forsake

Them, and they shall be devoured. And many

Evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will

Say in that day, “Have not these evils come upon us

Because our God is not among us?”’”

† Deuteronomy 31:16-17 NKJV

As I shared at the beginning of the New Year, the Lord said that this was "The Year of Vision." I found that humorous since the year is 2020 which correponds with perfect physical vision but of course the Lord is referring to each of our spiritual visions that He has given us to fulfill. And yet as we all know, there are things and attacks from the enemy and from within ourselves that can cause us not to fulfill God's vision for our lives.

This morning in my daily bible meditation the Lord spoke to me about the spirit of rebellion from the book of 1 Samuel and it is a powerful lesson for us to learn if we want to fulfill God’s purposes and plans for our lives.

And the reason it’s so important to spend time in the Word each day is because the Great Teacher of the Church, the Holy Spirit, will teach you every day if you will take the time to attend His “class” which is open to all of us if we want to attend and learn because His main purpose for the Church is to “guide us into all truth” and “to conform us to the image of Christ Jesus” and both of these require the Word and why the Tabernacle of the Old Testament during the days of Moses in our text emphasized that the priests change the showbread “daily” and why the manna was provided daily and the people were commanded not to try and save it or store it for future use. Likewise Jesus in the New Testament in both Matthew and Luke 4:4 declares that “Man shall not live by bread alone” (referring to the physical bread with which Satan was tempting Him) “but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”

So I trust that you’ve learned your lesson and understand that you need “fresh” bread daily—time with the Lord in the Scriptures.

In 1999 shortly after we moved to Canada, the Spirit began to show me a principle from the Scriptures beginning in Exodus that He referred to as “The Hardening of the Heart Principle.” And as I’ve learned over many years of reading the Bible through each month, once the Lord shows you a principle of God then you begin to see it throughout the Bible. And, this “Hardening of the Heart Principle” can cause eternal death so it’s important to understand it because it comes about through the sin of rebellion.

When the Spirit first taught me this principle He showed me the example of Pharaoh in Exodus. And if you study it you will learn what He showed me; that this Hardening of the Heart can only happen to those who know who the Lord is! When Moses went before Pharaoh and told him that the Lord had sent him Pharaoh’s response, and rightly so, was “Who is the Lord that I should obey his voice …? (Ex. 5:2). Pharaoh had never heard of El Elyon and the Egyptians had many of their own gods, including Baal and Ashtaroth who in reality are two of the eight Powers who serve as religious spirits under Satan (see MSDK for more info on the structure of Satan’s kingdom).

So Pharaoh hardened his heart but guess what? The Lord showed Pharaoh who He was through signs and miracles. The Spirit showed me back in 1999 that once a person knows who the Lord is then if they continue to disobey Him and serve Him and harden their hearts toward Him as Pharaoh did then at some point God Himself will begin to further harden their hearts just like we see with Pharaoh in Exodus.

But now Pharaoh was not a covenant man so what about us? Well, God’s prophecy to Moses about the future of Israel speaks to the problem and why the Lord wants you to understand and be on guard against the spirit of rebellion because it is the nature of man and we see it throughout the Bible and also in both the world and Church today. So it’s important for you to know this truth and be on guard against it.

Remember, it’s your responsibility to guard your heart and mind as Paul reminded the Philippian church as I recently preached at a church in Michigan on the principle of being “like-minded” that Paul exhorted this Church as well as others that he wrote to.

In the book of Genesis, God warns Cain about sin—that it “lays at the door”; it’s waiting for us! Paul wrote most notably in Romans about the principle of being “a slave to sin.” But the Lord told Cain, “You must master it.” In other words, once you recognize a specific sin, especially if it’s a dominant sin in your life—then it’s your responsibility to master it and overcome it.

The apostle Paul, as I preached in Michigan recently, seemed to understand this battle for the mind because we see it in many of his epistles, especially in the original Greek. In Philippians 4:6, a scripture most of you can quote by heart, Paul uses a military term for “guard” in reference to building a garrison. A more literal translation of the Greek would be that we need to take the Word of God and build a garrison around our hearts and minds because the opposing army is always going to be attacking our hearts and minds.

Almost all of the people that we minister deliverance to have to be delivered from a “stronghold” that the enemy has established in their minds and hearts that is contrary to the Word of God—lies of the devil that they have come to believe because they did not “master” their sin and did not build a garrison in their hearts and minds with the Word of God.

THE SIN OF REBELLION

Now in the original languages of Greek and Hebrew there are actually twelve different words that are translated “sin” in our English language—that’s a lot!

Yet W.E. Vine’s and most Greek works generally only discuss the most common word for sin, harmartia (ἁμαρτία), which is found 174 times in the New Testament and 49 times in the Book of Romans; it is defined as “missing the mark.” This meant more to people during Bible days when there were no guns but rather a bow and arrow was one of the most dominant weapons. A person didn’t get to become one of the king’s archers if he couldn’t “hit” the mark.

Another word for sin is the Greek word, skolios, from which the medical profession gets the word, skoliosis, and it means “crooked.” But the word I want to deal with here because that is the object of this particular lesson is the Greek word for sin which means “overstepping a boundary” because this particular word signifies this deadly sin of rebellion.

If you reread our text for this teaching and you reflect on the history of Israel and indeed the whole human race you will come to see that man is indeed, by nature, rebellious. Even though we in the Church have “a better covenant based on better promises” as I’ve written over and over again human nature is the same—we still tend to commit the same sins that our fathers—both physical and spiritual—committed.

And although all the words originally used in the Scriptures for sin tend to overlap there is also a specific word that means “willful disobedience” or “disobeying a voice.” That is why Paul writes about sin so much in Romans and deals with the principle of sin so that we can overcome it and not be a slave to it. Just because you are “saved by grace through faith” doesn’t mean that you can live a life of sin. Paul refutes this lifestyle that is preached as “another gospel” in many churches today. He explicitly writes that if you live a life of sin then you will reap eternal death whereas if you live by the Spirit you will reap eternal life.

But I want to discuss something that the Lord showed me from 1 Samuel this morning concerning Saul, the first king of Israel and how the sin of rebellion caused his personal prophecies, i.e., God's vision for his life, not to become reality and, in fact, led to his premature death and I believe much worse.

God’s personal prophecy for Saul was that “he would be anointed king” and that “he would save Israel from the hand of the Philistines” who had been their masters and tormentors for hundreds of years (1 Sam. 9:16). But as we all know, instead of Saul completely destroying the Philistines and delivering Israel instead the Philistines killed Saul and his three sons, including righteous Jonathan, David’s covenant friend. So we learn here and in many other Scriptures that sin not only causes the death of the sinner but it can also cause the death of many others, often thousands. We see this with the sin of Achan in the book of Joshua. So when you read “the wages of sin is death” in Romans keep in mind that it doesn’t just mean the death of the individual sinner although that’s true; it can refer to the deaths of others in our own family or elsewhere because sin has consequences that live on after the sin is committed.

And if you study Saul’s life you will also notice that his sin of rebellion brought in other evil spirits that we don’t see in his life when he first met Samuel before he was anointed and coronated king—the spirits of pride and jealousy.

Now I don’t have a “Thus saith the Lord” on this but I strongly believe that Saul went to hell when he died because of the sins in his life according to the Bible and his refusal to repent like David did after him. When the Spirit was speaking to me about this “Hardening of the Heart Principle” I looked at Saul and the fruit of his life.

Paul writes in Romans 1 about God giving certain people over “to a reprobate mind” to do certain sins. We have met and been attacked by certain people claiming to be Christians in which we saw the same issues that Saul dealt with—jealousy, pride and a spirit of insanity and yet they thought they were “okay” with God.

The fact is, my brothers and sisters, the spirit of rebellion is one of the “sins” that is innate in man! That is the main revelation for you to understand from this teaching so that you can stand against it. We have all heard—and it’s true—that “We inherited the sin nature from Adam” but nobody ever talks about what that sin nature was or how Adam inherited it. As I’ve demonstrated in this teaching, there are many different words for sin. And rebellion, along with pride, are two of the ones that we can easily see were inherited from Satan by the human race. Most of the Old Testament deals with the rebellion of God's covenant people--people who had seen the miracles, signs and wonders and knew who the Lord was!

When we went on the radio in Libby, Montana, many years ago and then the Lord moved on us to start a church there, I picked up by the Spirit from the spirit realm and remarked to Evelyn that the whole area around Libby “Was like the Book of Judges; everybody did what was right in his own eyes.” In other words, it was spiritual rebellion in the churches! And Dwayne, the radio station manager, told us the first day we began our broadcast as the only Christian ministry on the radio: “There are 30 churches in Libby and 18 of them are looking for pastors.”

And as we’ve preached, taught and written for over 30 years, the whole church today—at least 99% of it—is in rebellion to the Lord in the area of Church government and Five-fold ministry.

So I hope that this teaching article will cause you to be more aware of the potential for rebellion (sin) in your own life and not allow it to have dominion over you so that your purpose and ministry for the Lord are not blotted out like King Saul’s was.

MARANATHA SHALOM