The Apostolicity of Incarnation
-- by Art Katz
(Editor's Note) This article has some very challenging things to consider regarding worship, sending, being sent, 'sending ourselves', learning to wait for God's initiative, etc. I also really appreciate the encouragement to consider more deeply the life of Christ before and after His time spent on the earth...something which, traditionally, we as the Church have seemingly neglected for the most part.)
Transcribed from an audio file established during prophetic lessons.
August 24, 2005
One of the neglected considerations of the church in our
generation, though we have made faint allusions to it as we have been proceeding,
is the pre-incarnate life of Christ before he took upon himself humanity.
There is an immeasurable history of relationship between the Father and the
Son before the advent of his coming into the Earth that has been virtually
ignored as if history begins with the advent of Jesus in human form. But it
begins before that, and failure to consider that earlier history gives us
an inadequate knowledge and understanding of both the Father and the Son.
We have to know the glory that the Son forfeited in coming, and in coming
voluntarily and freely. That the Father sent the Son is the first instance
of apostolic reality, it is the first sending. The first of anything is always
the prototype. Here we find the classic formulation of every subsequent expression.
It contains the constituent elements of any sending, which is to say, of any
apostolic act. The sending of the Son was the first apostolic act. If you
follow up the use of the words sending and sent, it confirms it in every place.
Jesus said, “as the Father has sent me, so send I you.” The first
apostolic sending in Acts 13, from Antioch, when the Holy Spirit said, “Separate
unto me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. Then,
when they had fasted and prayed and laid their hands on them, they sent them
away. So they, being sent forth by the Holy Spirit, went. . .” There
is a reiteration of the word sent, there is a sending. The Greek word apostolos
means sent one. God’s lament about the false prophets is “I did
not send them. Yet they ran.” That is more a description today of what
takes place under the words apostolic and prophetic. “I did not send
them. Yet they ran.”
The issue of sending is critical, and it goes back to the beginning in the
agreement between Father and Son to be sent. The Son, in his own freedom,
voluntarily agreeing. My new favorite author P.T. Forsyth has a whole chapter
on the pre-incarnate life of Christ. Christ’s earthly humiliation had
to have its foundations laid in Heaven and needs to be reviewed as a renunciation
before the world was. The Cross took place before the Cross. The Cross had
its origins in eternity. The agreement of the Father and the Son to be sent,
and the renunciation of the relationship with the Father, in the most pure
form in which the Son enjoyed it, was already the expression of the Cross.
Our failure to understand that, to appreciate that and to factor that in robs
us of a fuller appreciation of the whole mystery of the faith. Maybe this
is the very thing that cheats us from that final stage of love and appreciation
which is called adoration. With adoration, that I somehow suspect, is the
key to power, ultimate reality and expression as to service in God. The issue
of the pre-incarnate relationship between Father and Son is that missing factor
that brings the fuller revelation and brings us across that threshold of respect,
admiration and appreciation to the place of adoration itself.
Forsyth is right that this earthly humiliation had to have its foundation
in Heaven. It was not initiated in Earth, but in Heaven, in the agreement
between the Father and the Son of what the sending would require. It was an
eternal resolve between Father and Son, an act within the godhead – a
remarkable phrase. Nothing less would carry the fullness of faith, and the
adoration of Christ must go together with this view of him that his sacrifice
began before he came into the world. There was a Calvary above before there
was one below. The issue of the Cross and the renunciation had its origin
in Heaven though it was acted out in Earth. If you ignore the heavenly origin,
you miss something of the greater glory of God and his character because this
was an act within the godhead itself. This is very God. We have lost the consideration,
both of the pre-incarnate Christ and the post-resurrection Christ. Isn’t
that interesting? There is very little consideration of the ascension of Christ.
We dote on his earthly history – and well that we should – and then
there is a resurrection, but the ascension of Christ and the enthronement
lies in the same kind of neglect as does the pre-incarnate life. And, yet,
one is the other side of the same coin. The coming down and the going up is
part of the total mystery of the great redemptive work of God that need to
be factored in and computed if we are to give God the full appreciation, recognition
and devotion that he deserves.
Jesus said to Nicodemus: “No one has ascended into heaven, except the
One having descended from heaven.” Nothing can ascend before it first
has descended. Something must go down before it comes up. Not only something,
but everything has to come down before it can go up – including and,
maybe, especially our worship.
True worship has, like anything that is apostolic, to come
down before it can go up. Something has to be given from the throne of Heaven.
Every true act, every true work, reality itself has its nexus and its origin
at the throne of Heaven. That is why Jesus said ‘no man can ascend who
is not first descended’, even the Son of man who is in Heaven. Though
his feet are in Jerusalem, his essential being is from above. We have lost
this consideration, and it needs to be restored. True worship has to have
its origin first from the Father, from the throne, before it can find its
proper expression out from the Earth. But if it begins from the Earth, humanly,
however well-meaning the intention, however aided and abetted by instrumentation,
it is lacking that heavenly quality that is true and becomes an issue of musicality
or enjoyment for the congregation. It is not worship unto the Most High.
Did you ever hear me quote a brother who spoke once in our morning prayer
meeting years ago, who said: “It takes God to love God”? I thought
that was the best thing I ever heard him say, maybe one of the best things
I ever heard anyone say. It takes God to love God. Only God can convey the
love which is appropriate to himself, and by the same measure, only God can
convey the worship appropriate to himself. That is why he has got to send,
because anything that issues from us, however well-meaning our intention,
lacks the quality that only God can imbue in those things which he initiates
and originates from the throne in sending. The genius of the word apostolic
is ‘sent’. The presumption of our religious generation is to run
though they were not sent. God said, “I never sent them”. He had
to send his Son, and then the Son sends his disciples. The root of the apostolic
reality is struck from the very inception of redemptive glory in the sending
of the Son by the Father. Before the world was. . .
The issue of the Cross is already in the Godhead itself and finds its expression
in the sending of the Son, because the separation and the coming into the
Earth in that sending is sacrifice. A loss of the pure intimacy that Jesus
enjoyed with the Father in the eternal experience that was his before his
sending. And then, the humiliation that awaits as coming into the Earth. The
humiliation of just being a man, let alone taking upon himself the form of
a man, becoming a servant and dying in the cruelest form, even the death of
the Cross was all foreknown and necessary in that sending. That is why Paul,
who had a greater sense of this in his apostolic knowledge as a sent one,
says “Who can separate us from the love of God?” Can persecution
or deprival or sickness or any other factor separate us from the love of God?
What made his statement so sublime and so sweeping? He factors in the love
of God, not just from the commencement of Jesus’ earthly ministry but
from the commencement of his sending.
The pre-incarnate sending is already the expression of
the love of God. God sent his Son. God so loved the world that he gave. .
. He has a sense of that love that factors in much more than just the conduct
and acts of Jesus in his earthly tenure, but apprehends also the sending as
being the very act of love. He goes to the origin, and therefore he has a
sweeping sense of the love of God that finds its expression in that remarkable
statement in the letter to the Romans – who shall separate us from the
love of God. How does he know it that deeply? Because he is apprehending and
considering something that the Church by and large has neglected, namely the
pre-incarnate life of Christ.
Forsyth says, “In that sending he consented not only to die, but to be
born.” Isn’t that remarkable? To be born, to take upon himself the
form of a man, the humility of infancy and dependency, all those things to
which he must come as very God.
A verse in the Gospel of John ties in perfectly with this: “And now,
Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with
thee before the world was.” Joh 17:5. It would take a Holy Spirit inspired
imagination even to begin to sense what that glory was, and that that was
left behind and forsaken as part of a sacrifice of love in the willing voluntary
obedience of Jesus, as a Son to the Father in Heaven, to come down, to enter
this Earth and suffer birth and then subsequent death.
What if this glory that he had with the Father before the
world began was the very glory of the Cross? What if time itself is seen as
a servant to eternity? . . .And the eternal purpose of God is already enjoying
the work of the Son as its chief object of glory – which would not have
been manifest had he not come. What if the chief object of eternal glory,
the very celebration of God, is the Lamb slain for all eternity? This is the
chief enjoyment and celebration of God, if this is his eternal purpose which
he purposed and for which sake all things that exists serve that purpose,
even time itself.
This is the very glory: There was a Cross in the Godhead.
It was not just a transaction, to leave behind. It was actually going to affect
the things which were already enjoyed by God, for ever, and that is the glory
of the Son. Any other glory would be a lesser glory, unbecoming of the eternal
purpose – which is automatic to God himself. The purpose must be, because
God is.
That is why Forsyth calls it an act within the Godhead. It requires an act.
It is inherent in the Godhead, it is intrinsic to the Godhead, it is the nature
of the Godhead. It required an act to explicate and bring that glory down
to Earth, which the Son voluntarily agreed to do in his own freedom and the
Father in his freedom of sending the Son. They are explicating and showing
forth in an act what was already with them in their own nature. When Jesus
takes upon himself the form of a servant, he is not taking up a pseudo identity.
He is revealing the truth of God. God is Servanthood.
This ought to begin to stir in us some sense of what Heaven itself is –
“and the glory that I had with you”. What kind of an environment
did the Son enjoy with the Father? Is that why it says that “every good
gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of
lights, with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning”.
Every good and perfect thing comes down. . . from the Father of lights. From
Heaven, which is the nexus, the seat of glory, of purity, of righteousness,
of holiness. That is why everything must come down, it must be sent. Anything
that has its origin except from that place is dubious and in question, even
counterfeit if it dares use the word apostolic – because it is not sent.
The first act, the sending from Heaven of that glory, out of that glory, by
the will of the Father, the sending of the Son, is the root of what is itself
apostolic. Every subsequent act has in some way to have its character from
that first sending and be of like kind. Do you harbor a jealousy, that you
will wait and not initiate anything that is expedient, humanly or religiously
necessary, if it is not given from above – because every good and perfect
thing comes down from above, from the Father of lights. This is a priestly
jealousy and a priestly insistence. It is interesting that Jesus, in Hebr
3:1, is called the Apostle and High Priest of our confession. He could not
be the apostle of our confession if he had not the high priestly regard for
Heaven, for the Father, for the glory, for what is with God in its purity.
And then being sent down to communicate something of that reality into the
Earth. We have it to the degree that we have a priestly appreciation, which
means to wait for that which is given, not to become endeared, let alone to
misrepresent or to humanly affect something that only God can give. That is
why so much of our Christianity is bogus. That is why so much of our worship
is musicality, but has not its origin from above.
The origin of every true act is from God himself, including
this morning session. Merely for man to exert something that he thinks is
appropriate is “sound and fury signifying nothing”. Can we be sons
without being priests? Can there be a sonship of the kind that Jesus set before
us in his own example by being both priest and apostle, if we ourselves have
not the priestly disposition to wait for what comes down from above? And not
to initiate. To check that human impulse, like the strange fire that was initiated
by two sons in their own impulse – not waiting.
In Isaiah chapter six, the vision that Isaiah had, seeing the Lord high and
lifted up, the Father says to the Son: “And whom shall we send? Who will
go for us?” Wherever you look, take the Strong’s concordance and
check out the words send and sent. It is a remarkable catalogue of the acts
of God that rests in the issue of sending – which is the root of the
word apostolos. Who shall go for us? Whom shall we send? What does Isaiah
say? “Send me.”
It is presumptuous to think that true worship and service
can issue from ourselves, independent of that source. The miracle of incarnation
is the miracle of a sending from Heaven and an ascension, that what came down
went up in the receiving of the Son that was obedient unto death. This is
the very master theme. This is the great theme struck that has at its heart
the whole issue of what must come down from above, sent from the Father. The
whole nexus of reality, of the Church, of what is apostolic and of what is
prophetic is the issue struck first by the act of the Father in the sending
of the Son. That is the great theme – everything else is a playing on
that theme.
One thing develops within regarding Isaiah and the sending: That sounds almost
like a reiteration of the covenant within the Godhead itself. If we would
ever contemplate what the true cost of sending is – and here is someone
who has been the very prince of God and been devastated by that presence.
Now, to speak in terms of sending, it is a whole different realm than this
impulse to be sent that is so natural – everyone wants to be sent, here
I am, I’ll be the guy. That is intrinsic to the human nature. But to
see the forbidding cost of that sending and to still say “Here am I,
send me” is the freedom that is in the Godhead itself. You need to have
God, like it takes God to love God, you need to have that in your nature –
even to be able to utter those words in the face of a revelation of what that
would cost. To recon on the cost is to bring something authentic in the response.
The cost for both Jesus and Isaiah was ultimate. Jesus
was crucified and Church legend says that Isaiah was sawed in half. Isaiah
was sent to do what? To speak a word that would pronounce judgment on Israel
in which they are fixed even to this day – you will find the word in
the latter part of Isaiah six. Speak this so that their ears will be closed,
so that they can not hear, can not believe, can not be saved. His word was
a word of judgment. Israel still languishes under that judgment, spoken by
the man who was sent. Jesus was sent for the purpose of judgment also, to
bear it himself. It is no light thing to be a sent one. Maybe that is why
we prefer initiating our own activity, because the consequence for us in that
would be less than that borne by those who are sent. If you are going to be
sent, brace yourself. There is going to be a weight, a responsibility and
a consequence that will not be pleasing but will be glorious.
To repeat: Isaiah had just been devastated by a revelation of the true character
of God, a man who knew God already, learned how little he really apprehended
and knew God. In that devastation there is a transformation of nature, there
is something added to or coming into him. When he says, in the light of that
revelation, here am I, send me, that was a revelation of an absolute requirement
unto death. He knew that it actually took God to go for God. Unless God had
been formed on the inside of Isaiah, unless he was an incarnation phenomenon
himself, he could not have said, in that kind of spirit and in the face of
that kind of revelation, “here am I, send me”. The reason that we
see so many that are ready to initiate their own sending is because it has
its benefits and that kind of thing, but the cost of a true sending is something
that man could never take upon himself. It is more than just a coal on the
lips to purge him. There was an impartation in the revelation, in that devastation,
that was also a coming into life. There was the killing and the make alive
at the same time.
One can assume that if one is sent there is an enablement imparted for the
fulfillment of that sending, which is character and life of God. It takes
God to love God and it takes God to go for God. It takes God to serve God.
Sent from God, it is his own nature being mediated. Sent from God is to be
sent with God.
Think of the sending of the child Samuel. He is called by name three times,
thinking that it was the old man bidding him and he ran to him each time.
Eli at last said unto him, if you hear it again, it is not me, it is God.
Samuel heard the voice once more and responded, yes, thy servant heareth.
Then God gives him a statement of judgment that is to come upon Israel, to
come upon Eli himself and his house. When the old man wakens and he knows
that Samuel has had a visitation, he asks: “What did the Lord tell you?”
The first expression of Samuel’s prophetic call is to speak words of
judgment. It is stated, because Samuel did not withhold the words of the Lord,
God did not allow his words to fall. So a prophet had come to Israel with
the obedience of speaking the sent thing though it was a word of judgment.
This sending is not a light thing, it is costly, it requires God. But it is
at the heart of reality itself, of which Jesus is the first expression.
My first message on this subject – the issue of contemporary worship
– was delivered in a Brooklyn church, quoting from Oswald Chambers where
he said: “Those times, the times of felt presence of God, that is holy,
holy, holy and transcendent are the gift of God entirely. You can not give
them to yourself when you choose.” You can not fabricate this, you can
not create humanly from below an atmosphere of that kind. It is a gift that
comes down from above. The whole issue of the church and its priestly call
is to recognize that every good and perfect thing comes down from above, and
the ability and patience to wait for it, and that when it is received it is
received with gratitude as a gift and even as a mercy.
We are told that our destiny toward Israel and the Jew
is to extend mercy that they may obtain mercy. Unless we are daily –
and Sunday by Sunday – recognizing that what comes down to us is from
above as a gift and a mercy that evokes our gratitude, how shall we have a
mercy to send and to extend. Every Sunday, there is an issue propounded before
the Church to grow in its apostolic awareness and its reality, its gratitude
for the gift that has come down from the throne, even of the sense of God’s
presence and the ability to worship, for which there is a thankfulness, a
gratitude and a praise and a recognition that everything that has come down
is purest mercy.
The whole issue of the church, its reality, its knowledge of God is the recognition
of what comes down from the throne, what man can not order – you can
not give it to yourself when you choose. When it comes, it is a gift of God
from the throne, for which we need to express gratitude. The very elements
that are constituent in the Church, that is the Church, is every Sunday an
issue over the question of worship. But if the worship that we perform has
its origin from below, and just at the command at a platform then we are cut
off the source of the renewal of that reality that is at the heart of what
is apostolic.
I am speaking this into a church whose pastor is called
an apostle. The message went over like lead. I am even looking at them squirming
in their seats, while at the same time people are standing up in different
places in the congregation spontaneously – “What are we hearing?
This is truth.” While that was taking place, the pastor himself with
his wife were greatly uncomfortable. It was challenging the whole structure
of a church predicated on a kind of worship that does not look to the throne
or wait for that which comes down from above as sent, but has its origin from
the platform itself by man. The churches are under obligation to present a
certain environment conducive to the enjoyment of men, because they are filled
up every Sunday with hundreds of people whose daily life is essentially God-less,
God-rejecting or indifferent. They come dulled by a week of indifference toward
God needing a fix of an emotional or soulish kind for which men can not afford
to wait. Something is fabricated from the platform for that emotional need
and they cut off the prospect of God’s sending. When God’s Spirit
sees that he has been pre-empted and that men themselves are taking the initiative,
who do not believe that every good and perfect thing must come down from above,
he draws back. That dove retreats. He will not compete with men, he just recedes
and lets man do his thing. Every week something is going forth from below,
rather than from above. We are loosing the vital connection and awareness
of that which is at the root of what is apostolic – even while we are
taking to ourselves the title.
What is so tragic is that Paul tells us in Romans 10, “How then shall
they call on him in whom they have not believed? and how shall they believe
in him whom they have not heard? and how shall they hear without a preacher?
and how shall they preach, except they be sent? . . .So belief cometh of hearing,
and hearing by the word of Christ.” What Israel is really waiting for,
unbeknownst to itself, is a sent word because the apostolic word is more than
information. The apostolic word is an event, the apostolic word creates faith
where it did not exist because it comes down from above. The church that is
forfeiting its apostolic reality and identity by performing from below what
must come down from above looses that possibility. There is a tragedy in the
failure to recognize that the nexus of what is apostolic is the word sent
– from above.
To find and partake of this in churches is not a frequent
experience, it is extremely rare. When it comes, you know it. It is ethereal,
it affects you. It is something transcendent, it is God himself being honored
and blessed. It is not something predicated by men for men, called worship.
Worship has become the name of the game. The church which is performing the
best worship is where people will go for their enjoyment – but the word
perform indicates where its origin is.
All of this ill and loss of apostolic reality, even as the word apostolic
is being commended and men taking it to themselves is in proportion to the
loss of the sense of the pre-incarnate life of Christ with the Father before
his coming, and that the issue of his coming was the issue of sending. The
issue of sending is the issue of apostolos – sent one, that every good
and perfect thing comes down from above. Sending from above is at the heart
of our faith. That is what Jesus represented in his coming as a sent one to
fulfill the tasks of messiahship for atonement. But we have lost the sense
and we have cut off the connection. When we initiate from below, God draws
back.
By this I am giving you the key constituent elements of
what is apostolic. A waiting for what originates from the throne as it is
sent. Because it comes down from above and is pure and holy there is a gratitude
for the gift of it, which is purest mercy because we are totally undeserving.
That gift evokes worship, that recognition is praise and worship. If this
is cut off by religious activity by men, we have no mercy to extend. And yet,
in the economy of God, the principal function of the Church in the last days
is to extend mercy that they may obtain mercy. If we ourselves are not obtaining
mercy, Sunday by Sunday, in what issues from the throne as we wait, how shall
we have a mercy to give? If we loose the apostolic connection of reality,
what kind of word can we proclaim for which they wait? We have cut off the
whole foundational premise of the faith and the Jew, therefore, suffers that
deficit and his restoration and the nation is set at abeyance by our failure
– which is exactly where we stand today.
If Isaiah required an enablement to be a sent one, what
do we require in order to worship God? In Spirit and in truth! If he does
not send that ability, what is the character of our worship that issues out
from our own humanity as the issue of music? That we have to pump, that we
have to fan is presumptuous and puts an undue emphasis on man and a disregard
for God as God. What kind of church are we, that has merchandised in God and
take such liberties in our attitude? What are we conveying when we convey
but a cheapened and a depreciated God, whom we have robbed of his autonomy
as the source of everything? We think that we can duplicate and act out of
ourselves to create something of a kind even acceptable to him. Our condition
is so poor that it is acceptable to us. Worship in the impure form pleases
man, like a pep-rally or a drug fix. Worship in purity pleases God, without
wanting anything back.
In a high moment during a recent trip to Africa, I was assigned to be the
speaker at the Prayer for Africa day in Cameroon. It was supposed to begin
at two o’clock but did not commence until five in the typical African
fashion. They had a bunch of ministers, each coming up on the platform having
a shot at it to knock the ball out of the park – no one succeeding. And
a musical group on the platform that was deafening. The loudspeakers were
overwhelming and the crowd was being whipped up. It was getting dark, and
I went up to the leader of the prayer time. I said, “I want to withdraw
myself as a speaker. The atmosphere that you have created is not amenable
to the prophetic word that I have for the continent.” He stammered and
wanted me to say something little to the people. I went up and said, “I
had a word from the Lord to Africa on this prayer day, but the atmosphere
to which you have given yourself is totally inhospitable to this prophetic
word. I can not speak it.” And I walked off the platform. That happens
more often then we know. My greatest discouragements and repression has come
in conflict with worship groups and worship leaders. I have a word pulsating
waiting to be delivered, but the atmosphere created by the so called worship
is inimical and opposed to that word that I can not bring it.
I remember one particular instance. The Lord was quickening something on the
millennial glory – I had never spoken on it. It was such an ethereal
a kind of word that you had to have a setting that is conducive. But by the
time the guy finished I could not speak it. I had to bring something other
and less. The worship ironically rather than inducing a word inhibits it,
and there is even a kind of rivalry of with whom the action really is –
the bearer of the word or the leader of the worship.
This priestly waiting on him is predicated on a profound respect and acknowledgment
is at the heart and foundation of the Church. It is here that the whole game
is won or lost if we forfeit this reality of what is sent and start fabricating
our own, what shall we have to give?
We talk about what comes down as gift, but how does it come down? And what
does the gift that comes down from above reveal about him who is the gift-giver?
When Jesus broke bread, dipped and gave a morsel, they not only received from
the hand of Jesus, but there is something in the operation of the gift as
it is being given that enhances an appreciation for the one who is breaking
the bread. It is not just that we receive the gift – we are so American,
we want the benefit – but what is revealed in what God gives as a gift-giver
and the manner in which he gives it, how much is that a revelation of the
character, the personality of God himself that we loose when we forfeit and
will not wait for the gift that comes from the giver. We loose both the gift
and the nature of the giver by which our knowledge of God would grow as we
wait in a priestly way for this remarkable phenomenon, because we are absolutely
determined that every good and perfect thing must come down from above –
all the more, when you think that Heaven is the headquarters of reality. Heaven
is not some governmental place, though it is the government of creation, but
it is the issue of reality itself. It is God at his throne, that is at the
heart of everything. What measure of reality do we have if we forfeit that?
There is so much more than I can begin to touch in what
is at issue in our failure to wait and to receive. The want for reality is
the ground for every psychic disorder, every kind of physical disorder. We
have congregations of the sick and the unhappy and the broken marriages and
everything that results, waiting then for some visiting speaker who is going
to bring a magic that will alleviate our ill and heal us. This because the
atmosphere itself is not conducive to health, it is not reality, it is a man-created
environment that has got to breed the kinds of psychic, mental, physical disorders
and social disorder that we see in the church as common as we see it in the
world. God is health, God is sanity, God is reality. He is worth waiting for.
Our impatience is the antithesis of priestliness. We are governed by our own
need and want to fill the silence. We have allowed people to live in a casual,
indifferent attitude towards God through the week, coming Sunday morning for
their fix. If you do not provide it, they will go out and find it in another
place that will. Their finance and their tithes are lost.
In the church where I was speaking this for the first time, the poor pastor
cringing in his seat – when I had finished he made reference to their
7.5 million dollar building fund. They wanted to put some kind of school,
and this is what occupies him. In the deeps is the issue of finance –
people in their seats, likewise, occupied with the issue of giving. Something
to please and satisfy them so that they remain and that they give, that the
program will be fulfilled, that the building will go up and on the sign the
name of the man as not only pastor but as apostle, while the whole issue of
what is apostolic is itself contradicted and lost. That is the tragedy.
Regarding the sending of Jesus it is written: “When the fullness of the
time came, God sent forth his Son.” Even the Father waited for the appropriate
moment in his own wisdom for that sending. The Father himself in his nature
is priestly. The Son is the High Priest as well as the apostle of our confession.
If God can wait, why can we not wait? If we will not wait, we are going to
find ourselves being visited by those who have sent themselves. Paul warns
us in 2 Corintians 11, “Such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming
themselves into apostles of Christ. And no marvel; for even Satan transforms
himself into an angel of light. It is no great thing therefore if his ministers
also fashion themselves as ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be
according to their works.”
The last days are going to be a harvest of false prophets.
One of the things that the Lord applauds in one of the churches in the book
of Revelation, is their ability to see those men who say that they are apostles,
and they are not. False apostles and false prophets will characterize the
last days in an age of deception, when people are not schooled in a priestly
disposition to wait and to discern and that there are vacuums to be filled
into which men will rush. If they can create worship, what else will they
not also establish out of their own religiosity that is false? The whole Church
then fails to be what it must, its witness to the Jew waits and it is a tragic
situation for the want of priestly disposition.
To repeat what Chambers said: “The times are the gift of God entirely.
You can not give them to yourself as you choose.” Not only that you can
not, but that you should not. You should not choose to give them to yourself.
When God gives it, it is in his time as was also the sending of his Son. His
time is perfect. We ought to desire to wait for it, and not choose to present
our own alternative. We ought not to choose it, let alone to produce it, or
we will get the false thing or the unreality that pervades the Church and
the world today.
This is all a part of a paradox, that there are times when you command your
soul to ‘bless the Lord, oh my soul’ and you do not wait. That is
something that must come from our own will. This is not in opposition to the
theme of God and the basic, apostolic nature of things that requires priestly
waiting and total dependence of what comes from above. We need to discern
when we should. . . And even in those things God gives us the incentive to
assert our will and praise. This is a part of the tension of being a saint.
One of the things that we see reiterated in the Psalms over and over is the
psalmist crying out: “How long, oh Lord”. They are crying for a
deliverance that can only come from God when God will. But by every reckoning
it is a deliverance that should have taken place long before, because the
psalmist or the nation is suffering judgment and ridicule of its enemies and
every kind of thing that contradicts even the reputation of God to deliver
his own. When the psalmist is crying out ‘How long, Lord’, he is
not only crying out for his own deliverance, he is crying out for God to honor
his own name – and to be to his sons what he ought. How often do we see
that, indicating that God is not at our fingertips and to become endeared
at our will because we see an urgency that we think he needs to meet now?
If he is not meeting it now, we should have the confidence in his great sovereignty,
majesty and love that there are purposes being served that will defer his
action and we can afford to wait however painful that waiting is in that condition.
This is sonship, this is at the heart of maturity.
God never intended us to be isolates, who are struggling this out by our selves.
In fact, the issue of one who will be sent to preach the word, in the hearing
of which Israel will be saved is not just the issue of the individual being
sent but the individual being sent from a sending body. That is why that message
was to a church, being called to apostolic reality that they might be a sending
body out of which men can be sent to proclaim the word – which was exactly
the fist sending in the history of the Church, out of Antioch in Acts 13.
Paul is addressing a congregation and in Acts 13 we see how divers that congregation
is. Black and white, Jew and Gentile, Cyrene, Mediterranian, the whole motley
mix of all of the elements that composed that piece of the ancient world.
But when they were found worshipping together, without an overhead projector,
in their differences, in the ethnic and racial differences of the world around
them made for conflict, they were at a place where they could worship God
together. When the Holy Spirit saw that, he said: “Separate unto me.”
He named the two men who would reflect this heavenly reality that had come
to the mix of the world and bring it into the ancient world that men might
know that there is a way of peace – that these men represented that reality
that had come to Antioch and was reflected in their worship. Their worship
was not a technique. Their worship was not a methodology. Their worship was
the statement of a reality to which they had come, of a Heavenly kind that
mirrors and reflects the reality of the Godhead himself, Father, Son and Holy
Spirit in a cordial and self-deferring love one with another, had come to
men on Earth in their racial and ethnic differences. Out of that body can
one be sent.
That is the first historic record of a sending. In fact,
Saul becomes Paul in that being sent. Saul becomes an apostle who is a teacher
until the sending. The sending is the coming forth of a new quality of reality,
but it had to come out of a body that God can address. “When they had
laid hands upon them, having prayed and fasted. . . they were sent forth by
the Holy Spirit.” God equates the laying on of the hands of men as the
sending of the Holy Spirit. What kind of power and authority did they have?
These are they that turned the world up-side-down. There was something in
that sending, that in being sent something of the sender is imparted as enablement,
because the purpose for which you are sent is beyond your human ability to
perform whether it is worship or apostolic service.
The sending itself by God, because it has its origin in Heaven, sets in motion
a new quality of reality called apostolicity that has a power to penetrate
and turn the world up-side-down, because the world in its present configuration
is up-side-down and needs to be rectified and set right. It needs to be brought
into an awareness of a heavenly alternative to an earthly hell by men who
are sent, who bear that reality and have it in themselves. They not only bear
the message, they are the thing in themselves. And they have come to it in
the environment of an apostolic kind that is priestly and that waits. Nothing
is told us about the church at Antioch, only that out of Antioch comes the
first apostolic sending - all the more because of its diversity. When you
dwell upon it, you can imagine the investment of God in bringing them to the
reality for which he had waited. That same God is waiting still. . . The pity
is that the word apostolic has now become popular and fraudulent men who have
no right to the claim, and have appointed themselves such, transforming themselves
into ministers of light, are now circulating and are setting up entire districts
by which they establish other luminaries to be the minister of this or the
minister of that, that the whole world is being sliced up and partitioned
by men who think that they are apostles – but are not sent. . .
We are reaping a judgment for our failure to jealously guard the great words
and to wait for that which can only come down from above. I know some of these
men personally. I have been on the platform with them. I know what they are
made of and where they are coming from. They are not the real thing.
Looking for such a church, and trying to find it, is not the point and the
issue, but being one, being it. “Where two or three are gathered in my
Name, there am I in the midst.” You start with who you are and what you
have at hand. The little nucleus, yourself and your wife and the one guy that
stuck it out with you – then just trust as God adds. “He added to
the church daily those that were saved.” Let the Lord find a nucleus
of authenticity, of priestly waiting, then trust and let him add. Do not be
numbers conscious. It may well be that the church in the last days will be
hardly anything more than little conglomerates of saints of this kind that
are waiting and are obedient. I do not know how numerous the church at Antioch
was. In fact, we might well suspect that where the churches are increased
in numbers there the reality is least to be found or even to be expected,
because numbers themselves are inimical to the reality that we are talking
about – which requires intimacy, relationship, honesty, speaking the
truth in love, confronting one another, reproof, correction. How do you do
that when you have a congregation of hundreds or thousands who are anonymous,
with no personal identity or relation to the other? What kind of communion
are they taking when they hold a little plastic cup, waiting for the command
to drink together? Communion means together. Can you have it when you are
lost in a large crowd? People even prefer that anonymity.
Paul says, When you come together, each one has a tongue or an interpretation,
a prophecy, a revelation, a hymn. Paul could leave the congregations that
were initiated through his evangelistic activity, come back two years later
and they were still there. Not only were they there, but they were flourishing
and they had grown because each one had something to share. There was an opportunity
to interact and to receive the benefit of the Spirit of God moving through
the different ones and the gifts that had been imparted. Paul only recognized
upon whom the mantle of authority had fallen and just set him in before the
congregation in a way in which they themselves had recognized that such a
one was called to be an elder in a place of authority. That was the original
pattern. We are so removed from that and have to find our way back.
In the absence of any existence of such reality you may
yourselves have to be it. And as I often encourage people; remain in the larger
church. But it is not your church, it is your field of ministry. It is your
mission field, to be a witness in that place. Your church, the place where
you share the Lord’s table, where you receive counsel or reproof and
intimate fellowship is the church. You have to distinguish between the church
and the place of ministry, which is the mission field, which the larger congregation
itself. It is a lonely call, but this reality has got to be found.
There is no apostolicity without priestliness. The Son of God, Jesus, is the
High Priest and the apostle of our confession. His priestliness had its origin
before his earthly career. It was already something that was the issue of
his identity with the Father in his pre-incarnate life. His servanthood as
priest was something made manifest in the Earth, but the origin and the reality
was with him in his eternal identity as the Son with the Father before he
came to Earth. We need to take this into our deepest consideration and recognize
what that sending represented. It was the revelation of God in his mercy and
his love at great cost to himself and to the Son, but to our great benefit.
Items produced in public settings, available by Art Katz:
Sent from God, 6 pages
And They Crucified Him, 12 pages
David’s Cry for Mercy, 13 pages
A Priesthood Made Ready for the Future, 16 pages
A Man in Whom the Spirit of God Is, 17 pages
The Conflict of two Wisdoms, 24 pages
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Subject: Katz The Apostolicity of Incarnation
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