Israel, not Jacob!

“But now thus saith the LORD that created thee, O Jacob, and he that formed thee, O Israel, Fear not:  for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name;  thou art mine.” Isaiah 43:1

In the scripture above we see that God is addressing two different kinds of people: Jacob whom He created, and Israel whom He formed. Without going into long drawn-out discussions about the meanings of the words “created” and “formed” here, we at least know that God is more interested with Israel than Jacob because when the angel of the Lord met Jacob on his way back to his fathers’ land, Jacob demanded a blessing from Him, and the Lord told him, “Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel:  for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.” Genesis 32:28.

Henceforth Jacob would be known as Israel. That is of profound significance.

In all His dealings with man God allows the natural to precede the spiritual, and if we are not careful we miss out on the real blessing that God intended for us to have. That is why we who are called by God under the New Testament cannot simply rejoice in the material and physical blessings that God gives us. They come so easily and naturally we are tempted to think they are an end in themselves. On the day I got saved God healed me of a terrible physical illness. It was such a big miracle, and it could still be the highlight of my life with Jesus.

But we must discover the hidden meaning of God’s true calling in our lives. The Apostle Paul talks about a hidden mystery. When we read the Apostles’ epistles we see they did not talk very much about miracles and material blessings, even though they experienced all these. Rather, they spoke about something infinitely more spiritual – the changing of our carnal selves into spiritual, which is a process!

Nor can we rest in the mere act of salvation itself. We cannot underestimate its importance in our lives (eternal life with Jesus), yet the Bible is filled with proof that this is not the end of the matter. For example, in 1 Corinthians 3:15 we read that “If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer loss:  but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.”

Elsewhere in Jude 1:23 we read: “And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire;  hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.”

Paul also talks about “a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day:  and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.”

There are many Christians today who are so worldly-minded that it cannot be said of them that they would love the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ!

Which means that people will be saved all right, but there will be a distinction: while some will enter in triumphantly, yet for others it is as if they will have barely made it.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that God does not want us to remain ‘Jacobs’. Here I mean carnal, or immature Christians. He wants to form us into the image of His spiritual people, “the Israel of God”  -Galatians 6:16. When we speak of “form” we get the impression of people in whose lives God’s hand has worked to bring out something out of something. He works on what He has created to form something new. It is this which He desires to do in our lives. There is a big difference between the simple calling of God and his formative work in our lives.

Hence the revelation of the Cross. It is of utmost importance to us to understand that the apostolic gospel that has come down to us is a revelation. The Apostle Paul (whose mental faculties we cannot fault) says he received the gospel by revelation. Moreover, in Ephesians 3 he implies that all true apostles and prophets in every generation would be men who would have caught the gospel by revelation, a revelation of the Cross. They would understand what it means to be a Christian: it is to offer our bodies as a living sacrifice, that our minds may be renewed (i.e. put far from sin) and that we may conform to the image of Christ. And this will be accomplished by the work of the Cross in our lives.

When you receive the Cross as a ‘Jacob’ (i.e. without revelation) you will understand that Jesus came to die for your sins so you do not go to hell, which is true. But you cannot go beyond that, and soon you will turn to the weak, worldly materialistic gospel which does not have the power to deal with sin. But when you get the revelation of the Cross, which is only found under the true apostolic ministry, you will understand that the Cross came to work in your life also so that your body of sin may suffer and die with Christ, and to rise to the resurrection from the dead in newness of life; and to become a mature son and daughter of God, worthy and capable to inherit that spiritual Kingdom, as we read in Galatians 4:1-7: “Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son;  and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.”

Note the angel’s words to Jacob: “as a prince hast thou power…”! He had fought the good fight and he was worthy!

In other words you become a man or woman who has died to sin. Many people today are praying for the hand of God upon their lives. Behold, the hand of the Lord is the Cross! If we think the hand of the Lord are the worldly blessings He gives us, the healings and all that, we are doomed to spiritual immaturity and carnality. While in Mauritius, I witnessed the death of a man whom the church had prayed for a long time to get healed. I visited him one week before he died, and he was sitting there, weak in body, but strong in faith, in righteousness and holiness. He died triumphantly, and we rejoiced on the day of his burial.

We need to join ourselves with the true gospel of Jesus Christ, Christ crucified. Then we will know, as Paul says in Romans 12, “that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” How can we say we are in the will of God while we are walking in sin? It is simply impossible. We are called to a walk of holiness and purity – of body, soul and spirit: “And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly;  and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Anything beneath that, however flamboyant it might appear, and under whatever name it is called, is carnality!

The Magnificence of God’s Grace

“This is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief. However, for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all longsuffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to everlasting life.” 1 Timothy 1:15-16

My favorite animated movie is Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast”. A once-spoilt, selfish prince was turned into a hideous beast by an enchantress after turning her away from his castle, and only if a beautiful damsel were found to love him would he be set free from this curse. But who could possibly ever love this ugly Beast, and undo the sad fate that had befallen the once-proud prince? The odds seemed irrevocably stacked against him, and he resigned himself into inconsolable despair… until Belle came along.

The real-life version of this fantasy, more than any, is the story of Jesus Christ and the Apostle Paul. As sinners go Paul, once known as Saul, was the worst of them all. Not so much because of what he did, but because of who he did it to. He mercilessly persecuted God’s people, and in the process became God’s foremost enemy. There is no greater sin in the world than to hurt someone for whom Christ’s blood was shed on the Cross. Jesus Himself said it were a far bearable punishment for such a person if a milling stone were tied around their neck and they were thrown into the ocean! Paul deserved the worst possible punishment.

And yet, again, it might well be that Paul received a far greater revelation of how gross his sin (any man’s sin) was before a holy God…. Whatever the case, Paul knew he deserved nothing but the worst form of judgement from God.

But God took this man, His most virulent opponent, and made him his closest ally in revealing the grand plan that His Son Jesus Christ had come to fulfill on earth for the salvation of mankind. Having freely forgiven him of his sins, God transformed him and invested in him all the wisdom of His revelation – Paul knew the Lord Jesus in a way the other apostles did not. God also used him to spread the Good News on a scale none of the others would.

But God would do even more through Paul…

God chose Paul for a very specific reason. By saving this ‘chief’ of sinners God purposed to show the abundance of His mercy to all who would believe on Him. Through the grace that He would bestow upon such a man in freely saving him and cleansing him of his sins, God wanted to make known that He is able and willing to do just that to anyone who comes to Him.

“But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has quickened us together with Christ (by grace you are saved)… that in the ages to come he might show the exceeding riches of his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus.” Eph. 2:4-7

When we think of the word ‘mercy’ we have the idea of this mushy, cuddly, loving, fatherly care and concern coming to us from God. And, indeed, that is the reception we get from Him right from the start. The minute we receive Jesus into our lives, God instantly sets us free from the power of sin, He heals our diseases, and does many other wonderful things to confirm to us that He is indeed our loving, caring Father.

More importantly, He gives us His Holy Spirit who brands this all-important truth onto our hearts.

Many Christians wish – and many more assume – that the story of our salvation should end there, and all we need to do is just hang around and await the rapture. And probably as we are waiting for Jesus to come and take us to Heaven, we could enjoy a bit of life here on earth as the King’s Kids?

In this kind of scenario, the most that we could expect God to bother us with as His sons and daughters would be for Him to assign us a simple task which we could happily fulfill while munching a hamburger. We might even be tempted to contemplate taking on a great responsibility like the one He was about to give Paul through Ananias: “For he a chosen vessel to me, to bear my Name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel” (Acts 9:15), as long as no real suffering is involved. We could get noticed!

The above scenario might have become the happy ending to Paul’s encounter with Jesus were it not for the fateful words that Jesus added as He was giving Ananias instructions concerning Paul: “For I will show him how great things he must suffer for my Name’s sake” (Acts 9:16).

This, and Jesus’ many references to losing our lives painfully brings us to face the truth that the reality of our calling is not so simplistic. In the spiritual kingdom, you cannot have your cake and eat it. We cannot live for both the heavenly and this world.

Jesus’ words to Ananias henceforth shaped the character of Paul’s mission and ministry. Only through the suffering that God put him to would Paul become a vessel of honor to carry the life of Christ wherever he went. God made Paul to understand in his spirit that without the working of the Cross in his life, the life of Christ would not be manifested in him. As Paul allowed the hand of God to mold and shape him through the sufferings he endured, he was able to spread the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Christ – the Good News – throughout the entirety of his ministry.

It is no wonder, therefore, that his letters are replete with references to the Cross of Jesus Christ: but not in the traditional sense that the Cross is understood by many Christians today. The Cross that Paul talks of in his epistles is something beyond Jesus simply dying for our salvation. The revelation of that Cross in our hearts is the power that will bring death to the carnal nature residing in us. And when that carnal nature dies in us, we will bear fruit in the spirit and please God, no matter the nature or size of our ministry to Him. God is not so much interested in what we do as in what we become through the working of the Cross in our lives.

Dying with Jesus (by the power of the Cross) is what we need if we are to become true ambassadors of Christ here on earth. “For the preaching of the Cross… is the power of God” 1 Cor. 1:18.

“But we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumblingblock, and to the Greeks foolishness; but to them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God” vv 23, 24.

It is interesting that, although the apostles did many and mighty miracles during their ministry here on earth, yet nowhere do we see them talking or writing about these things. They wanted to represent something spiritually far more superior, the inner transformation that only the revelation of the Cross can effect in a man. To them, this changed life represented the true power of the gospel.

The Apostle Paul worked miracles, yet he would not boast in that. Rather, he boasted in the grace that enabled him to identify his life with the life of Christ in His sufferings and death: “But God forbid that I should glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world.” Gal.6:14

Jesus was not simply a mighty man of signs and wonders. He was, in the final analysis, “the bread that came down from heaven.” He did miracles all right, but in Himself He carried something infinitely more important which He desired to give to mortal man: the very life and nature of God. He did that by dying on the Cross.

Man also would only be able to appropriate this new, Godly nature by dying to the old, carnal nature through the Cross. 

Miracles do not make us spiritual. Nor does material or physical well-being. The Cross, working in us, does. That is what God meant when he told Ananias: “For I will show him (Paul) how great things he must suffer for my Name’s sake.”

Many preachers who work miracles today will be rejected by Jesus at His return simply because they did not allow their lives to be touched and transformed by the mighty hand of God. They did not align their lives with the Cross of Jesus in the spiritual sense, where their lives, crushed by the Cross, would unveil the riches of Christ to a spiritually dying world. They did not allow the Cross to deal with their pride, the lusts of their flesh, their idolatry, etc. On the contrary, these preachers gloated in the miracles that God would do through them and they became proud, vain men. Their very lives would testify to that: “By their fruits you shall know them” Mat. 7:10

The power of God’s grace in the life of Paul is summarized in his own words to Timothy: “But you have fully known my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, charity, patience, persecutions, afflictions…” (1 Tim. 1:16). The power of the gospel brings this kind of lifestyle and fruit in a Christian’s life.

I am blessed to be a member of CTMI where the undiluted revelation of the message of the Cross, the power of God, is preached and lived, wherever this gospel has been proclaimed. Along with hundreds of other pastors in so many countries, I know that I am also a direct beneficiary of God’s powerful, magnificent, and matchless grace.

A Merry Christmas to all who visit this blog! May God’s grace warm your hearts during this holiday season.