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Articles 2014-2017
According to Isaiah’s prophecy, Israel’s Messiah, the Servant of the Lord would act wisely and prosper. And He did indeed act wiser than any man ever had; He lived in perfect harmony with His Father (John 5:19). And though He would be exalted above all others, He would first go through great suffering. As a result of His anguish He would sprinkle many nations with His blood. The Good News was that God did not send His Son simply for Israel’s sake; He sent Him to Israel for the sake of the whole world. And unlike the ceremonial purification effected through the blood of animals in Moses’ day, the Calvary event released Heaven’s powerful cleansing from sin for men and women all over the face of the earth. Clearly, Isaiah Chapter 53 reveals God’s heart for the whole world.
And this particular chapter concludes with the King making intercession. He not only interceded from the cross for the specific ones crucifying Him, He ascended back into heaven to make intercession for all who would draw near to God through Him (Hebrews 7:25). These would not only be the ones who presently believed but also all who were yet to repent and draw near in the future. And today, as He presently makes intercession, His people are to listen and learn to declare on earth what He is saying in heaven. The result will be that our God will express His spiritual authority among the nations through a people on their knees. In other words, our calling is to participate with Him in His project to change people’s lives and even the face of the whole earth through His role as Heaven’s Great High Priest.
Even as the voice of the Good Shepherd is heard through the accurate ministry of New Testament shepherds/pastors, His voice as the Great High Priest is heard through a priesthood praying accurately what is on His heart. But it takes time with Him to discern His voice, His timing, and His attitude of heart concerning His present work and human need.
Throughout his ministry as a Bible teacher, my Dad (Dale Rumble) generally spoke with a two-pronged emphasis: 1) body, soul, and spirit and 2) the house of God. But notice the apostle Peter’s words.
you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
(1Peter 2:5 NAS)
Teaching about God’s house was foundational for us to take the next step. His work of building His house has been to establish in it His holy priesthood so that proper sacrifices would then ascend before Him. One of the priestly offerings that the apostle Paul in his own lifetime wanted to bring before God was the offering of multitudes of people from the nations as an acceptable sacrifice.
and the more boldly I did write to you, brethren, in part, as putting you in mind, because of the grace that is given to me by God, for my being a servant[45] of Jesus Christ to the nations, acting as priest[46] in the good news of God, that the offering up of the nations may become acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit.
(Romans 15:15 - 16, Young’s Literal Translation)
Either Jesus died for the nations, for the whole world, or not. If so, then Heaven’s priests must carry in our hearts the same motivation. To be honest – I have a difficult time offering up to Him my dinner fork! How can I possibly walk in such a way that I carry in my songs and prayers the destinies of nations?
But clearly, Paul understood that the present success of Christ’s kingdom would be rooted in a properly functioning priestly ministry. Like him, our preaching of the gospel must be an extension of our priestly function in God’s house. I believe that the Lord is going to bring us instruction on being His holy priesthood for many years to come. Change is coming to our corporate worship experience. New dimensions of spiritual authority will be revealed as we come together in worship and prayer. And many among the nations will change in their courses of direction.
Because of Calvary, God’s kingdom is emerging on earth. Isaiah Chapter 53 expresses the biblical foundation for this truth. The prophet first lays out the vision of the cross and the resulting activity of Heaven in sprinkling Jesus’ blood on the nations. Then in Chapter 54 he reveals the promise that God’s international work will expand massively across the whole earth. The spiritually barren nations of the earth can now rejoice because God is bringing to birth among them multitudes of His children. And this strategy will not only survive, it will defeat every weapon fashioned against it; God himself will vindicate His people.
If our thoughts on Isaiah Chapters 53 and 54 are correct, then Chapter 55 will give us insight into the Good News that Paul and the other apostles preached in the Book of Acts. Spoken by Isaiah, these words bring us a prophet’s perspective on the gospel God promised to release one day among the nations (Romans 1:1 - 6).
Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
I can envision Paul proclaiming these words to Jews and Gentiles alike nearly two thousand years ago.
When people have no money, they know it. They do not need others to tell them that they are broke. Paul’s gospel was for those who recognized their bankruptcy, their spiritual lack. “You who know that there is a hole in your life, that something is missing, come and buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Of course, one of God’s greatest gifts to anyone is to let that person see his own spiritual impoverishment.
The Good News is God’s offer of what is priceless. What price, what value could man put on the truth that God had become a man, took the sins of the whole world into himself thus becoming sin (2 Corinthians 5:21), and then died breaking its power? Not only that, He then ascended back to heaven and sprinkled His blood upon the nations of the earth releasing Heaven’s cleansing power for even the vilest of sinners! Paul had Good News indeed for the people of Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica, etc.
But how does one buy what is priceless? Very simply, we must give our all; God’s kingdom costs everything. We cannot have one foot in, the other one outside, and then think that we are kingdom people. In giving ourselves through repentance and baptism, and to a lifetime of being filled with His Spirit, we discover that in our “purchase” we have simply received what He paid for. While it is true that Heaven’s gift costs us everything, all we really have to offer Him in the transaction is our brokenness, our poverty, and our bankruptcy.
So the question arises:
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
Like today, many in Paul’s day were looking for personal fulfillment in career, financial success, or some sort of societal power. But the question transcends time. Why pursue what can never satisfy? Why not face your bankruptcy and receive what will fill the void in your life?
In fact, if they would listen diligently (Hebrew, SHAMA – to hear intelligently and with perception) to the Lord, they would eat what is good. As the listeners gained revelatory insight into their own spiritual condition and God’s solution, they would discover spiritual sustenance for their souls as they responded to what they saw. With that spiritual nourishment would come a sense of purpose, destiny, and fulfillment that money and societal success could never satisfy. The reason is that man was designed to be a habitation for God, and He himself is our spiritual food. Apart from Him the human soul exists in a starved condition.
So what price can be put on Heaven’s solution to mankind’s great need? All the gold in the world cannot pay for what God has offered us. It is so eternally valuable that only He himself could afford it. And so He paid the price.
And notice that the prophet refers to rich food. God does not want us to be spiritually anorexic; He wants us to be robust, prosperous, and enjoying the richness of the nourishment of Heaven.
Incline your ear, and come to me; hear, that your soul may live;
Incline your ear. When someone with a satellite dish wants to receive the proper signal, he has to incline it in the right direction. So also in God’s kingdom, believers must incline our spiritual ears toward Him. Too often though, many simply do not expect Him to speak except sporadically through a preacher, a counselor, or a well-timed book by a Christian author. In other words, they do not really expect a flow of thoughts to surface in their thinking as they wait upon Him in prayer, or that they will gain insights as they meditate prayerfully on a dream they just had.
But we must develop the lifestyle of the inclined ear. While I believe that He is speaking more than we are hearing, my prayer is that He will keep drawing us to the sound of His voice.
and I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.
After articulating the truths of Isaiah Chapter 53, the Lord turned to the barren Gentile nations and promised to extend His kingdom in our midst and to establish among us the covenant He made with David. And starting in the Book of Acts, He began to release among the nations the very same mercy that He had showered on Israel’s greatest Old Testament king.
But David had seemed quite insignificant. His family did not even invite him when the prophet came to anoint the next king of Israel. While I am sure they loved him, they just did not think him relevant to the present situation. “Why invite David? He probably smells like sheep.”
But he was God’s choice. So with oil still running down his face, David went back to the flock and took care of sheep as the mostly unrecognized future king of Israel. Similarly, think of all the years that the Son of David, the unrecognized King of the nations functioned in obscurity as a carpenter. And then think of the Lord’s work among us. For most of us, He did not immediately establish us in a highly visible and recognized ministry. A newly saved computer programmer simply went back to work and kept programming. A schoolteacher kept training his students.
So David just kept looking after sheep. And when a bear or a lion tried to devour some of his flock, he responded in the power of God. Or to put it another way, God revealed himself to His servant as a bear-killer and a lion-killer. As a result, when he came face to face with a nine foot giant, David wondered at the fear permeating the hearts of Saul’s soldiers. For David, the Lord of heaven and earth was with him and would establish him in his destined calling. So he simply walked with God expecting Him to reveal himself as a giant-killer, and as one who drove demons away when he strummed his musical instrument in the presence of king Saul.
And like David, each of us has a destiny called upon our lives. The temptation is to pursue it when what we should do is to love God with all of our hearts and respond to His voice. Rather than chase after visibility, let us pursue intimacy with God and hiddenness before men.[47] And He will reveal himself to us in unique ways that He can then make visible to others if He so chooses. And if He does not, that will be fine with us because being noticed by people was never to be the main point anyway.
Without trying to be the next king, David began to emerge in national visibility simply because God was with him. Of course, prominence brought its own problems. David had done well against lions, bears, and giants but stumbled badly through adultery and murder when seated on Israel’s throne. “Success” itself was the toughest test of all.
When the Lord has fulfilled a promise in our lives, we can tend to let our guard down and think we have arrived somewhere. But we have not. In fact, at that point, we will still be as needful of His mercy and grace as we were when we first started out – maybe even more so.
And so David humbled himself and cried out for God to have mercy on him and to not take from him His Holy Spirit (Psalm 51). And God responded to his servant and continued to be with him as Israel’s king. It is true that David reaped great destruction in his family because of what he had sown. Yet it is also true that God showed him abundant mercy.
Today, every one of us deserves to be cast into hell. But He has instead showered upon us the same mercy that He showed to David. And though our sins have been many, His mercies are new every morning. And they endure forever. Such kindness and forgiveness do not excuse our failures, but reveal that His purpose is not based on what we deserve but on His own holy determination to build His house, to glorify His name, and to fill the earth with His glory. As the Scripture has said, mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13).
As God began to raise him up, David became a threat to the established order, to the political system in Israel. And Saul chased him all over the kingdom trying to kill him. At one point David even fled the country and acted like a mad man in order to save his life. What a humiliating experience.
And we can all identify with this man. Sometimes we go through circumstances, trials, and failures where we wonder if we will ever be meaningfully useful to the Lord. But God was faithful to His servant and established him as the nationally recognized king of Israel because His purpose was based on mercy and not on David’s merit. And since Calvary, that same mercy has been released into the nations of the earth. As a result, Paul could preach this Good News in Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, etc.
Jesus became a threat to the establishment of his day and they killed him. The same was true of Paul. In fact, every kingdom man or woman down through Church history ultimately became a threat to the established order of the day – sometimes political as well as religious.
Through our recent election process, God has placed before this nation a parable of His kingdom. To be clear, I am not saying that Donald Trump is a righteous man. I am simply not going to comment on his spiritual condition. But what I am saying is that God has given this man to us for at least the next four years, just like He gave us Barack Obama for specific reasons and for a specific season.
But like David, Mr. Trump was considered by many to be nobody of consequence among the presidential hopefuls of the Republican Party. Nobody expected him to go anywhere in the primaries. I remember listening to him in the early debates and thinking, “This guy is not going anywhere.” And though he was a threat to the Republican Party establishment, in the end he triumphed. And everybody was amazed. Then in the general election, he again was the underdog against the establishment – the powers that be in media, education, economics, and politics. He was an absolute underdog and most wrote him off as having no chance. Except that the Lord was raising him up and giving him to this nation. And the onslaught against him increased (some he brought on himself through questionable words and attitudes). But no matter what came against him, instead of self-destructing, he seemed to thrive.
I believe that God has placed before us a parable. Again, I am not saying that Donald Trump is a humble follower of Christ. But like Cyrus the Persian, God has raised him up at this time. God caused Cyrus to succeed in warfare (Isaiah 45:1 - 3) and then used him to shepherd His people home from captivity (Isaiah 44:28, Ezra 1) even though he did not know the Lord (Isaiah 45:4 - 5). And in our own day, something greater than politics has been unfolding before our eyes. God is giving this man to our nation. And the forces arrayed against him picture for us how the enemy will react as God raises up His corporate servant in America. If you want to see what persecution will look like in our nation, the Lord is giving us a glimpse.
The Lord told me a week before the election that Donald Trump would win. So I shared in a couple of churches what I believed He had said to me. I was a little tentative because God had never spoken to me about national elections before – this was a totally new experience for me. Then on the actual day of the election, as I was walking across a city parking lot He spoke to me again and said, “Not only is he going to win but I’m going to release blessing into this nation.” Tears came to my eyes because such a thought was so unexpected. Nationally, our sins are so many and so blatant that one cannot help but notice His judgments on our land. But in the midst of His judgments, I believe that He has heard the cry of many and is remembering mercy.
And I believe that the blessing He is speaking about is more than mere economics. It is bigger than that; some have said that something has shifted in the heavens and that God is arising in spiritual warfare by the power of His Spirit. If these thoughts are true, then His royal priesthood must learn how to pray with redemptive hearts in harmony with Him.
About a year ago one of the prophetic men in our local church said to me that the Lord was going to give us a short reprieve. Since we were not sure what this word meant, we carried it around in our hearts and just waited on the Lord. Then when the election happened, I sensed that our nation had been given a short reprieve from the direction that we had been headed in. What does that mean? Does “short” mean four years, eight years, a generation? With God a day is like a thousand years and vice versa. Another prophetic man informed me that the Lord had said the same thing to him. He believed that “short” meant four to eight years.
But in the midst of all that is presently happening, let us focus our hearts upon our God and respond with redemptive heart attitudes toward those who are upset and fearful concerning the future. Let us seek His heart for those who think differently than we do.
Our God has a plan. Let us not be reactionary to others but responsive to our Great King. Let us intercede for others and then “wash their feet” with the words He gives us to say.
Donald Rumble – February 2017
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