As we live in the cities we lose our flair. It is common for a city person to be choked by loans, to run around job, to be always in a hurry not to be late; your cell phone – you have to always pick it up, which a sort of “fever”, unhealthy things, we go crazy about that. Having a living place in those “people-heaps”, where people are all around you – above you, under you, before and behind you. They cross the circle of your life – someone else sleeps a meter away from you through the wall, but for your eternal spirit there are no walls; your neighbor may be a mean person, and he sleeps some half meter away from you. This certainly ruins your personality, your life, it kills our sensibility, our eternal quality.
Therefore, it is very important to understand that we must remain people, truly human. This is one of my biggest battles – to remain a heavenly man, to remain a Man with the big letter, a Man of the planet.
Remember in Genesis 11 they wanted to make a name for themselves that could reach heaven. So they built a tower, I don’t know how high it was, but their intention was to make a name for themselves. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were bigger than the biggest sky scrapers in Dubai. But the Lord saw that man was perishing. As he was building this tower he was losing himself. There weren’t many people on earth then. And the Lord comes down to see what they were up to and makes a decision to scatter people over the earth, because the very concept – understand this – to gather everybody together is not God’s design.
Babylon tower is one of the first prototypes of the city. I am quite certain there were living places and rooms, it wasn’t just a piece of rock to climb it as high as possible. After all, it wasn’t the very first city.
Cain was the first to build them – after the murder with a sign on his face he started building cities. He was led by something, wanting to get rescued from that loneliness, abandonment and rejection; to get rescued by means of people – the first anti-depressant. From this absence of God’s presence, this emptiness inside he wanted to get warmed by people. He started building cities in order to hide himself and his pain in people. I realize why he started making musical instruments – so that he could make noise and put out this quiet voice of God. So these two things he started doing – musical instruments and cities. This is very interesting – sounds like arts and architecture, very cool. And people, not knowing the roots of the system, continue moving in this direction.
I don’t think that the city itself is sin. In heaven – God help us to get there – we will be in the heavenly city, the Lord has a city in heaven. There’s also worship, beautiful music pieces, where man has released his genius in music, and there we can feel more than we can say in words. Many people consider music the most powerful way of expression and influence on human emotions.
But Cain made those things with that collecting reflex – when there has to be many people because of the fear of absence of God. This urbanization process has such reasons as natural disasters in the lands, education – when people strive to raise their level and social status; and poverty. Also wars drive people to cities to get closer to one another. This is Cain’s nature – he has to hide from God; God sent him out of Eden, He took away the blessing of the land bringing fruits to him – he now had to work in the sweat of his face to make the land bring fruit. To Eve He said she would give birth in pain and her desire would be to the husband. It implies that it is hard for a woman to live alone, even she is single she needs someone stronger like man, she needs additional resource to stay dependant on the one who is stronger than her. God put this desire in woman, so says the Bible. But today women “hunt”, go all kinds of ways to conquer men through magic things with immorality, complex beauty etc.
Artists say that the most beautiful form in the universe is human body. I agree here, that there’s no more perfect harmony either in stars or ocean, no animal like deer or whale is more beautiful than man – his face, his eyes, the expression of his emotions, his body forms – they are perfect and divine.
With our young people we discuss this topic of contemporary man, what is he like, and one young man who is only nearing to the Lord, said, he wanted to find an adequate young man today. That is a good point as so many young people are inadequate from the point of view of eternity. I wonder what Adam would say about contemporary man with all his technologies. I think he would be very competent and would ask you a couple questions that would make you stuck. You wouldn’t be able to answer them, but those were basic questions for the Man – questions in regard to kindness, mercy, character, patience, sacrifice, love etc. These are the things that will be with us forever, always relevant for man. The greatest demand of man besides food, drink and clothes is love – all people on earth know the language of love and need it most of all.
So Cain was trying to find a way out – he lost God’s presence, he lost his connection with Him and started building cities. And the Lord scattered man over the earth keeping him from perishing, as this Babylon construction was a suicide, global and total suicide of psyche and all the sense, because we walk under God, in the under-heavens. They were practically repeating what Lucifer did – he said, “I shall be lifted up and shall sit in the seat of God”.
Adam and Eve lost the garden of Eden, they sinned, they fell, Eve drew Adam into this, which is a very dark thinking: she realized she had sinned, she saw the dark side of her sexuality, she realized what she had done, her eyes now open to the sin, she loved sin, they had tasted the sweetness of sin. Before sin didn’t exist for them, they were merged into the grace, they were merged into the complete trust to God. He spoke and so was it, they weren’t capable of doubt, they had not this feeling – to expose God’s love to doubt. They were totally pure and faultless inside. When Satan tempted her and led her a different path, to think by ways of doubts and contradictions, he release a new philosophic system. Philosophy altogether is grounded in contradiction, this is why Paul says, “be not carried about by strange doctrines”. So he released this new philosophic system, saying, “did He really say so, let us check it up – does the Bible really say the truth, let us check His promises, His commandments. He was taking her the path that eventually produced atheism, where they eventually reached the point when they rejected the existence of the Creator. That is blasphemy in its peak – to deny the existence of the Creator.
So Eve, after she had sinned, in her corruption, goes straight to tempt. Think about this – she had not this reflex, “just let it be not Adam!” This didn’t work with her. Think that even now if you eat a poisoned piece you shout to your child, “Don’t eat this!” be it even your last words. But she did the opposite: she took the poison and went to her husband and took him the same path. He had no experience of the open eyes, betrayal or apostasy. So she gives him the fruit and the fall together, which is already a collusion, which gives a start to new systems and civilizations of destruction. Two of them together are against God. A new life for humanity begins.
The Lord takes out of what has remained (there were thousands of people by then), of the remnant of light, He take Noah – the man who has kept light inside. He gained the favor of the Lord, and the memory was present – Adam told his stories… I think that Eden – if to speak hypothetically – also scattered over the earth. Today Eden is, it is just not in one place, like pieces of Babylon are here and there all over, and it’s not about geography, but about human history, when certain places of curse flourished. So is Eden bursting into blossom all over the earth, it left the Middle strip of the East.
Today we need to understand who man is, who I am and what I am doing here on earth. What is my higher calling, what is my personal calling, what is the calling of all humanity? And the Lord says: “You are new creation”. He doesn’t say, “you are new man”, but “New creation”. You have to leave the human thing, which is called demonic. Jesus says “You mind the things that be of men” – the Lord calls things of men cursed. Sometimes we may be so human, but that is a godless path. Humanism is the apogee of so to say kindness of man, when they unveiled the humanism system, when man is the focus. They moved God aside, put man in the center and affirmed that man is the main agenda. And this human thing destroys man because it raises hyper ego. It is raised and praised, and the Lord is moved aside.
Today is crucial to know three things: first – what is the global calling on earth. God made man for Himself, and the highest purpose of man on earth is to take pleasure in God. If this is true, even part of it, then what are we doing giving the all of our strength for ourselves? That means we go against the purpose. We don’t have resources because they are not sent on the false ways. I am not talking about money or health, but about the heavenly favor. When you go a false way you go a way of minimum light. The light shines on the right path. If you are a prophetic person you can feel a lack of light, lack of resources, lack of spiritual resource to fulfill God’s will. You may feel that there’s a global chronic weakness, strength is lacking. Why? God has not changed, and of course, the problem is in us, not in Him.
Another thing we need to understand is what are we called to as those who are called in Christ, as those who received God in their hearts. Yes we have forgotten something, yes, we were born with the firstborn sin. But in Christ – what is our major purpose in Him, what is the general calling and personal? This question sounds hard for us, though it’s not a complicated question, but it has become extremely difficult for us today.
What is my personal individual calling in my life in this moment of my life and history? Where am I in the history of Apocalypse and what is my role in the universal harmony that was broken. You know that God made everything perfect, but today we do not see that, we see the destruction of harmony, puzzles don’t come together – we pray, but miss the target; we pray and don’t receive the answer or receive the opposite. This is disharmony, because man built chaos.
And here is the church where people read the Bible, pray to God, but there’s so much distortion, because of lots of selfishness, offence, unforgiveness, fights, envy – this is horrible, because the last bursts of hope in this time are sick and produce smog instead of aroma.
So I am giving you this dimension of a contemporary prophetic person who could be a voice, who could dare say he is a voice, because this is rare, especially for the city churches where people are bound by loans, keep running around anxious not to be late and other things that are mostly useless – if be taken away you would most likely become better. Today many Christian communities are not like the Church of Christ, they are not like God’s fountains of living waters flowing into eternity, where God Himself is smiling, where He is pleased to be. I see this in many places, this total weakness and spiritual poverty is characteristic of the contemporary church. We go out of ourselves to give “powerful testimonies” and exaggerate them. We want to testify of God’s glory, but that is a very high concept – God’s glory, instead we speak of our own works, which aren’t God’s glory at all; and such things are plenty.
This is very serious. I know I will stand before God in the eternity, and all the jokes and games shall be over, and I will have to stand before the reality. And today I am giving you this odor or heavenly perfume, which speaks about the level we should think at, the level we should evaluate the church at, the level we should evaluate our life at. These are three global question we should engage in: what God thinks of man and his purpose on earth with the creation and the planet; who the man of God is on earth with his highest calling, why he is; and you personally – what are you chosen and called for. It is no secret that in many cases people in churches are subject to manipulation and serve interests of the pastor or group mentality, which is often primitive and distorted and is more like slavery than liberation. All this has nothing to do with eternity, but we need to learn to focus on major issues and discern whether we are truly on the general highway.
We give place to grace. Grace is not just undeserved mercy – that’s a very narrow understanding. Grace is also strength, grace is also love, and love is impossible without grace. Grace has glory, we are called into the glory of the grace, because our God is the God of grace. This is what we mean when we speak of empowerment – not with new thoughts or piercing revelations, not even with the power of the gifts, but with something greater, the royal path.
We must lead our congregations into freedom, take them to God, when Christ is sensed as the Head, that we are all under Him, and my greatest desire and hope that this is true – that we are all joined with Christ.
The value of individuality, because individuality is made by God. He made you unique, there’s no one like you. Through your prism, that is your spirit and your soul, He sends light, and when you break this light it comes on earth through you, you send it into people. There’s nothing like your way of sending this ornament – this makes you individuality. This is what religion destroys making people dull and all the same, and they call it unity. Most of the time it is done by manipulation and what is worst of all they use God’s word there.
Church are supposed to be the great sources of hope, and man comes there to be liberated, but he gets into a new kind of community slavery, which is called “Christian duty”.
These are very serious things, and I want to wish to all of us to walk the royal path, which is the path of grace.