“What is crooked cannot be made straight …” (Ecc. 1:15, NKJV)
If the previous teaching did not take your breath away, you did not understand the full extent of its implications. We are currently busy explaining how the spirit of the antichrist brings forth the spirit of perversion, and an entire religious system, which stands against the “gospel of Christ” (Rom 1:16).
The natural man (even though he may be religious, even born again, but without spiritual way of thinking – see 1 Cor. 2:14-15) is always looking for something physical, tangible. An idolatrous nation always seeks a sign (Matt. 12:39; 16:4). With the passing of time this tendency became manifested in a wide variety of traditions, rites, ordinances, cathechisms, methods, institutions, actions, programs, customs, etc, that all witness of to the fact that our thoughts have been corrupted, are removed “from the simplicity in the Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3, ACV) and thus from “the spirit of Christ”. It has become such common practice that it is impossible to think of a church devoid of such trappings. In generation after generation this is the ‘spiritual’ thought climate people grow accustomed to; they know no other way. They do not understand that Christ is head of the church (Eph. 5:23)!
There is another very important aspect of 1 Pet. 1:10-11 which we have not yet discussed: “Of this salvation the prophets have inquired and searched carefully, who prophesied of the grace that would come to you, searching what, or what manner of time, the Spirit of Christ who was in them was indicating when He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow.”
2 Pet 1:2 states: “Grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.” The obvious question is thus that one can understand that peace increases, but how does grace increase? God’s grace is all-encompassing, “otherwise grace is no more grace” (Rom. 11:16, ASV). We do however know that despite the fact that there is “manifold grace” (1 Pet. 4:10), we can still “fall short of the grace of God” (Heb. 12:15). In Jude 1:4 we are warned to not “turn the grace of our God into lewdness”. If this happens we can lose grace completely, as was the case with Esau – “For ye know that, afterwards when he wished to inherit the blessing, he was rejected; for he found not a place for repentance, although he sought it with tears.” (Heb. 12:17, Murdock).
But 1 Pet 1:10-11 states that the grace that is destined for us, “the grace meant for you” (Lexham English Bible), “the grace that should come unto you” (Modern Spelling Tyndale/ Coverdale Bible), “the grace which was to be given to you” (Murdock), is grace that is concerned with predestination, and this comes to the fore only in the third dimension. There is thus a particular type of grace for the first dimension; another type of grace for the second dimension; and a completely different type of grace for the third dimension. In this light it is then clear why 1 Pet. 1:13 explains that there is a grace “that is to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ”. In the three dimensions the different types of grace thus function as follows:
- First dimension: Grace for salvation – Eph. 2:8-9: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”
- Second dimension: Grace for hearing the voice of God and for uniting it with faith (Heb. 11:6), and for the practice of the gifts of God, the gifts of Christ and the gifts of the Spirit. This is an entirely different kind of grace, which is not at all concerned with salvation.
- Third dimension: Grace to understand the mysteries of the third dimension once the veils of the first and second dimensions have been removed (2 Cor. 4:3-4), the veils/coverings that are destroyed in Christ (2 Cor. 2:14). Therefore Paul makes it clear in Gal. 1:6-7: “I marvel that you are turning away so soon from Him who called you in the grace of Christ, to a different gospel, which is not another; but there are some who trouble you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ.”
The revelation of the Christ is only given through God (Matt. 16:17), and we are thus called “unto his eternal glory in Christ”. Although we know that this is based on “the foreknowledge of God the Father” (1 Pet. 2:1) our prophetic examining and research (1 Pet. 1:10-11) thereof are the prerequisites for the revelation! The kingdom of God must be taken by force (Matt. 11:12). “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.” (Matt. 7:7-8).
Remember – we are still discussing the spirit of perversion, literally the spirit that renders things crooked. Therefore Deut. 32:5 is very insightful: “They have corrupted themselves; they are not His children, because of their blemish: a perverse and crooked generation.” Remember that the New Testament offered two references about this grouping that is part of the Babylonian church system, and that they were referred to as blemishes. We can thus see that even in the Old Testament believers were rendered “crooked” by the spirit of perversion.
One can then understand the words of Ecc. 1:15: “What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be numbered”, and you can also understand why Jesus then says to the believers of his day, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you?” (Matt. 17:17). And Paul’s harsh reprimanding words to Elymas in Acts 13:10: “O full of all deceit and all fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease perverting the straight ways of the Lord?” As all things concerning the gospel of glory is not merely simple and obvious, the spirit of perversity then brings about 2 Pet. 3:16: “speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which untaught and unstable people twist to their own destruction, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures”.
The crux is that this spirit wants to “pervert the gospel of Christ” (Gal. 1:7). A call is made to the Bride as remnant: “that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world” (Phil. 2:15). The Bride’s mandate is to bring this spirit to the light, and to manifest the task Jesus assigned to us in Luke 3:5 –“ Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill brought low; the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough ways smooth.” The next teaching will start detailing these crooked traditions.
- Selah: Ask the Holy Spirit to take you to the street called Straight (Acts 9:11).
- Read: 1-4
- Memorise: 1:31
