Cities of Refuge | Part 4

There are six refugee cities we will be discussing, but I need to review before we move on, so that we understand the journey of the resurrected Christ Jesus reclaiming land rights that the enemy had stolen. We are responsible for following the same path we're supposed to be following Jesus. 

Well, one of the journeys, as I mentioned before, is when He went to the cross and was resurrected. He had told Mary and the disciples at the last supper that He would see them in Galilee before the cross. The disciples and Mary are in Jerusalem for Passover, but Jesus tells them He will see them again in Galilee. He repeats this message to Mary as the resurrected Christ at the empty tomb. The shortest route to that area from Jerusalem was a three-day journey. If they had stayed in Jerusalem, they would have missed His appearing. This is a moment to pause and ask yourself, has Jesus told you where He would see you again?

After Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, the Spirit of the Lord rose upon Him. John the Baptist heard the voice of God say, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the enemy of God or an antichrist spirit for 40 days. Jesus fasted during this time, and afterward the scriptures tell us in Luke 4 that he wasn't hungry till after the 40 days were over. “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them, he was hungry” (Luke 4:1-2 NIV).

I propose that we consider that fasting is also about the words of our thoughts, not just about food for the physical body. “Do not eat the bread of a miser, nor desire his delicacies;
For as he thinks in his heart, so is he. “Eat and drink!” he says to you, but his heart is not with you. The morsel you have eaten, you will vomit up and waste your pleasant words” (Proverbs 23: 6-8 NKJV).

What I want to do is make a little shift here: keep in mind that Jesus, God, has just had the anointing placed upon Him after the baptism. Now, according to John the Baptist, Jesus didn't really need to be baptized, but He had to go through it all for our sake. When the Spirit of the Lord came upon Him, it was the experience of John 3:16 being unveiled in Him. 

Well, why would Jesus need to have the Spirit upon Him, being born again, coming out of a baptism? Jesus had not sinned, and He was already the Son of God. What was all of that about? 

The reason it had to be fulfilled is that, afterward, when He went into the wilderness, the 40 days there fulfilled the 40 days of the wilderness of coming out of Egypt for Moses and all the children of God who were in slavery. Scripture tells us that Moses went up on a mountain for forty days with the Lord, not eating bread or drinking water (Exodus 34:28 NKJV).

The journey to the promised land was not meant to take 40 years but 40 days. Instead, it took Moses and the children of Israel 40 years traveling through wilderness territory because of the cleansing they needed to go through, circumcising their hearts to get Egypt out of their spirit and soul after four hundred years of bondage. 

Jesus spent 40 days in the wilderness. I'm proposing a deeper understanding of what He was fulfilling through His 40-day fast. It was more than not eating bread or food or drinking water. He was fasting from the words created by man that He was born into. 

Jesus is the Word made flesh. He is the complete, finished work of all Scripture. Whatever He spoke from His mouth would produce life or death, and it's a heart matter. So, if the Spirit of the Lord was upon Him and He was in the wilderness, whatever He spoke would have been decreed and come to pass right then and there.

There had to be a fulfillment of what the children in the wilderness, traveling through the lands described in Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, did not accomplish; Jesus accomplished it all. Think about it from that perspective. 

In Luke chapter four, we read that after forty days, Jesus became hungry. What was he hungry for? See, there are means of survival with desert plants if we are referring to Jesus being hungry for literal nourishment for His natural body. He could have easily looked at a plant and started eating it, or He could have spoken to the sands of the desert and told water to spring forth. He's God. What was He hungry for? 

How about being hungry for a relationship with the body of Christ? And that's the reason why Satan, or the antichrist spirit, was there. That antichrist spirit had been following Jesus around for 40 days. Just like he follows us around. Sometimes, as a spirit of rejection, a spirit of abandonment, or a spirit of devaluation, all these things that we become complacent about.

For forty days, Jesus heard these voices in the atmosphere that humanity had released into the world over thousands of years. Jesus did not respond to any of them. He gave no place to any of the accusations in His thoughts, for the Holy Spirit was the only voice He heard. Have you ever gone to a crowded place alone, not knowing anyone, yet your senses are bombarded with voices and noise all around you that humanity created? Jesus was going through the same thing in the wilderness.

After forty days, the wilderness encounter Jesus had with man’s creation ended. Jesus hungers for the Word, created in the image of God in Genesis 1:27-28, to become flesh, dwell in the land, and take the promised land decreed in the beginning when the Father established for His Kind, male and female, to go forth and multiply, filling the earth with the glory of God. This was not about creating natural children, but the masculine and feminine words of God. 

The enemy of God knew the word, and it was with the word that he was tempting Jesus, just like he does to us. In Luke 4:3 NKJV, the devil said to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” We have read this as Jesus needing to eat some bread. Yet Jesus told us in John that He is the bread of life. Does Jesus need more of Himself? Of course not, but this is how we lose the anointing of the moment we carry in dealing with God’s enemy.

“Jesus answered him, saying, 'It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God,’” (Luke 44 NKJV). Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8:3 in His response to the enemy.

The Word of God is about the fullness of the body of Christ coming together as one new man. Paul shares with us in Ephesians 2:14-16 NIV, “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility.” 

Everything Jesus did before the cross was to revisit the places that the enemy of God had used the  Old Testament to keep the image of God in slavery and bondage in the earth, God’s original intent was for the earth to be filled with the glory and Kingdom of God manifested and ruling creation in Love, Light, and Life as the body of Christ Jesus (Genesis 1:27-28). 

When we cherry-pick Scriptures to validate man’s ideas, we create commandments and laws that may be good for the flesh and soul but impose limitations on our spirit, preventing the Holy Spirit from being in control of our lives. The Word is both male and female in one flesh. God called both ADAM (Genesis 5:1-2). ADAM was to be led by the Holy Spirit, unveiling the fruit of: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

Keep in mind that nonbelievers do not use Scripture to validate their beliefs. This conversation is with those who read their Bible and find a Scripture they can use to bring others into bondage and slavery if they abide by their rules. Church denominations are good at this: keeping the body of Christ separated rather than joined together as one new man under Christ's ministry of reconciliation. 

Jesus could have turned a stone into bread, but that wasn’t what this forty-day journey was about. He wasn’t baptized and led by the Holy Spirit just to go without food or drink, become hungry, and try to perform magic by turning a stone into bread. That would be self-focus, using the scriptures for personal gain. He would've been aborting an awful lot of other things the scripture was saying because it takes every single word. That's the hangup we have in many of our religions. A lot of our Christianity is that we only have a partial truth. 

The next temptation is that the enemy of God takes Jesus up to a high place and shows Him all the kingdoms of the world at once. He said to Jesus, “I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours” (Luke 4:6-7 NIV). What are these kingdoms? The kingdoms of pride, the kingdoms of arrogance, the kingdoms of control and manipulation. These are all the strongholds and territories of our thoughts that Moses talks about to Joshua, and this is why there were refugee cities. These cities were there because creation life begins with the words of our mouth and the meditations of our heart (Psalm 49:3). The power of the tongue can produce life or death (Proverbs 18:21). 

These are the kingdoms that Jesus was shown. Jesus investigates the faces of all humanity and sees the glory of God and the one body of Christ, but He also sees the controlling spirits leading His body with deception and self-interest.  Did the tempter of God have any power to control these kingdoms? Yes, he did, and Jesus could easily have used the refugee cities as His authority to overtake the enemy, but the timing was wrong. There was a cross-and-resurrection event coming in a few years that would accomplish the defeat of the enemy of God and Death. 

Jesus responds, "You shall worship the Lord, your God, and serve him only” (Luke 4:6 NIV) quoting Moses in Deuteronomy 6:13. You see it's a heart matter when we love the Lord, our God, with all of our heart, with all of our mind, with all of our soul, and with all of the strength, the power within us is Christ. The words of our mouth and meditations of our heart have the potential to release Christ’s presence to the world, fulfilling the second commandment – loving your neighbor as yourself.

 We will go through trials and tribulations and be challenged, and we can call it temptation. But in those challenges, each time we fell, we got angry, upset, had meltdowns, or went through so many negative things that, in our weakness, it became an opportunity for Christ in us to become strong. That's what He's working through us and unveiling to us: the glory of God is within us. Christ in you is the glory of God knocking at your door. In Revelation 3, when it says, "I stand at the door, and I knock," we've used that as a salvation message, but the bigger picture is pulling us out of the escapism of going to heaven but bringing heaven to earth.

The spirit of religion tells believers in Christ that they receive some of Christ's blessings while in the natural body and the rest when they cross over into heaven. That was not the message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ for humanity. Jesus conquered death once and for all over 2000 years ago when He rose from the grave. The fullness of this blessing as our inheritance is waiting to be unveiled as we put on immortality and incorruption. “For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15: 53-54 NIV). 

There is so much more our Heavenly Father desires to unveil to us while in our natural body that Jesus has given us of our inheritance now.

This is what the disciples had to learn while they were in the bondage of fear: they left Jerusalem in haste, carrying the message from Mary, who told them on the day of the resurrection that Jesus would see them in Galilee. That's the same journey we have. We must hunger and thirst for the righteousness of the one who is alive. He's alive today in you and me so that when the inner voice of our hearts hears the voice of Jesus, we can go to Galilee and to the high mountain where the refuge city of Kadesh is, and know that we're now hearing His voice telling us that you are the righteousness beloved of the Father. 

From that position, our identity has been born again to who we always were at the beginning of creation (Genesis 2:1-2). This is what repentance is all about. Turn from the false identity the world and religion have tried to impose on us to what God has always said from the beginning of creation. We are beautiful and wonderfully made in His image and kind (Genesis 1:27, Psalm 139).

 It's not about telling you how bad you are; it's about telling you to turn around and see what the Spirit of the Lord is truly saying to you. When we pray, we go within ourselves as Christ comes forth in the intimacy of quietness, the 40-day journey Jesus unveiled after the resurrection as our High Priest. It's a wilderness opportunity that allows Christ in you to pray, to reverence, to have faith, not my faith, but Christ in me, faith, the Christ in me hope, the Christ in me worshiping, the Christ in me receiving revelation knowledge, the Christ in me having an invitation that says, “look what the Lord's done” to share with others.

This invitation imparts the Kingdom of God into the world as Christ in me is unveiled. All this happens in the twinkle of an eye because the Spirit of the Lord is upon me. When Christ comes forward, it is Jesus Christ that the world sees. Our worship and raising our hands become the intimacy of one between Jesus Christ loving you, and Christ in you loving Him, not the old self that died, but the new creation in me now (2 Corinthians 5:17). Just God all and in all at that moment. 

When you're dead in Christ, then all that can come through is Christ in you so that your senses and everything about your decisions, your emotions, your mind, your imaginations, your reasonings, your thoughts, your consciousness, your will is Christ. It's not a question of being a believer or not, but what our relationship is with Jesus Christ and the finished work of the cross and resurrection. 

Our purpose is to understand that the signs, wonders, healings, and miracles are all part of our inheritance because of the resurrection; however, we must first turn back to our first love. This was what John encountered when he turned around and met Jesus in the heavens (Revelation 4). 

Our first love as the church is when we know that we are joined in marriage with Jesus Christ; there's one spirit, one body, one Father, one Lord, all in Jesus Christ now to rule and reign on the earth, unveiling the Kingdom of God through us (Ephesians 4:4-6). Think about the journey Jesus went through personally before the cross, reclaiming the land and the air we breathe. This is our purpose today: to live knowing that Jesus is with us wherever we go and whatever we are dealing with. He is our refuge and High Priest. He is the lover of our souls. He is our husband and head of the body of Christ today.