TEARING DOWN THE HIGH PLACES
After I had returned from Uganda in March of ’23 I felt as thought the Lord was prompting me to recognize that it was His desire to build upon all that had been shared by the Spirit during that visit.
The Lord had placed a word in my heart taken from the prophet Isaiah:
Forget the former things;
Do not dwell in the past.
See, I am doing a new thing!
Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
And streams in the wasteland. (Isa 43:18,19)
He added a prophetic word saying that all that this people had taken for evil the Lord was going to make for good!
With that as a backdrop and recognizing that the Lord was calling us to press forward to discover all that He had in store for his, upon my arrival in Canada I began to wait on the Lord and almost immediately I sensed that the Lord was encouraging me to view the interval between my recent visit and the upcoming visit as a time of birthing.
When a child is born a mother is said to be expecting. She has the expectation that something wonderful is about to take place and I was sensing that the Lord was calling his people to move ahead with that same spirit of expectation.
As I continued in this posture of rest and expectation a picture came to my mind in which I saw myself in a room with a bed and on the bed had been placed a pair of shoes. I quickly understood that the Lord was showing me that in this time of waiting we were to understand that we were standing on holy ground.
The imagery of the priesthood came to mind in the sense that I was being reminded that as the people of the Lord we had been created to be holy vessels created to be used for His purposes.
In scripture we see that in the temple there were many vessels created to be used for holy purposes and it was the responsibility of the priests to keep those vessels spotlessly clean. In the same way, as his priests, God is reminding us that as His vessels each one of us carries the responsibility to remain clean in order that we can continue to be used for His purposes.
The biblical principal that is being applied is that which has set apart for holy purposes must not be allowed to become contaminated by the things of this world but must be continually cleansed. As God’s chosen vessels that principal applies to us as much as ever it did in the days of the temple because as God’s chosen vessels he expects us to remain fully useable, holy and set apart for His use.
The books of Kings and Chronicles speak of the lives of the Kings of Israel and Judah. We discover as we read that of all the 42 Kings of Israel and Juda only 8 Kings were said to be good. These we all kings of Judah. All the others incuding all the kings of Israel were said to have been evil in the sight of the Lord and Of these 8 good kings, only 4 destroyed the High Places. These were Jehoshaphat, Joash, Hezekiah and Josiah.
It seemed to me that the Lord was leading me to consider the matter of these high places in the lives of His people these many millennia later. In Israel, the High places were those places that had been set up to worship foreign gods that the wives of Solomon had brought with them from outside Israel. God had warned Solomon of the result of such folly, but Solomon disobeyed God and so his many foreign wives did exactly as God had foretold and set up alters that would be known as high places all throughout Israel and Judah.
The high places in scripture have been used to be a reflection of those things that as believers we place ahead of our desire for God. God declared to his people that He is a jealous God and that we are to have no other Gods before Him. Israel continually disobeyed God, choosing instead to follow after gods created by their own hands, gods that they could, see instead of remaining true to the one true God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
God’s heart for His people is that they would understand that in order to be the bright lights to others that he calls us to be, we will have to be willing to tear down any High paces that exist in our lives.
In keeping with this sentiment, God is forever seeking to find those who are fully committed to Him and that’s why we read in scripture:
The eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth, seeking to strengthen those who are FULLY committed to him. (I Chr 16:9)
The Lord calls His people to full and complete devotion to Him. There is no room for half way and he is calling us to recognize that historically his people have been only too willing to allow other gods to take first place in their lives. The Lord wants us to destroy any High Places that exist in our lives. He is reminding us that we have turned a corner. God is preparing to pour out his power in order to come against the evil that floods our world and he wants his people to understand the need to be completed surrendered to him alone.
God was sending out a Get Ready call. He Spirit was heralding the fact that He is about to move in ways that will amaze us and that when he does He will use his people as vessels for his service. Vessels that are required to remain clean and available for his purposes.
