The oil of gladness is God’s kind of anointing; it is the anointing of God. This oil is a conveyor of gladness and this is what makes it peculiar. God anointed Jesus with the oil of gladness because He loved righteousness and hated iniquity (Hebrews 1:9). This shows us that what God loves is righteousness. Righteousness can be believed and it can be loved but one cannot love righteousness without first believing in it. The entirety of God’s workings from the beginning to the end is righteousness.
Faith is believing in righteousness, which is different from loving righteousness. The love of righteousness is the love of the truth. To love the truth, however, you have to first believe the truth. No soul starts its journey towards God by believing in the truth. The first believing that the soul does is without the knowledge of the truth. When one is born again, the person is Christ in his spirit but may not be aware of/start acting in consonance with who he is.
In much the same way, the day one gets born again is not the day he starts loving righteousness because, from the Fall, the soul fell below the spirit. However, the Christ kind of soul is spiritual. The first knowing that one should come into is the knowledge of Christ. When one gets born again, the person does not have Christ-soul immediately. Such a one would have to be taught. The first teaching a believer should partake of is the milk of the word. This dimension of the word is what makes for good believers.
However, a milk believer is not a spiritual believer. To be spiritual is to be Christ. A good man can easily identify that which is spiritual. To be good is to have the ability to locate the spiritual. Barnabas was a good man and could easily identify Paul. Paul on the other hand was spiritual because a quick work was wrought in him. He began to suffer persecution from the point of New Birth. His growth from babyhood was accelerated because he had a dimension of the allocation of the gospel.
The milk of the word makes one good. A good heart is that which can find/locate the spiritual and choose it. What is qualified as good is what is in the line of God and can respond to Him. It is possible for a believer to be generous and nice but lack the ability to respond to God because he/she does not have a good heart.
Christ is not a man of our realm, He is the New Man that every soul has to learn. Christ is the beginning of the knowledge of God. One who can learn Christ can ultimately learn God. Christ can never be learnt or received without revelation and understanding. There are people who lack the capacity in their soul to learn Christ because of their kind of soul formation. These kinds of souls have not been prepared or made ready to come into the knowledge of Christ on this side of eternity. It takes time for souls to be prepared for the knowing of Christ.
There are some people to whom it is given to know the mystery of the Kingdom and there are some it is not given to know (Matt. 13:11). Jesus understood the multitude very well and taught them accordingly. This is why He was born at the time He was. A lot of us, if born then, would have made many mistakes in the ministry of the word because we would have been teaching revelation knowledge for which the people have not been prepared. Men had to be sent to teach the milk of the word in order to prepare hearts to receive the teaching of truth.
The righteousness of God is in levels. The first level of righteousness is Christ. A right soul is that which is changing from being fleshly to being spiritual. You cannot make carnal souls spiritual in one day, it is a gradual process. It is as truth is revealed that souls change because a soul has to hear truth before grace is administered to do it.
There is the learning of the Spirit in whatever you do as long as you are under the atmosphere of the word. One can learn the Spirit with or without vocational jobs. What the learning of the Spirit, which is the practical school of learning the word, is meekness. The change that should be wrought in souls cannot be achieved by prayers alone, it is by the learning ways.
Each revelation has a way. Obedience is a way. Knowledge can be impacted by prayers but the best way to acquire knowledge is to be led. The bible says in Psalm 25:9 “the meek will He guide in judgment: and the meek will He teach His way”. The practicality of it is acquired in the way. One who despises the spirit will not know ways because he lacks accurate judgement of the spirit. When one is ignorant and out of the way (Heb. 5:2), it is as a result of having learnt another path by another spirit. To come out of this ignorance, such a soul will have to be led in another path to unlearn the previous ways.Sin can have a form of righteousness, it can be disciplined, but it is still sin. It can generate and mimic properties of the spirit but the ultimate test lies in the way.
When you come into the righteousness of Christ which is the teaching of faith. Faith is the first step towards redemption because it removes the gaze from the physical and sets it on the invisible. Christ makes one spiritual. God is spirit. Christ is the living spirit. When a soul knows Him, the soul lives. God is a quickening Spirit and when a soul comes into the knowledge of God, such a soul becomes as quick as God is.
Divine nature is higher than divine power. Divine nature is eternal life but one cannot come into divine nature without partaking of divine power. Divine power is faith. It is the power of God unto Salvation (Rom. 1:16). The gospel of God is God’s nature. The divine nature man is a quickening spirit. The power of God is the man Christ.
What God is doing in us is working against the things that Satan has done in our souls. The seat of satan is not a physical throne, it is the source of iniquity that the antichrist will discover. The Bible speaks of scorners that will arise in the end-time (2 Pet. 3:3). Every scorner starts by the counsel of the ungodly (Psalm 1:1), which no man can escape except by the wisdom that Christ is. Psalm 1 speaks of the Outer Court, Holy Place and Holiest of all dimension and progression of sin. It all begins with the counsel of the ungodly, continues with the way of sinners and ends with the seat of the scornful.
The godly man is the righteous man [who has become righteous by obeying righteousness]. The ungodly man speaks of those who, though may be believers, are not obeying righteousness [and, as a result, are not changing]. A godly man has access to judgement while the ungodly shall not stand in judgment (Psalm 1:5). This judgment is for the profit of the righteous. The essence of judgement is to save the righteous (1 Peter. 4:18). The ministration of the engrafted word cannot be received if judgement is not given. This judgement can only be done amongst the righteous, who have obeyed faith and charity.
Sinners, in the context of Psalm 1, are those who have the law of God but denied it. These men are different from those who are weak and are, probably, faint. A sinner is one who deliberately denies the Father and the Son. You cannot be a sinner in this context if you do not know because there will never be an imputation of sin when knowledge is absent (Acts 17:30-31). A transgressor is one who speaks against the light.
When God says, “sinners will not stand in the congregation of the righteous”, He is saying He will deny them. As a result of this denial, they will not get blessed even when they are expecting to be blessed. We are in the season of being begotten. To be begotten of God is the last birth, which makes a man ready to sit on the throne of God. 1 John 3:1-3 implies that although we are sons already, it has not yet appeared what we shall be and everyone who has this hope gets himself purified.
This is how to attain the nature of God. If you have not obeyed the syllabus of Christ well, there is no way you will not offend under the economy of God. Sin is denying God while righteousness is agreeing with and allowing God. Taking God when He comes with His desire is what righteousness is. If you cannot stand someone who is obeying the faith of the Son, you will never be able to stand Christ when the realm of the Spirit opens over you. This is because such souls have violated a major law in the spirit.
Seeing the Son of God is seeing God. it is the sight of/understanding of God that stops sin. There is no other way to stop sin. One who has come into the understanding of the Son of God is he who has become a perpetual overcomer. When the Bible says, “he that committeth sin is of the devil” (1 John 3:8), it is not speaking about the human spirit. It is referring to the soul, which can keep sinning despite the fact that the spirit is quickened. To commit is to give oneself to something. This commission is done in the light of a given law because transgression is not established/imputed except there is a law.
Another reason God sheds light is to determine souls. The Bible says, “the devil sinneth from the beginning” (1 John 3:8). This sin is not a mistake; it is a deliberate action, which stemmed from the fact that he did not want God anymore. He wanted his own things and taught other angels how to depart from God. The beginning of sin is taking thoughts on how to depart from God. Littered all over scriptures are those who sinned; an example is Cain, who departed from the living God (Genesis 4:16), Demas also departed from Paul (2 Timothy 4:10). Those who have an unbelieving heart depart from the living God (Hebrews 3:12). Satan did not just depart from God, he sought his own throne and dominion, left what God committed to him and sought another.
Lucifer before the fall was a minister of the sanctuary but Michael is not, he is a minister of God. If lucifer did not fall, he would have been helping Christ admit people into the holiest of all because he was a minister of the sanctuary. Because of his fall, he perverted his ways and he is instead teaching men to depart from the living God. satan invented death. It is a creature that satan created. What God imparts is discernment so that the birthing process can be completed.
The fullness of one who has been born of God is seen in 1John 3:9 “whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin”. Such a man will not depart from God nor transgress the law. In this season, we must see to it that there is nothing we love more than God. If you love something more than God, it places you in a position where you can be ensnared. There is a way to know one who has God, such a one is a person that has abided in Christ. Such a one must have known the faith of the son. This does not mean the person has the lingua but the person has the lifestyle.
Christ is the ‘marah’ meaning the bitterness of God. Christ is not joy to the flesh; He is the leaves of the tree of life which is for the healing of the nations. Leaves are bitter because of the potency that they carry. One who does not abide in Christ has not either the Father nor the Son. If such a person professes to know God, he is a transgressor and a liar because he has denied the process, which is to have and abide in the Son before the Father.