Spiritual male and female, part 3

I began to receive revelation at the time of the 120^th Jubilee from Adam (1986-1987) that I would be unable to fulfill my calling without a wife who could hear God’s voice. At the time, my wife did not think she was able to hear, although later we discovered that her hearing was very good and she merely lacked confidence. My own “hearing” experience began June 5-7, 1982; my wife’s “hearing” experience (discovery) began ten years later, June 5-7, 1992.

During those years, I tried to teach my wife to hear God’s voice as I did but to no avail. In fact, my efforts only made matters worse, for it put pressure upon her, which only increased her feelings of guilt for not hearing. I had to back off and let it go. In 1992 we both discovered that she had no problem hearing but that she heard in a different way than I did. Her hearing was more intuitional through her womanly “feelings,” whereas I, as a man, was getting words that I recorded in notebooks.

At any rate, in 1992 it came down to a simple but serious matter where it was very apparent that my revelation was wrong and hers was right! That was the turning point, where we both knew that she was hearing correctly all along but just lacked the confidence to know it. Her obedience to me, deferring to my revelation, did not mean that I had been hearing correctly.

Secondly, I knew that in order for me to hear correctly and to fulfill my calling, I had to have a proper double witness. That, of course, is one of the most basic purposes of marriage—to create a double witness in the family so that truth and revelation is “established” by law. I had known since 1980 that the reason God separated Eve from Adam and made them into two individuals was to establish the principle of the double witness. However, we did not achieve this purpose until 1992.

We have now had nearly 27 years in which to test and prove the principle. I can testify that it has never failed us. If just one of us gets a revelation to do something, we wait until the other either confirms it or God shows us that it is wrong. Usually, when that happens, it is a matter of waiting until that single revelation is adjusted or put into better perspective. When the time was right, we always came into agreement.

We found that God often uses this principle to establish timing. If just one person got a revelation to do something, but not the other, we had no choice but to wait for adjustments or for the right timing. When all adjustments to our understanding were completed, and when the timing was right, then we always came into agreement and were able to act accordingly.

This is a very important insight, because often one becomes impatient, thinking that the other is just “not hearing properly” or worse, is “being rebellious,” when in fact God was merely slowing down the process so that we would not jump too soon. The solution to such impatience, as I soon discovered, was in knowing beyond all shadow of doubt that my wife really did hear from God and that she was truly functioning as my “Sarah.”

In other words, I had as much confidence in her ability to hear as she had in mine. Her input was equally important to mine. Her revelation carried equal weight with mine. Apart from such confidence, a New Covenant marriage such as this will malfunction at some point, and we would automatically revert back to an Old Covenant pattern. But I am happy to report that she was always faithful to let me know whenever that happened, and I was correctable. Such times were given to us in order to test my confidence that God truly spoke through her, but I only had to remember the events in 1992 to regain that absolute confidence and to rein in my impatience.

Okay, enough of my true confessions. Talking about myself makes me uncomfortable, mostly because my life includes many failures in need of correction over the years. I have learned much through failure. Much revelation has been incomplete at first and has required input from others (including my wife) to remove distortions and to make it complete.

All of this personal experience ultimately led to the revelation that I wrote in my book, Old and New Covenant Marriage and, still later, The Two Covenants.

In November 1997, as I was studying Exodus 21:1-11, I was struck by the fact that God spoke of two kinds of marriage—marriage to a slave and marriage to a free woman. I asked God about this in a way that manifested a rather poor attitude. His response was: “Abraham had two wives.” That simple statement opened my eyes to truth in Paul’s allegory about Hagar and Sarah in Galatians 4 and how it applied to this law and to the two types of marriage.

That was the revelation that gave us the key to understanding the biblical basis for our new relationship that we had enjoyed since 1992. Notice that this was five years later. God never seems to be in a hurry. We always think we are ready for revelation, but in fact there is a time for every revelation. That time arrives as we grow, for then we receive the capacity to receive and understand it. To press for revelation before its time usually leads to failure and trouble.

The Original Marriage

God did not make Eve to be Adam’s servant, as many have taught in the past. Being a “helper” (Genesis 2:18) has been thought of as an employee or servant, but actually, God had something very different in mind. If Eve had been created to be a servant (or slave), she would have been a “Hagar” from the beginning. But note that Adam’s authority over his wife did not begin until after they had sinned (Genesis 3:16). In other words, sin made authority necessary until such time that agreement could replace it, according to God’s original purpose.

This is self-evident when one looks at other applications of the marriage principle. For instance, is an ideal government one where the people recognize the king’s authority and obey him perfectly, or where the king and the people are in agreement? Is an ideal church organization one where the people submit to religious creeds, regardless of their own revelation and belief, or where the spiritual leaders and the people arrive at the same revelation independently?

It is obvious that agreement is superior to submission and obedience. So also is Christ preparing a bride who is in agreement with Him, not merely one who submits to His authority and vows obedience, as the Old Covenant required (Exodus 19:8). Jesus was the Lawgiver in the time of Moses. Yahweh was the Lawgiver, and Yahweh-God has become my Yeshua (Exodus 15:2; Isaiah 12:2). This prophecy was fulfilled at the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

Hence, Jesus was the Husband of an Old Covenant bride at the marriage ceremony performed by Moses at Mount Sinai. We know that that marriage was imperfect because the Israelites could not be perfected by the power of their own will, no matter how sincere they were. Neither was it the plan of God that they should succeed through the Old Covenant.

It is only by the power of the New Covenant that any marriage will be perfect and will meet the high expectations of God. That Covenant is based on the will of God and His vow or promise, not upon the will of man (John 1:13). His vow will be fulfilled when all men reach their full potential as God envisioned before the first day of creation. The Old Covenant marriage was always going to be a temporary arrangement, because it was based on sinful man’s promises to God.

When we understand this truth, we may catch the vision of something greater. Those with an Old Covenant mindset are those who have not yet received a New Covenant revelation, or whose revelation is yet incomplete. We all start out thinking Old Covenant-ish, because we are born of flesh through perishable seed. That is “natural,” but it is not the goal that God has in mind. God is working to make us supernatural through the process of spiritual begetting that leads ultimately to our birthing as the sons of God.

In other words, God is in the process of restoring all things to the original purpose of God. We will not be restored to the Edenic order, however, because that order was naïve or “innocent” and lacked knowledge that comes with experience. In the end we will have much more than Adam and Eve had in the garden. God knew this and planned it from the beginning by His own sovereign will.

The Primary Purpose of Marriage

Marriage provides each partner with a tutor, instructor, or “helper” (Genesis 2:18). This is not merely a one-sided task or responsibility. Men are as responsible to help their wives achieve their full potential as a wife is to her husband. In fact, that is one of the main purposes of authority. Authority comes with an equal level of responsibility, so it is obvious that if a man claims authority over his wife that he should be responsible for her spiritual maturity as well.

Yet that responsibility was first given to Eve in relation to her husband. One cannot fulfill that responsibility by mere drudge work. Bearing children and doing housework may be necessary, but it is not the prime responsibility of a wife. The same can be said about the husband. In times past, while the Old Covenant mindset prevailed in the church and in the world at large, women were Hagars, bondwomen, slaves, or servants. As such, they were prevented from fulfilling their true callings and thus could seldom reach their full potential.

This Old Covenant relationship was reinforced by the Roman church (and in later Protestant denominations as well), for they functioned (as “Saul”) by demanding obedience to authority and submission to creeds, rather than taking responsibility upon themselves for the spiritual growth and maturity of the parishioners. There were exceptions, of course, among individual churches, but the spirit of denominationalism as a whole was based upon an Old Covenant relationship between leaders and the people.

Hence, the church during the Pentecostal Age (33-1993) was characterized by Saul, rather than by David. Though ordained by God, it was an imperfect arrangement and therefore temporary. The Roman idea that this church would be eternal is as untrue as the idea that Saul and his dynasty could have been king forever. No, Saul was from the tribe of Benjamin, and the leader/king was supposed to be from Judah (Genesis 49:10).

In later years, the people of Benjamin settled north of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 11:31-36) in what later became known as Galilee. Jesus’ disciples were mostly from Galilee and were therefore of the tribe of Benjamin. The exception was Judas, who was from Hebron in southern Judah. Judas betrayed Jesus and was replaced by Matthias just prior to Pentecost (Acts 1:26). We are not told his tribe, but I believe that he was a placeholder until the arrival of the Apostle Paul, who was from the tribe of Benjamin (Philippians 3:5).

Hence, during the Pentecostal Age, the first church leaders were of Benjamin, not Judah. They followed the pattern of King Saul who was crowned on Pentecost in 1 Samuel 12:17. As we see in the case of Saul, he did well in his first year and then began to show signs of lawlessness afterward. So also, in the first Jubilee cycle of the church, while the apostles were alive, the church was relatively pure as well. Nonetheless, looking at it in the long-term, the church under its Pentecostal anointing was doomed to fail and to be replaced by “David,” the company of overcomers.

The point is that in order to be an overcomer, one must have a New Covenant mindset and belief. One’s faith must be in God (God’s vow), rather than in one’s self—one’s own vow. As we began to transition from Pentecost to Tabernacles in 1993, the revelation of the New Covenant (in terms of marriage) was given to us (1992). This revelation has grown over the years, but I am convinced that this understanding was given only because the time was right. We are blessed by living in this time, for we are approaching the fulfillment of the feast of Tabernacles that will empower the overcomers in the Tabernacles Age to come.