Apostles Theological Seminary

I was waiting on the Lord this morning for a response on how we should be addressing situations that occur in the earth like the ‘Haiti Earthquake’, which has estimated over 200,000 people killed and many more serious casualties to the point of doctors having to undertake amputations in the midst of the rubble left of streets and houses.

That God has heard the cries of His saints' hearts to pour out His mercy on that nation is very apparent because of the massive response from all over the world to help rescue and save as many as possible. This is the hand of God moving the Nations to respond to the crisis. What the church has to grasp today is how our God responds to His church on earth. He uses ordinary people like you and me; He uses organizations; He uses Nations. The truth of the matter is that Jesus has been ruling over the nations of the world from the right hand of Glory since His resurrection and ascension that took place 2000 years ago (Acts 2:30-36). Christ rules in His justice and mercy, which manifests itself as salvation and judgment. For example God moved Great Britain and its allies to bring Hitler and his Nazi followers to their knees; God used the nations of the world to end Apartheid.

In the 2^nd world war He motivated England to fall to its knees in prayer for the troops stranded at Dunkirk, and then sent a flotilla of small boats that saved an army.

When these calamities occur, God mobilizes the nations; we see it time and time again. We’ve become so dull and insensitive to the move of God and in many cases limited it to showmanship in mass meetings. God moves a lot more outside the four walls of our church buildings than we realize. Jesus was a field man, always out in the field with the sick, the poor, the hungry, and yes, even sinners. He hasn’t changed. He is the one who puts it into a president’s heart to send millions of dollars of aid to these situations. Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, like a river of water He turns it wherever He wishes.”  Why do you think Paul exhorted Timothy that prayer and intercessions be made for Kings and all those in authority. Come on church. Lift up your eyes and look beyond your little fellowships and independent agendas and see your God at work in the earth!

What the Lord impressed upon me this morning was that the church of this generation is largely in reaction, and as long as we remain in this mindset, the world (society) will continue to crumble and deteriorate into darkness and chaos. The doom and gloom boys will continue to pour out their rhetoric and their negativity on us, whilst making a fortune on books and media.

Having spent 33 years of my life in police work and having been largely involved in strategic management, I suddenly saw the picture very clearly. Consider this. Police law enforcement is divided into two functions, 1. Reactive Policing, 2. Proactive Policing.

• Reactive policing is simply put as the action a police force takes after the commission of a crime. Investigations, arrests, dockets, court and sentencing. What I call mopping up policing. We never get ahead of the crooks, and spend our time mopping up after them. Have you never noticed how Police and traffic officials always tell us how many arrests and tickets they have made; it is all reactive policing.

• Proactive policing is described as the action a Police force takes before the commission of a crime, intended to prevent that crime from occurring, or apprehending the perpetrators in the act of committing the crime. This is what hurts the criminal world. It requires a lot of research, investigation, informers, and most of all proper operational planning. The officials need to be highly trained and motivated.

If you look around at our world and focus beyond what seems to be happening on the surface, you will see a whole different set of factors that lead up to the situations we see and react to.

For example the Haiti situation could have been a lot less severe, if that nation didn’t have corruption and poverty dominating it. We are told that many of the buildings collapsed because of faulty or substandard building standards. The fact that this island is situated over a documented fault line is nothing new; the powers that be have known this all along.

How could the church have prevented this from occurring? (In other words been more proactive than reactive.)

The Somali situation, how did such a situation come to pass ?

And so on we can go from crisis to crisis in the earth, and ask ourselves, "how did these things come to pass?"

We see protest groups like "Green peace",  anti-this and anti-that protestors all over the world doing the "Church’s job" and being what they see in their unspiritual minds as "proactive", whilst the church focuses largely on in-ward looking religious agendas.

How should we deal with situations like Haiti, tragedies waiting to happen, considering what Paul said to the Ephesians, “And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22-23)?

In other words Jesus rules over all things (the world and the nations) through His church in the earth which is His inheritance.

The church in general, excluding preaching the gospel, is largely in reaction to the world, and needs to move into a more proactive mindset. The reason for this reactive mindset is that our underlying doctrinal understanding is negative; it sees the world on a collision course with destruction and corruption as inevitable, unavoidable. We’ve been programmed into a underlying pessimism that’s left the church with "no fight in it." A church has been disarmed by erroneous doctrine and philosophical humanism. We have this mind-set that the "Anti Christ" is coming anyway and will destroy all that is good in the earth. So why try to change anything? For many today the Christian life is about "waiting to fly away."

We move from crisis to crisis in survival mode asking God to patch up our world so we can make it to the rapture. This is not the ever increasing Kingdom (Isaiah 9:6, Dan 7:27)! It's certainly not what Scripture teaches.  Sadly, Moslems in many instances are having more effect on the world that we are. But even many of them are probably waiting for the so-called rapture to take Christians and the Church out of the way. (I want to provoke your minds to read what scripture says and think carefully about what I am saying).

What I understood the Lord saying this morning is that the church should be filled with great zeal to see justice established in the earth. Not out on the streets protesting before the world like those who have no eternal hope, but rather we should be protesting day and night before the “Court of Heaven.” Daily the Lord's church should pray and intercede for God's justice and His righteous judgments to be released with power in the earth. We are too passive, too focused on ourselves. Justice and peace on the earth is within the church's grasp.  All we have to do is use the authority and power God has given us collectively for things to be change.

We need to pray proactively for unjust and corrupt governments to be removed and replaced by righteous men who know the truth.

How much prayer warfare has been brought before the courts of heaven on the Somali situation. We know that the world’s reactive policies have had little effect; all the world's navies that are actively involved there haven’t changed a thing. The warlords and their evil supporters must be removed and brought to justice. That is what we should focus on. But it is not going to be accomplished by one prayer on the part of a couple of people; it will take days, months and even years of united prayer and spiritual warfare in the heavenlies to move the hand of God in behalf of that nation. The church, as a whole, needs to discuss these things, agree on a spiritual strategy, then see it through to victory.

This is how God's peace, justice, and mercy is going to come into our world. We have to “Pray it down”. But you might say, "Somalia" doesn’t effect me; I don’t even know where it is." Well then you haven’t understood the Kingdom of God and are still a babe in Christ, concentrating on what you can put in your own mouth.

You see the follow-up strategy once the powers of darkness start to loose their iron grip in that country is to send forth laborers into the field to establish the Kingdom. That’s how we are going to take to world. Look at every military strategy. It always starts off with intense bombardment to weaken and soften up the enemy's hold and put him on his back foot before the foot soldiers go in. Our prayer bombardment is, “Mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds”. The bottom line is that God can and will change the mindset of governments, or even remove them if need be, to bring justice and peace to a situation. As Christians we have the privilege of asking Him to do this. Consider this scripture,  "Ask of Me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession," Psalm 2:7-8. You might say that this is in answer to Jesus the Son. Well, His mandate to us is to disciple the nations.

Then what about God's sovereignty over any ruler or situation (See Romans 9:14-23)?

As a church we have to get our eyes off ourselves and see that the Lord has delivered the planet earth into our hands. A kingdom mentality is a conquest mentality, a “go in and possess mentality”.

Last word: The Gospel of the Kingdom is not about saving people so that they can escape the world in a rapture, but to save people in order to work together with Christ the King to bring the earth under His subjection and rule. There is a vast difference between these two.

Giles Hunter

Kings Church

Durban