By: General Jim Green
Welcome to TRIBAL CALL. We’ve been talking about and believing God for a Tribal Community in this generation in which we live. The Tribal Community is none other than a holy nation, a nation of people that are going to walk uprightly with God. It is a people who are going to walk in purity of heart, that are going to keep their hearts low before the Lord, and who are going to obey God’s commandments, something that we don’t see much of anymore in today’s Body of Christ. This type of real Christianity has been thrown out the window and has been replaced with the television watching, music listening, fun, and games, brand of churchianity where you just forget about obeying God. But this community that the Lord has laid on our hearts to talk about will consist of communities of Christ around the world that will work together and fight together, not against one another. They will fight the enemy together and love each other in the Lord, letting the Spirit of God run their lives. And to do this, there are some keys which will make it possible.
I’m just going to quickly review some of the things we’ve been talking about. Now, in the first message, I only gave the introduction that consisted of talking about the five keys. Key number one talked about a Transcendent God, which basically means that God is superior and we humans are inferior. God is the boss, and we are not. And the second key, we talked about was Hierarchy, which describes how God has a Government by which He rules over His people, and He has a Government within the Body of Christ. Tonight we are going to be talking about Ethics. This is the third key. You can’t have a truly holy nation, or tribe, or righteous army for God unless you have ethics and standards. And the forth and fifth keys deal with oaths and continuity. So, there it is in a nut shell, a small picture of the five vital keys for a God-centered community. In fact, we already have 20 hours that I’ve taught on these five keys in the series called The Tribal Call. But, the points in these messages are going to be quick (in a nut shell), points of different views on this. Hopefully, they will give us an idea of what God is wanting.
GOD DESIRES TRUE SPIRIT COMMUNITIES
Yes, God is wanting His people to live communally, not like the hippie communes, but communally that they would live together and that they would pool their resources together and throw their man power together, for the sake of getting the gospel out into all the world. Yet people say, “Well, that sounds kind of cultish.” What do you think a cult is? The word cult comes from the word culture. What do you think America is all about? The whole American “cult”ure started out with little cults, little sects of different groups. Even the Christians of this country are brainwashed into thinking that a democracy is the greatest form of Government yet invented, and they’re trying to push democracy all around the world. And if we can’t cram it down their throats, then we will kill them over it. And the communists are trying to cram Communism down everybody’s throats, and the Muslims are trying to cram Islam down everybody’s throat, and everyone is trying to cram something down everyone else’s throats. But I’ve got news for you, and that is that I’m not cramming anything down anybody’s throat. I’m just presenting the vision of a Tribal Community under the complete Theocracy of God Himself—it can, it will, and it is currently working. It’s working for this group of believers here; it’s working for this Missions Training Core. It has been working for years. Our community is small, but it’s sound, and it’s growing, so don’t tell me it can’t work. If people are willing to be under a God-centered Theocracy it will work.
This brings me to tonight’s message: you can’t have a true Theocracy unless you will obey God. This is what a Theocracy is all about; it’s the rule of God through men upon the Earth. People talk about all kinds of Governments, and they talk about Utopias; they talk about all of these great communal ideas and dreams that they want to accomplish. So what’s wrong with a Theocracy? Why don’t today’s Christians want it? Because today’s Christians don’t want to obey God. It’s rebellion! They want the world and they want God too. Let’s face it—they are double minded, and some of them have triple minds. They want God’s fire insurance, but at the same time they want to live their own lives and do their own thing. Well, I’ll tell you right now that if you’re going to be a true, sincere, born again, Spirit filled, Spiritual Christian, then you are going to have to learn how to obey God, in both the outward commandments of His written Word and the inward commandments of His spoken prophetic Word.
In the last message, I was teaching about the authority structure that God has set in His body, in His Ecclesia, of prophets, pastors, evangelists, teachers, and apostles, which is the five-fold ministry used to bring God’s people into perfection in the Son of God. These offices were established with the goal being to bring God’s people into the fullness of God. What this means is that God set up leaders: people that would lead His people by His Spirit. I know there are rulers and leaders in civil governments, and in the big picture, they rule over lots of people. In the Body of Christ, we’re supposed to have our own leaders that are led by God. We are to establish and abide by our own government with our own leaders, over whom God is the ultimate head. To be a godly leader, you’ve got to be led by the Spirit of God; you can’t just make rules and regulations and demand people to obey them. Being a leader for close to twenty four years now, I know sometimes you almost have to become a dictator, and there are times when you have to command people to do certain things. But, I also know that you can’t make people obey at gun point, and neither can God, because every person has a free will choice, yet we can try our best to make people obey God.
SIN DESTROYS!
The reason that we want you to obey God is so that you will be blessed by God. Why do you think we hit on sin so much around here? Because sin will destroy you, and sin will make you unfaithful and unrighteous. This is why we always have to bring the sin issue up. I know people get tired of hearing about sin, but you know what I’ve got to say: “TOO BAD! Because sin is a destroyer of souls, and you’ve got to recognize who your enemy is if you’re going to be victorious. Your enemy is sin, and this enemy comes in many different colors, shapes and sizes. First off, you have inbred sin, which we all have to a certain degree because we were born with it from Adam. Then we have the outward sin which surrounds us in this dark, filthy, slimy world in which we live. This type of sin is waiting on every corner to try to destroy us, and this is why we’ve got to learn how to be soldiers of the cross, inwardly and outwardly. Amen. You’ve got to learn how to fight against these things, and not give into them.
Alright, now I want to talk about ethics, and I’m going to read out of the book of Deuteronomy, which has been our primary source book for this study. Deuteronomy is the book of the covenant. As a matter of fact, we started this whole series talking about God’s covenant people. Everything points back to the book of Deuteronomy. Let’s go to chapter 4 verse 13, where we will find some points regarding ethics. It says, “And he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform….” Now listen, he commanded them to perform the covenant. He didn’t ask them to do it—He commanded them! Moving on to chapter 5, you find Moses recalling to the Israelites the Ten Commandments. Here you have your ethics, the Ten Commandments, which were written upon tables of stone. The Ten Commandments were part of the character of God. They were a description of how God wanted His people to live, and He wrote them down in stone to emphasize their importance and their eternal nature. Yet people in this generation are absolutely petrified, their knees begin to shake, and their heart fails them, if you even mention that they may have to obey the law of the Old Testament. They will literally pass out on you! We have to remember that the Ten Commandments (except #4, the Sabbath) are still connected with our covenant under Jesus Christ, and if we don’t obey the commandments, we don’t have a covenant with God! Why do you think so few Christians of today have any kind of real covenant with God? Because they don’t obey His commandments! The commandments were God’s character; they were how He expressed Himself to His people.
RIGHTEOUSNESS OF GOD BASED ON ETHICS
You can’t have a righteous people unless you have ethics. We can see ethics in all sorts of civil governments too. In the military, they have a code of ethics—in the political system, in the medical system, in the thing they used to call the educational system; all of these systems have some sort of code of ethics that must be adhered to in order for them to function properly. So why shouldn’t the Body of Christ have ethics and laws? It should and it does! The problem is that today’s Christians don’t want to obey God’s laws anymore. It’s pure rebellion! Nevertheless, our community here is going to obey God whether the worldly Christians want to rebel on God or not! The fact remains that God commanded His true people to obey His commandments. There never were, and there never will be, any gray areas. Either you will or you won’t. Either you’ll obey God and receive His blessings and goodness and mercies, or you’ll disobey and receive His cursings and wrath. The ethical standards of God don’t change. God is a moral God, and God’s character is absolute and righteous; His law doesn’t change. Whether you’re talking about the law in the Old Testament or the New Testament, you are still talking about the same absolute God.
You can’t try to weasel your way out of obeying God by saying, “Well, that was just for the Old Testament Israelites, but now we live in the New Testament and we’re under grace, so we’ll do what we please!” This is the prevalent attitude of today’s Christians, but I’ve got news for you, and that is that you can’t do what you please and be a Spirit people. You see, God is Spirit and the Spirit of God is moral; therefore, if you are going to be a Spirit people, then you are going to have to be a moral people, both physically and spiritually. You can’t have a true community, a true Ecclesia, unless you operate by the standards of godly morality. You can’t just gather people together and fit them into a community and call it a spiritual community while everyone is doing whatever they want to do. The foundation has to be moral, it has to be righteous, and it has to be holy.
MODERN CHRISTIANS IGNORE GOD’S STANDARDS
Ethics have to do with God’s standards. When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, they were a code of ethics. He wrote them down so that they would not be forgotten by future generations and so that we could go back and obey the commandments. But the Christians of today try to say that they don’t have to obey them. The truth of the matter is that you have to obey all of God’s commandments, whether you like it or not. There are more commandments of God than just the ten original commandments. There are commandments and laws that have to do with eating. If people would eat right, they wouldn’t be so sick all the time, yet so many people rebel and eat things that they know they shouldn’t, and in the long run, they pay for it in their bodies. Even unsaved people would live Ionger and have better lives if they would obey God’s laws, not to mention God’s people who have no excuse at all! Why do you think that God laid down the laws in the first place? So that His people would adhere to them and so that they would live a better, more abundant life. But today, His people just throw them out the window and think that they don’t need them. When you take a look at this nation of America, you can see that it’s dying from the inside out. The church system is dying, the political systems are corrupt, the educational systems are decaying, every spectrum of life in this country is disintegrating right before our very eyes, and it’s all a result of people not obeying God’s laws anymore. They think that man’s laws are better. This nation is a nation of humanists who worship and look to man for the answer to all problems. They no longer look to God for help like many of them once did. Their covenant has been broken, and they violate God’s commandments 24 hours a day.
All this has to do with the cause and effect principle that I taught on earlier, as you may recall. I really went into detail on this subject in times past, and this is what we have working today and has been working now for some time, cause and effect. Imagine a homosexual laying in the hospital dying of AIDS: his body is shrinking up, he looks like a skeleton, and eventually he is going to die. Actually all that is lust, the effect of the cause. So what caused it? I’ll tell you what caused it: he stopped being moral, he deviated from God’s standards and laws, and he committed sin wilfully, and now he is paying the price for it. This type of cause and effect can also be seen on a large scale involving the populations of entire nations, just as it can happen on a small scale (like the homosexual dying of AIDS). In every spectrum of life, we see the principle of cause and effect working all throughout the world, whether it be with the Christians or with the non-Christians. Cause and effect is still a basic law of the universe.
Man is called to be faithful to God by submitting to the morals or the morality of God and the ethical standards and laws of God. We are called to do that. We are commanded to do it! And if we don’t obey God, if we rebel, then we become unfaithful, which in turn brings the effect, which will be a curse from God. All kinds of things could start going wrong in your life. Your health could deteriorate, your family could break apart, and yes, God’s curse could cause your finances to dry up. But, the biggest problem of all is when your relationship with God goes down, and God won’t draw near to you anymore. He’s looking to see if you’re going to keep your covenant with Him. Remember the word covenant in Deuteronomy 4:13: this covenant is referring to the covenant you made with God when you got born again. What we’re doing is actually renewing the covenant with God that Adam broke. Adam, who is your real earthly father, that dirty reprobate, is the one whom you came from and from whom you inherit your carnal nature and wicked heart. But when we become a born again Christian, Jesus Christ becomes our new Father, our Spiritual Father. When we get saved, we make a new covenant with Him, and we break the old covenant with death and our old father Adam. Jesus becomes our new Father, our new brother, our new Savior, our new healer, and our new baptizer. When we accept Him, we receive a new covenant of life.
Now why is it when you preach salvation to people they often get mad and upset? Why is it when you tell sinners that they’re going to Hell if they don’t repent that they get real mad at you and want to dismiss Hell like it doesn’t exist? They want to call you a heretic or a lame brain or they curse you out, why? Because the devil doesn’t want them to get saved! The devil wants to keep them in the covenant of death with him. And that’s where people will stay, in the covenant of death, until they repent and cry out to Jesus to save them. All men are suffering from the effects of Adam’s covenant being broken with God. It affected all men—I don’t care what religion or what nationality or what country you’re from, you still live in death until you accept Christ, break the old covenant and make a new covenant of life with Jesus Christ. Then the new covenant starts bringing life and blessings into your life, instead of death and cursings. I can’t understand why people don’t want this? I can’t figure out why they rebel against it. What it comes down to is that the devil has deceived them.
Also, remember that you can break your covenant with God, as a Christian, along the way. Even though you may not say, “Well, I’m tired of serving God; I’m quitting.” Yet through your actions, mental attitude, and desires, you could actually be breaking your covenant of life with God. Yes, you may even be going to church and still break your covenant with God. Few Christians realize that when you neglect to keep God’s standards and laws that you can actually be breaking your covenant and throw away your salvation. Then you will begin to find yourself being cursed by God instead of blessed. We’ve talked to countless Christians that are cursed. Why? Their lives are miserable, and they don’t reflect any of the life, blessings, and abundance of God. They are just miserable—what went wrong? Obviously, somewhere along the way, they broke their covenant with God and entered back into death again, and now they don’t have God’s blessings, goodness, and mercies in their life anymore.
This is a different kind of death than what you feel when you are going through trials and tribulations in spiritual warfare or feeling the spiritual death when you’re walking through the valley of the shadow of death with the Lord. We’re talking about the death that comes when Christians break their oaths with God and backslide into their old sinful habits. We’re talking about spiritual death. When a Christian breaks their covenant with God and goes back into sin then death can literally claim and consume them. Then curses will come upon them from God!
Okay, let’s go to Deuteronomy 5:33 where it says, “Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that you may live and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.” Here again, we see God’s commandments. We see that God wanted His people to keep their covenants with Him so that He could continue to bless them, so that He could prosper them, and so that they could have longer lives filled with His goodness. God wanted His people to live by His code of ethics. God truly does want the best for us, but out of our rebellion and our covenant breaking, we show that we desire death—we can commit spiritual suicide. When people give themselves over to the sodomite television, to viewing all these filthy movies and magazines, and to partaking of all the worldly entertainment they can get, they are actually giving more of their time to those things than they give to God. What they are doing is actually breaking their covenant with God, and they’re throwing away God’s standards and morals. They’re throwing away God’s ethics and they’re saying God’s holy and righteous character doesn’t matter anymore. They are actually saying that the world is more important to them than God.
As you might expect, this offends God. You say, “Well I can’t offend God.” You’re wrong because you can offend God. You can grieve the Holy Ghost, you can grieve God’s Spirit, and if you persist in your sins, dear one, God will dismiss you as none of His—God will break His covenant with you. Yet in reality, we actually caused it by our actions, and we can then feel the effects. It goes back to the cause and effect. We caused it because we gave our hearts over to other lovers and committed every sinful act in God’s face. So, then the only thing God can do, since He is Holy and Righteous and a God of standards, is to get rid of us. Amen?
Let’s go now to Deuteronomy 29:9 where it says, “Keep therefore the words of this covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.” Now here we go again: covenant keeping equals blessings and prosperity. When we talk about prosperity, it doesn’t always just mean money and material prosperity. It can include a lot of things like Spiritual gifts. So we can see that the action or cause of keeping our covenant with God will have the effect of blessings from God. If you recall the book of Joshua when God told them to go in and take the land, you’ll remember some of the wars that they went into and that the outcome of the battle depended on whether or not they were keeping their covenant with the Lord. In fact, the whole book of Joshua was a picture of covenant keeping. I know they blew it a couple of times and failed God, but the overall picture of the whole book was one of covenant keeping and blessings. As long as they kept their covenant with God, Joshua prospered, and they conquered. Of Course, not everything that God wanted was totally done, but regarding Joshua’s lifetime and those that lived after his death, you could say in a sense that it was a picture of the cause and effect principle in action. They kept the covenant, they obeyed God, and the nation prospered.
Then we see the sad point when we go into the book of Judges. There, we find time and time again that God’s people did what they wanted to do. They did what they thought was right in their own eyes. They rebelled and broke their covenant with God. They didn’t even want to hear about the laws of God, and so God cursed them. The whole book of Judges is a book of blessings and cursings based on the cause and effect principle. God’s people would rebel and then get cursed, war after war, captivity after captivity. The enemy was always there to harass them and to inflict evil against them because of their unfaithfulness to God. Yet God was still faithful and merciful, giving them chance after chance because they were His covenant people—although they were breaking their covenant. In several instances ,God raised up judges to rescue His people and bring them out of their backslidings, but invariably, they woyld go right back and do the same thing again just a short time later. This again is a big picture of the cause and effect principle regarding covenant breaking in the book of Judges, and it’s a sad thing.
So it all boils down to whether or not we are faithful to God. If we are faithful, then we are going to have life, but if we are unfaithful, we will receive death. Christians today are always saying that they can’t feel the Lord, “I just feel so dead.” Why? “What have you been eating?” is the first thing I’ll ask them. “Well, I only watch eighteen hours of television a day.” Is that all? Why don’t you just go for the full twenty-four hours? What you eat physically as well as spiritually will affect your body. We have learned this from experience. If you have an eating problem where you’re always eating junk food, you’re not going to feel very good. It’s the same with spiritual food. If you eat the food of the world that’s produced by sodomites and lesbians, humanists, Communists, satanists, atheists and all the unbelieving weirdos in the world, taking it into your bosom all day through the TV and movies and all kinds of worldly entertainment and music, then what do you think is going to happen? When you take all of the filth of the world through your ears and eyes into your mind and heart, you aren’t going to feel so good, right?
Then you have these political activist Christians who get all worked up and decide to fix things their way. They tell you, “Let’s write our congressman!” Go ahead and write your congressman, but too bad he’s busy in the bathhouse committing a homosexual act with Joe the male prostitute. Brother, you might as well not even waste the stamp by writing to your stupid congressman. Why don’t you just get on your knees and pray? Why don’t you get your covenant back with God again? Church people are notorious covenant breakers! I would say that almost every one of the churches in our land today have broken their covenant with God. The truth is made manifest by the way they eat, by the way they work, and by the things they do and the places they go, and by the sins they commit. They aren’t even doing anything that is righteous anymore. And then they have the audacity to shake their self-righteous fingers at those dirty abortionists who are murdering all of those innocent babies—when their own pastors are just as guilty of aborting the born-again babies in their own congregations by not telling them to STAY AWAY FROM SIN!
Look at some of these morons that go to churches today calling themselves Christians. They look like, talk like, and act like sin! They wear the trappings of the world, they listen to the world’s slimy music, they watch the world’s slimy TV programs, and they have all the same mannerisms as the world. The youth look just like hoodlums, the women look like sluts, the men look like pimps and perverts, and even the old men and women can’t wait to jump into bed with the first available person. And how many preachers have we met who are nothing but raving homosexuals or adulterers—I’m telling you the truth tonight—And then they want to shake their finger at the world, condemning those poor sinners who aren’t as spiritual as they are. They will attack the people that don’t even know God, the people that have never even made a covenant with God, and demand that they clean up their act. These hypocritical, carnal Christians want the unsaved to clean up their act so that they (carnal Christians) can partake of their worldly entertainment without feeling too guilty. There is an entire movement in America where the Christians are trying to force the unsaved to clean up their television programs in order to make them presentable, so that when their children sit down in front of the TV, they won’t have to worry about having them exposed to any cursings or live sex acts. What hypocrisy!
Today’s Christian camp is literally reeking with filth; it’s like living in a sewer house. I don’t care if the people look nice, say nice things, drive nice cars, and have lots of money in their pockets. It’s all a show! The truth is that they are filthy! They are continually polluted by the things they view, the things they hear, the things they think about, and the places they go—cause and effect. Then we wonder why there is no revival. We wonder why it’s hard to get people saved. Who would want to join such a bunch of hypocrites anyway? Why should they settle for “sanctified sin” in the Christian” camp when they can have a much better time partaking of the real thing in the world and not worry about being a hypocrite?
Now I’m going to quickly mention three things in closing that have to do with different aspects of Biblical ethics. The first one has to do with motivation: what motivates us to do what we do? Motivation has to do with our motives. Have you let God examine your motives lately? We could be motivated out of pride, we could be motivated out of greed, or we could be motivated out of fear. There are many different things that can motivate us to do religious works. Then we can claim that we are doing them for the Lord when, in fact, He is not even in them. We need to let God search our hearts and examine our motives. If our motives are not in line with God’s desires, then our actions will be unethical from a biblical viewpoint.
Next, we must talk a little about God’s standards, which reflect God’s character. Does God have standards for His people to live by? Of course, He does. God has always had standards, righteous and sanctified, for His people to live by. This brings us back to the question: why do so many Christians want to look like the slimy world? Why do they want to wear all the styles and fashions that identify them with the filthy gangsters, rappers, murderers, adulterers, sodomites, and every other unclean thing? Christians dress up in all the latest styles of the world and fill their houses with all the images and idols of the world. Then, they want to talk about how they serve a holy and righteous God. Something is fishy! Their lives don’t match up to the standard of God. You can’t have a clean camp unless you adhere to a clean standard. You can’t just talk about it; you’ve got to do it.
The last point we need to discuss is application. We’ve got to apply what we know. We’ve got to apply the principles of God. You can’t just say, “Yes, I’ve memorized lots of scriptures, and I’ve read lots of books about God.” You’ve got to apply your knowledge about God so that it will affect your life. Basically, you can know all about Biblical ethics and realize that they are good and true, yet if you don’t apply them to your life, all your knowledge is of no use. How we apply our Biblical ethics also has much to do with each individual situation. Reality teaches us that situations will change, and that is why we must always remain sensitive to the Spirit of God in every situation. We cannot rely on ourselves; we must rely on God and seek His face. He will lead and guide us in every situation, examining our motives, pointing us toward His holy standards, and making sure we apply ourselves toward living a life that is pleasing to Him.