The False Prophetic Movement
It’s time now to focus our attention on making some more critical distinctions between the priesthood of the flesh and the priesthood of Jesus Christ. The church will not be able to return to the priesthood of Jesus Christ in full confidence of His redemption unless we do a thorough disambiguation of the false priesthood and examine how it got such a strong foothold in the hearts of believers.We said that true prophecy is a confirmation of Jesus Christ and that the Spirit of God always confirms this utterance by providing the fullness of Christ for your experience. By this witness of the Spirit, we are mindful of the simplicity of serving God by Jesus Christ, for when we touch God with the Second Covenant priesthood tools, we are touching God with Jesus Christ, which assures our faith of competency in Him, and our joy is made full in Him.
In addition to this, we experience the Holy Spirit daily giving substance to our hope, we enter into His rest, His holy knowledge counsels our heart, we experience His regenerative work within, and our conscience is purged. Christ left this legacy through His death and then rose from the dead to personally oversee this work and make it living by the Holy Spirit. This is our expectation, that as we serve God at the Altar of Christ through prophecy and prayer, He will keep His promise to love us, manifest Himself to us, and transform our soul to the image of the Son.
The Jezebelian Priesthood
When the church left her first love (Jesus), she also left her first works, and doctrine and function turned inward and focused upon the flesh. The tool of prophecy also followed suit with the same fleshly pattern; the flesh became the focus and direction of prophecy along with the themes and issues of life, from which the Jezebelian Priesthood emerged.
Jesus identified the Jezebelian Priesthood to the apostle John, warning the church that such ministries seduce Christians, teaching them a faith that profits the flesh, but not the soul. Jesus said, “Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee, because thou sufferest that woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols” (Rev.2:20).
There are several things here given for our discernment. First, those who practice the Jezebelian Priesthood commit spiritual fornication; they practice a spiritual contact that is for the purpose of pleasure, rather than the building God’s house by the Spirit. Secondly, their god is their belly, and they mind earthly things (Phil.3:19). Thirdly, with these earthly things, they seduce God’s people, schooling them (teaching) in a prophetic ministry that relocates confidence from the true gospel of Jesus Christ to another. Consequently, as Paul said, “They are the enemies of the cross of Christ” because this knowledge does not carry our redemption (Phil.3:18). This is how Satan works prophecy.
The Jezebelian Priesthood is a priesthood of the flesh, demonstrating a three-prong thrust:
(1) it sets spiritual value in the gifts of the flesh (man’s signature gifts and talents) for which they seek God’s sanctification (which profanes the name of the Lord);
(2) it follows a Jesus that speaks into people’s lives about their personal needs, lack, and fears; and
(3) it seeks to reclaim the promises of God without covenant.
Those who buy into the Jezebelian Priesthood continue to fall victim to the psychology of their own emotions, prophesying to relieve their conscience of guilt, to dissuade their emotions, and to restructure their thinking, trying to sort out God’s judgments, while desperately claiming His promises.
Their prophecies are reflective of deep soul-searching questions regarding sin and holiness; they offer explanations that make sense of their suffering and give instruction on how to remove the barriers of Satan from their pleasures. These symptoms are reflective of the Jezebelian Priesthood and her efforts to add to the puzzle of her own psychology. The Jezebelian Priesthood is not the priesthood of Jesus Christ, for the priesthood of God cannot function with the tokens of the world.
The spirit of the world has long taken the grace of God to bring it down to the level of one’s own psychology and cleverly develops a false priesthood for its utterance and reciprocation. Those who minister by the spirit of this world loop themselves and those who hear them to a continued experience of death.
Those engaged with a fleshly priesthood cannot discern what they are struggling with. Their struggle has to do with resolving the conscience and therefore their priesthood is always trying to puzzle together their reason and give value to their suffering. Their suffering does not have anything to do with God’s longsuffering, but with their ignorance—the conflict of their conscience and circumstances.
The struggle of the righteous has to do with choices of faith and fruit bearing. We enter into God’s longsuffering. We are dealing with God’s longsuffering because of the presence of death. God knows that the presence of death challenges faith, and He frustrates the imagination so man will put his trust in God and His covenant rather than circumstances.
Circumstances are loud because they beat on all five senses. But the word of God is a still small voice which is heard by those of faith. The Lord is longsuffering with the will because He knows the will struggles between two kingdoms. The Lord is longsuffering with anything less than Himself, and as we engage with Him, He accepts that which is in reciprocation of Him only.
When those of the flesh do not understand the longsuffering of the Lord, they translate everything into the suffering of their aspiration. Now what is the result of that? They are always fighting against anger, bitterness, malice—they are fighting against death with their own willpower, trying to find peace by this form of leverage. And what follows that? Will worship and self-denial and false humility. And they boast, “I am suffering for God,” wanting to attribute it to their spirituality, and as Jesus said, “They have their reward.”
Jesus knew that false prophets would arise to speak in His name and that Satan would use them to turn away the hearts of many and said, “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” (Mt.7:21-23).
Here again we see so clearly how Jesus Himself said there would be those who would prophesy in His name and cast out devils and do miracles in His name and claim to know Him, but He does not know them. That has to be the most earth-shaking and devastating thing you could ever hear from the mouth of God about your faith: “I never knew you. You said you were prophesying in My name, but you were merely speaking what came up from your own heart, all the while working with Satan’s knowledge and Satan’s tools, with seducing spirits, not My Holy Spirit.”
This pseudo priesthood is called “the priesthood of the flesh” because it centers on praising God by the wisdom of the world and through the works of the flesh. We know that the world by its own wisdom knows not God (1Cor.1:21), and it is because the world’s wisdom confirms the power of the imagination and teaches men to lay hold of the promises of God by their own aspirations and principles.
On the other hand, the wisdom of God confirms the power of Christ for faith and teaches by grace and truth to lay hold on Jesus Christ, who is the promise of God. There is a big difference between these two perspectives. The former wisdom comes from beneath and witnesses of man’s survival needs, while the latter wisdom is from above and witnesses to Jesus Christ.
The scriptures declare that we cannot know God by the wisdom of the world, which directs faith by aspiration and principle. When faith follows your principle, then pride is your shield, and you live in the fear of man and by the things that flatter the heart. But when faith follows the truth of Jesus Christ, then grace is your shield, and you live by the power of the Spirit in the fear of God. So you can see how important it is that your faith be set squarely in Jesus Christ, for that is where your faith will be strong.
When God said, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked” (Jer.17:9), He was speaking of the manner in which the heart reflects its own counsel for false equity. Christians have long been vulnerable to Satan who moves the waters of the soul to excite its passions, while remaining cloaked behind meaningless psychology.
Christians do not desire that experience, but were given that education. God is healing the breach of many generations and now establishing the confidence of the church in the steward of His grace.
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