The House of God
Turning the Heart's of the Fathers to the Children

Studio Session 165
Sam Soleyn
02/10/2009

We have looked at the intention of God for creating man, we saw that God made a son when He made Adam; put him in the earth. We saw that the intention behind that was to bring the culture of heaven into the earth by placing a son of the Father into the earth. With that, the house of God came into the earth and the rule of the heavens came into and among mankind, to the realms of mankind. With the fall, we see the introduction of a foreign culture into the plan of God. With the fall, we saw how man separated himself from his Father and how his culture changed from that of representing his Father, to surviving. And we've seen the proliferation of the culture of the orphan distorting the very gospel that man was sent here to present and to maintain. We also saw that at the cross, Jesus came and restored the culture of heaven to the earth by presenting to us, in it's ultimate form, in it's clearest resolution of the picture, that that principle of permitting God to reconcile the world to Himself using the instrumentality of Jesus Christ, using the person of the Lord, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself not counting mens sins against them.” The restoration, however, began at the cross but now was meant to be continued through the church.

So I'd like for us to begin to look at the fullness of the resolution, the essence and the heart of the gospel itself. And I would like to shape this discussion with a reading from the book of Ephesians the third chapter. This speaks of the divine intention of God, from the beginning, to accomplish a certain thing through Christ. Here we are, in Ephesians chapter 3, here the apostle says that he was made an ambassador and an apostle of this gospel to present the good news to the Gentiles and to make plain, pick up in verse 9 of chapter 3, “to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God who created all things. His intent (God's intent) was that now through the church,” now if you think of the word “church” as meaning “ek-lesia”, through the “called out ones”, “now through the 'called out ones' the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly realms according to His eternal purpose which He accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So he's telling us that the intent of God was to show to principalities and powers in the heavenly realms, the manifold wisdom of God. These principalities and these powers in the heavenly realms - areas of rule and rulers themselves in the heavenly realms - judged that God had made a mistake when He chose humans as His heirs. But the intent of God was to show the manifold wisdom of God, the place where all of the wisdom of God came together, the “manifold” of the wisdom of God. And this was to be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly realms and it was to be made known through the called out ones, through the house of God, through the “ek-lesia”. When we translate the word “church” and the word “ek-lesia” much is lost in the meaning because we're predisposed to thinking of church as a building, just as we are predisposed to thinking of the house of God as a meeting place. The house of God is the family of God that He introduced into the earth when He once put Adam, His son, into the earth. So the “ek-lesia”, the called out ones, are being shaped into this house.

So the intention of God is, through His family in the earth, to demonstrate the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and powers in the heavenly realms which were the ones that challenged the decision of God. So it is by and through the house of God that God intends to bring to justice the rebels who challenged - the created beings, the angels - who challenged the authority of God and the rightness and goodness of God to choose humans as His heirs. Now this was a mystery long hidden in God, from ages past. God knew what He was going to do before He made the world. The world would be created as the stage and the setting that would host the evolution of God's purpose. In the fullness of time and when it was necessary, God deposited the Son of redemption, the Son with healing in His wings to rescue the son who by deception had been taken off the track of God's purpose for the very creation of the world.

The present gospel that we preach, which comes out of the Roman gospel, is a continuing emphasis on the preeminence of the church to deliver the message of salvation, meaning that people will be saved from the falleness of Adam, from sin, so that they may go to heaven. Whereas going to heaven is a result of being saved, it is not the essence of the gospel; going to heaven is a happenstance, it's happens because you're saved. But you're really saved from the deception and control that follows deception, of the enemy's craft and you're saved from a mindset that is dominated by the evil one, a mindset of provision and protection as being your goal for being here. You're saved from that, because until you're saved from that, there is no other purpose for being on the earth. If you see that your purpose for being on the earth is to be supplied until you die, then your entire focus will be upon getting your supply. So your work becomes a means for getting your supply, your relationships become a means for your survival, your abilities and your craft, your competence, your ability to manipulate situations for your preservation; that becomes the focus of life itself. And needless to say, when that is the culture even the church is polluted by that culture. Religion is thoroughly polluted by that culture because it seeks only to know what it must do in order to go to heaven; it describes 'being saved' as 'going to heaven', whereas being saved means to be delivered from the control of the lie and by that of course to be delivered from the preoccupation with what you shall eat, what you shall drink or wherewithal you will be clothed. Because when you're delivered from the lie, you can be restored to the place of sonship in which place you then are able to represent your Father which is the very reason that God put Adam in the earth.

So work and vocation and calling then become not a means for personal expression or a means from which you may derive provision and protection. Work, at that point becomes a venue in which God inserts you through whom - you in that situation - He may be free to show His glory, to show His presence that heals, His presence that restores, His presence that rescues all of humanity around you. This is the concept of the kingdom of heaven being as leaven within the dough. So your work progress and your work process is informed by the greater purpose of representing your Father and the creativity and competence within your work process and within your work environment is meant to display God's astounding competence in you and through you to the end that those who see you may see the Father because the Father and you are one. He's appearing through your face and men will repent from their false notions about God when they see the representations of the Father all around them and in their midst doing the things they do but from a higher order; doing what they do with greater creativity; doing what they do with greater insightfulness, doing what they do with stunning morality which is not the morality of convenience but the morality of the heavenly perspective, the culture of heaven being exhibited through you. And whether they approve of you or not, they will be presented with the alternative.

You see this is when and it is how everyone has a ministry. We've made everyones ministry into a church purpose, everyones ministry has to be cleared by what can be put under roof on Sunday morning. What utter rubbish and how perverse is this view because ultimately church systems like this, because it's their opportunity to expand their base of operation through you, all the while letting you think that you have relevance when the only relevance you have is because and the manner in which you are tethered to the maypole of their desires for you. The alternative, and quite contrary to that notion, is that God is present in you to display His glorious self in you and through you and the notion that all of that may somehow be contained in any religious form is, to say the least, ludicrous. And whoever advocates that perspective shows the limitation of their own vision to the slavish will of contemporary Christian religion.

This is how the culture of the orphan has thoroughly infiltrated the church and defines the churches religion rather than the house of God; religion for the purpose of provision and protection, offering you the tidbit of going to heaven if you will do all of this. Rather than that the culture of the heavenly, the culture of the King of heaven, your Father, is put on display through a son whose purpose is to represent the Father in the earth. Now God knew that as the age concludes and concluded that two things would happen; the seed of the culture of the orphan would have matured into full flower, into the tree and into it's full flower and that it would dominate the whole earth. That human culture would be one and the same as the culture of fatherlessness, God knew that. And God knew that mans purpose in the earth would be completely lost unless He moved from the heavens in a certain season to turn the hearts of fathers to children and to have a corresponding response, a resonance that responds and that is that the hearts of the children will be turned to the fathers.

In the United States of America we just elected a fatherless man to the highest office in the land. Fatherlessness has come out of the closet, so to speak, and it's now totally on display. And a fatherless generation responded to him as the image of a father and voted him into office, nearly exclusively so. Now this is not a political comment, these are observations of fact. I'm not commenting on the choice, whether or not this generation should not or should have chosen this man as president, I'm merely commenting on the fact of his fatherlessness and that it is no longer hidden or secret; God has brought into the open the fact of fatherlessness throughout the whole earth. This is an individual but by reason of his prominence he is in a sense the poster child of the concept of fatherlessness. And his appeal to a fatherless generation is equally undeniable.

Now what should we learn from that? We should learn that this thing of the hearts of fathers being turned to children and the hearts of children being turned to fathers is already...the spirit of that is already in the earth. It is appearing, as it so often does, it is appearing in the secular, in the earthly, in the carnal, so that it may be clearly seen by spiritual men and women. We should have seen this coming, we should have known that according to the prophecy of Malachi, the book of Malachi ending the Old Testament concludes with this note of promise, the last words written in Scripture before the announcement that the Son had come into the earth to redeem the race that had come from the first son, the last words, the book ends as it were, the way the Old Testament ends and the way the New Testament begins is with this prophetic declaration. Malachi chapter 4 verse 5 says, “See I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse.”

The curse of the fatherless is already in the earth, undeniably so. Gangs of young people with no connection to the past are now the norm in the earth. In countries such as South Africa, the lack of restraint among young people will turn a simple crime into a vicious murder. A common crime such as a house burglary will routinely escalate into a savage murder; a carjacking will quickly turn into a violent beating and/or murder. The absence of fathers in these nations is a matter of public record. In Western Europe we see gangs of young people going on rampages in the streets of Paris and in Greece, in recent times. This is a worldwide phenomenon of the fatherless becoming a scourge upon nations because of the lack of restraint. But the good news is that God will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers.

In the principle of this President elected by the United States, being fatherless, and appealing to a fatherless generation, in this principal we're observing something that is of great significance and that is that the one who becomes a father is not necessarily the biological father. We're now entering the time when the father is not necessarily the biological father. The President of the United States is undoubtedly a father figure and perhaps more of a father to an entire generation of fatherless people than their actual, physical, biological fathers were or are. Because of the many categories of fatherlessness that we discussed earlier, young people in this generation do not typically feel connected to any kind of father. So it opens the way for the concept of father to be defined differently than a biological Father; it's the hunger in man for a reconnection to God the Father. That's the phenomenon.

So if we read Malachi in which he says, “I will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the children to the fathers,” in many instances it will be the actual physical fathers who are the fathers whose hearts He's turned to the children, but in the majority of cases it will not be that. Another thing that one may observe is that a generation of people in their thirties who are now fathers, are obsessed with the care of their children; the fatherless have become obsessed with the care of their children. They know what formulas to feed to babies, they know what car seats to buy, strollers, they know what clothing to provide, they know what cribs and monitors, all of the paraphernalia. It's interesting to watch this generation just try to do something simple like flying with a family. All of the attendant stuff that they take with them shows that they are obsessed with the physical care of their children. But you know what's absent? You will also see the children of the thirty somethings who are utterly undisciplined, they have no discipline. You'll see them in the grocery stores, you'll see them in public places and they are unruly and completely in control of their parents as a general category. Why? Because a fatherless generation construes discipline as punishment. Why? Because they've not been disciplined themselves.

But this will run it's course as the need to control the behavior of a generation of people asserts itself. But my point is that what is already true is that the hearts of the fathers have been turned to the children of this generation. There's much work to be done but this work...there's a heart for the doing of this work. The most important concept of all that is emerging is because the term “father” is not limited to a biological father, we're going to see spiritual fathers become the real answers. Spiritual fathers, fathers who love sons who are part of a spiritual household.

So in the next broadcast I want to pick up the matter of spiritual fathers as we begin to look at what God is doing to fulfill the need of a generation with the gospel. The provision of spiritual fathers for orphans is the solution that God always contemplated from the very beginning because that solution is a one-to-one correlation with the problem; the problem and the solution are an exact match. If fatherlessness is the scourge of the earth, then what would be the gospel in that context? And God foreknew that when Adam separated himself from his Father, that the culture of the fatherless would not become static but that it would proliferate and define human culture. And to rescue human beings from that fact, God would have to deploy a solution from heaven into the earth.

The point of it all is to restore Adam and the progeny of Adam to God the Father. For the gospel is the gospel of how we have been made to be the sons of God. John would put it this way, “Behold the manner of love,” behold the quintessence of the love of God, “Behold what manner of love”, (behold what quintessence of the love) “Behold what manner of love God the Father has bestowed on us that we might be called sons of God.” That is the gospel. That was the point of dispute between the angels and God; they rebelled because they did not think that humans should be the heirs of God. God put a son into the earth and brought His house into the earth and brought the culture of heaven into the earth and inserts Himself in and through human beings to display the glory of His love for mankind. Eventually this gospel would have to address the intended beneficiaries and the fashion of the address has to be, has to be, the vision of God the Father presented again in the earth through human fathers. This will not be limited to natural fathers, this will be the product of spiritual fathers.

So we'll talk about spiritual fathers in the next broadcast. I'm Sam Soleyn and I'll talk to you then, bye bye.