PROPHECY THROUGH IDOLS

PROPHECY THROUGH IDOLS

by Marty Gabler

SEEC Ministries International PO Box 2655 Spring,TX 77383-2655

[This article has been transcribed from a message preached by the author.]

BEFORE LAUNCHING

This message is preparatory to what God is going to do at this launching point. We can talk about having completed a spiritual work, we can talk about having survived this or that, how God has called a certain church or ministry into being and the blessing of God is on it but unless we have the proper paradigm, the proper understanding, the proper openness for what God is going to do from this point on, we’ve just spun our wheels. If we go no further we’ve got a car with a powerful motor and a loud muffler but no transmission.

OK, WHERE ARE THE IDOLS?

Eze 14:1, then came the certain of the elders of Israel unto me and sat before me and the word of the Lord came unto me saying, son of man these men have set up their idols in their heart. Where are your idols? They’re in your heart! The heart is the seat of the passions; the heart is the seat of decision-making, the heart of the seat of your value system. They have set their idols up in their heart, they didn’t even have to go out and chop a tree down and carve an idol, they didn’t even have to go and find a piece of stone somewhere and make a statue out of it, they already had their idols in their heart. And we Americans and we Pentecostals, we Charismatics of this 21^st century are so proud of our ourselves because we are so far removed from the ignorance of people in far away places that actually have wood and stone idols still today; we are so proud we are not like that. And we are absolutely right, we are not like that. We don’t have stone and wood idols; our idols are in our heart where nobody can see them quite so easily. Until it comes time for dedication, until it comes time for commitment, then those idols withhold commitment, those idols withhold dedication, those idols withhold the action that it takes to carry out the mandate of Christ in this earth. They are unseen until the time of dedication; they are unseen until the time of “put the goods where your mouth is.” A ministry can become an idol, one’s eschatology, a pursuit for the cause of good can become an idol, church work also and endlessly spending oneself in behalf of others.

Verse 3 – son of man these men have set up idols in their heart and put the stumbling block of their iniquity before their face. Who did this? The devil isn’t mentioned here, the devil’s bored; he’s got nothing to do with what is going on here in Ezekiel 14. The word of God to the prophet is these men have set up idols in their own hearts and they have put the stumbling block of their perverseness of their iniquity before their face. No devil has done it, no horror of Babylon or Hollywood. Las Vegas hasn’t done it, the greed of Wall Street has not done it, they have done it themselves. It was a matter of choice, a matter of choosing.

IDOLS BEFORE THE FACE

David said in Ps 27:8 you said unto me Lord God, seek my face and my heart said, your face will I seek. But if we’ve got idols up before our face we can go through the gymnastics of seeking God’s face all we want to and it will always be shrouded from us. Face in that context means person. I will seek your person. The face tells all. David said, Thy face will I seek but these men in Ezekiel have put their iniquity before their face, should I be inquired of at all by them? (v.3) Is anybody going to inquire of God? There are persons who will try to find a prophet to say what they want him to say. More than once I have stood before people and half-way through the prophecy, they angrily stopped me and demanded I stop that prophecy and prophesy to them concerning what they wanted to hear.

When we put idols before our face, that means that the thing or cause we put before our face is blocking the proper view of God and what He is doing. When that idol is before our face, God’s voice gets filtered through it. How can we properly identify what God is saying and what He is doing if we have an idol before our face? Then every prophecy we get, every word of knowledge, word of wisdom, the council we receive from others, the sermons we hear all seem to miraculously confirm what we have been wanting all along. One Monday morning I received a disconcerting phone call from an angry pastor. He immediately expressed his displeasure with my ministry at his church the day before. When I inquired as to why he was so upset, he informed me that a lady in his church had told him that I said she could get a divorce. When I prophesied to her over the microphone (I did not speak to her in private), the word dealt with coming change in her relationship in the Body of Christ. Nothing was said about a change in relationship to her husband, let alone a change for the negative which would violate a scriptural principle. She heard what I said through her preoccupation. I have seen people hold up the idol of “ministry” and “church building” before their eyes, disregard the principles of relationship and covenant in God’s Word, split a church and go a few miles down the road and start another church with sheep they have stolen.

The idols Israel went after were not hideous and grotesque. Consider how attractive the golden calf of Exodus 32 must have been; plus there is the fact of its costliness to the people for they donated their personal jewelry to make it. Each of them had made a personal investment in something that Moses was preaching against. The fine craftsmanship that went into the brazen serpent, that caused it to gleam when lifted up, was most acceptable to the point that Israel began to worship the brazen serpent. Hezekiah had to destroy it (2K 18:4) after Moses (Num 21:8) was commanded by God to have it made. Initially it was used to the benefit of Israel but became a religious practice that was the source of judgment upon the nation.

THE IDOL THAT REPLACES JESUS

Any of it that leads away from Jesus Christ is error, whether spiritism, altruism, gnosticism, legalism, Pharaseeism, Judaism, humanism, occultism, modern religion, personal experiences, unexplainable spiritual experiences, ANY OF IT that replaces, displaces or distracts from JESUS is ERROR. A combining of any of the above with Jesus is evidence of a disbelief and/or mistrust concerning whether JESUS is sufficient as holy scripture doubtlessly shows Him to be. There is a humanism (and its not just found out there in the disbelieving world—it will dress up and go to church on Sunday) that does not mind embracing a generic view of God and even some form of worship but will not stand for a personal experience with a personal Lord and Savior who cannot but represent and be the source of a righteousness that is not by works but by grace through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord (and without faith, it is impossible to please God). Any of the distractions or replacements (Eze 14:7) become idols for they replace personal interaction with the person of Jesus. Christian or Jewish icons, artifacts and trappings that get our attention, affection or devotion are also idols. If people persist in devoting their time, effort and energy pursing those things, they will un-embrace the God of their salvation and embrace the idol (Eze 14:11). According to biblical theology, it is the Holy Spirit working through the Word that reveals Jesus to us, not icons and artifacts (Jn 16:13-14).

There is a spirit in this world that is trying to bring in idols to replace the supremacy of JESUS and it is using end-time theology. JESUS is the ONLY acceptable sacrifice for the remission of sin and NONE come to the Father but THROUGH HIM. In the book of Revelation it is not a general concept of a loving and forgiving and all-embracing God that every knee bows before and every tongue confesses before, it is the risen LAMB of GOD, THE victorious LAMB OF GOD.

They are not just Gentile knees that bow in that context. They are knees of every tongue, nation and tribe, every ethnic group, every bloodline, every representation of everything that can be called mankind. They all shall bow and confess their total need of Jesus, the Son of the Living God, the victorious LAMB. There will not be LAMB blood acceptable for some and red heifer blood acceptable for others. Both David (Ps 40:6f) and Paul (Rom 3:24-26; Gal 3:14; Eph 1:7; Heb 9;12) agree in the Holy Bible that bulls and goats cannot take away sins. Read Hebrews 10;4-12. JESUS did not just bear Gentile sin, He bore ALL sin. When Jesus said, “I am THE Way, THE Truth and THE Life” He was not just talking to a handful of radical western, modern evangelicals. That message was for ALL people no matter their ethnicity.

IDOLS, DRAMA AND PURPOSE

There are those who lack a satisfying degree of drama in their lives so they devote themselves to the service of an idol. I have seen multimillionaire celebrities who are so dissatisfied with their lives and their careers that they go undercover with spy cameras and photograph the handling of cattle prior to auction so that they can then lobby before congress to get legislation passed for better treatment of pre-sale cattle. They value animals more than they do people and unborn babies.

Some folks may not have discovered their motivation or gifting (they may not even believe in such a thing) so they find a cause. It is possible to fail in discovering who one is in Christ and find a cause that will fill its place. They financially support it and use Christian media to gather a support group together for it of people who are of like sympathies. People can be rallied to a cause and the more dramatic and urgent it is, the more support it gets. There will ever be someone who will rally people around him to help perpetuate his paradigm. When someone doesn’t have a paradigm born of the Word and the Spirit, they will fill the void with someone else’s paradigm.

People are ever looking for purpose. Perhaps, someday, there will be a group of people who are completely taken with Jesus Christ and will rally folks to focus on Him and His Kingdom purposes. Perhaps there will come a day when guilt trips will not be put upon Christians in various areas of the country because they do not support this effort or that effort, because finally such an emphasis has been put upon Jesus that one and all end up in proper relationship with Him, and those where He has set them in, and begin to imitate Him rather than imitating the Pharisees who hated Him.

THE NEW TESTAMENT EXPLANATION

I’m going to take you to the place in the New Testament where Eze 14:4 was illustrated. Israel, in their religion, was worshipping their religion, not God. Anybody will tell you that the center of Jewish worship was the temple.

John chapter 2:12 …after this he went down to Capernaum, he and his mother and brethren, his disciples they continue not there many days, the Jews Passover was at hand and Jesus went up to Jerusalem and found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves and the changers of money sitting. Make a note of where they were: in the temple. Jesus faced them in their beloved icon of religion. Their identity was in the temple. They went into the temple and found those that sold oxen and sheep and doves and the changers of money. In other words, it was a modern religion. We’re seeing the first Jack in the Box and Burger King right here. The Old Testament sacrificial system was based upon the shed blood of Jesus. .

There is no effort to it, just bring your credit card in here, we will check your credit card out and if your credit’s good we’ll give you a lamb, we’ll give you a bullock, we’ll give you an oxen, we’ll give you a dove, whatever your particular willingness is today. There’s no problem right here; you will come in fresh, your deodorant will still be working, you won’t be sweaty, there’s no labor here, there’s no effort involved here. You can just walk a few easy steps from our booth right here, and you can go make your sacrifice and you won’t even smell like an animal. No effort involved here, no commitment, you don’t have to hear the voice of the set-in man, you don’t have to obey his instructions or listen to him. Jesus authoritatively knocked over the tables. He cleared the whole place of all of the idolaters. Verse 16 says: and said unto them that sold doves, take these things hence, make not my Father’s house a house of merchandise. There’s only one price and it’s been paid at Calvary. It’s the blood of Jesus Christ.

Verse 18, then answered the Jews and said unto him, what sign shall thou do and Jesus had only one answer for them, and this is where the Jews got prophesied to through their idols. You know what their idol was? Their idol was the temple and Judaism, i.e., their religion and its practices. It is possible to reach a point where you don’t need God’s presence. You can just follow rote and formula and be counted most religious. In Eze 14 God warned Israel that if they continued in their idolatrous ways and continued to search out prophets that prophesy what they wanted them to prophesy, He would prophesy to them through their idols. One does not have to search out an actual prophet per se. Having itching ears, we can just heap unto ourselves teachers and end up with idols that prophesy to us. Continuance in idolatrous and perverse ways will bring undesirable results.

THE PROPHET ATTEMPTED TO PROPHESY UNPOPULAR TRUTH

Jesus was standing in the temple. He did not give them even the slightest hint He was talking about his body. He was prophesying about His death and resurrection but because they held their idol up before their face, they could only hear Him through that idol. They could plainly hear the accusations that said He was blaspheming. They could plainly hear the political implications of His being a king and accuse Him accordingly. All of those things served them very handily so that they were able to easily reject Jesus. Their religion was their idolatry and the physical location where they said their religion could only be practiced was their idolatry. That sort of thing doesn’t get very personal. I’m trying to be plain because we’ve tended to cover up the biblical message and we end up with people whose lives are being destroyed because they are getting prophesies coming to them through their idols. God was trying to bring the truth to Israel but Israel had their idol up to their ear so the word of God had to be filtered through their paradigm.

I had been waiting on this answer to Ezekiel 14 for 8 years. On the Sunday I preached this message I had been on the floor on my face through most of the worship service. While on the floor I saw Jesus. He was standing in the temple next to a column. The crowd stood before Him. His hands were hanging down by His side. He turned His palms outward and said, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” There would be no purpose in Jesus raising His hands to point out the building and proclaim to indicate to the Jews that He would destroy the building He stood in. It would be just like the character of God for Jesus to turn His palms outward and make that obvious proclamation about His person, His death and resurrection.

HELLO, IS ANYONE LISTENING?

Jesus was standing in the temple saying to them, destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days. The only way Israel would allow God to speak to them was through their idolatry. Jesus didn’t tell them that the temple which took them 46 years to build would be rebuilt by Him in three days. He didn’t say that; he did not mislead those people. He was speaking the truth. They were just so imbibed and entrenched in their personal paradigm of what God’s presence and God’s house was that they could not see that Jesus was the embodiment of the Father. They demanded He show them the Father. He said, “Look at me. Here He is,” and they said, “No thanks, we prefer Judaism.” Our eschatology is much preferable to what we might have to deal with if we think about changing.

Jesus stood there in bodily form and said, destroy this temple; that’s where they were headed, they already tried to stone him. They had murder in their heart at that time. Jesus told Judas, that which thou doest, do quickly. He didn’t tell Judas, “Don’t do this, please, think about it, go get it analyzed for $200/hr and I’ll pay the bill and maybe you can get over your mother’s treatment of you and your father’s rejection of you.” “Please don’t reject me, Judas.” Judas had it in his heart and it was revealed to Jesus by the Spirit suddenly in a word of knowledge and Jesus said, “You’re the one; that which thou doest, go quickly. Jesus was saying to the Jews, “You’ve got murder in your heart standing right here in the house of God. This house that you claim you love so much, this house that is your actual idol is right where you’ve got murder in your heart.”

The Jews had a concept of the body being sacred. If they wanted to, they could have heard what Jesus was talking about. The Jews were warned on more than one occasion that they had ears but were refusing to hear. They understood very well the sanctity of the body. They had all manner of ceremonial washings in their religion and various ritual cleansings concerning the body. Paul didn’t bring brand new revelation when he said your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit; he was just confirming.

ENLARGING THE TENT

He whips them all out of the temple and we have got to go back to Isaiah 54 to find the message of the Lord here and it doesn’t say, “Get ready for a double blessing, get ready for the year of jubilee to overtake you.” I’ve been told, “Oh, Brother Marty, it’s the year of jubilee and I’m going to get land that I never had and I’m going to get money and cars and stuff. The Bible tells me if you don’t pay tithes and you don’t sow, you don’t have anything coming. Some are waiting for a free ride, waiting for a magical calendar date to come by so their life will be different than it is now and they don’t have to do a thing but look for it. Someone might get prophesied to through their idol. Ignore the tithing scriptures, ignore the sowing and the giving scriptures and the offering scriptures, just ignore all that stuff and focus in on that 50 year jubilee thing. Go ahead and confess it, keep it up, turn the television on one more time with your favorite Christian hero and shout around your living room confessing the year of jubilee and see how much good it does you.

We can’t make religion easy, for if we read the Bible we find it says in Isaiah 54:2 enlarge the place of thy tent. It doesn’t say hold your hands out and receive something like somebody’s going to hand you a book or something and you just stand there and God will put goodies in your hands and he will give you all kinds of wonderful stuff. That’s the understanding some folks came out of some seminars with. You just have to stand there with your sweet little hands just turned up and your heavenly grandfather that rocks in a rocking chair and doesn’t have any standards of righteousness or holiness or anything for you to hold to, will just bless you.

The prophet Isaiah says, enlarge the place of your tent. Before they put their tent down they cleaned off a place. The area was not full of animal droppings. They didn’t bring all kinds of animals in the tent area and let them leave their uncleanness. They didn’t let the TV leave its immorality in the living room and let Hollywood and the unethical politicians and everybody else just leave their uncleanness and expect God’s blessing regardless. The floor gets cleaned up before the tent gets put down. And if you are going to have an enlarged tent, you are going to have to enlarge the area of cleanness. You would think by now, the year 2004, we wouldn’t have to be worried about this holiness stuff. Man, that’s all passé stuff; all that old legalistic preaching and everything. The reason why preachers came down so hard with legalism was because humans are extremists. We go to extremes so that God has to bring a fresh revelation to us in an extreme form and to an extreme extent and intensity before we will even begin to look at it.

Enlarge the place of thy tent and let them stretch forth the curtains of thy habitation. (Isa 54:2). Who is “them?” Let “them” stretch forth the place of thy inhabitation, who is them? “Them” is the children in verse 1. You’re part of something bigger than you are! I said you are part of something that’s a whole lot bigger than you are and that’s the destiny of God in his Son Christ Jesus and His Son will have many children without number. How can that be? God the Father is going to see to it that His Son is rewarded because of His obedience so that His seed will be without number. That wasn’t Abraham’s physical seed He was talking about, it was those little Jesus’ called you and I right here in the 21^st century and our children (Gal 3:29). Let them stretch forth the curtains. We need a bigger theology, a bigger paradigm, a bigger view of God because of what God is going to do in this end time harvest. We will not reap the end time harvest with the old tent!

Isaish says spare not. What does “spare not” mean? It means don’t lay any boundaries out there for God is limitless. Go with the limitlessness of God for once in your life. If we don’t do it now, when will we? We’re conservative here Brother Marty, we don’t just do stuff. We vote on things after a long time of debate and we think about it and we discuss it and we’re still over here on this side of Jordan in Moab and the rest of Israel is already across Jordan fighting the battle of Jericho. And we’re too conservative and thoughtful to just go on and get across Jordan and see the walls of Jericho come down.

Father, I pray that your Holy Spirit would move upon us today, that you would not have to prophesy to us through our idols, that we would stop longing for prophets to come to us and say what we want to hear them prophesy but that we would hear your word that is already written. We don’t need prophets to come prophesy to us what we’ve never had prophesied to us before because your Word has already promised more than our minds can conceive. I pray that you would help us clean up the ground so that we could stretch out our tents. Come fire of the Holy Ghost, come burning fire that burned in the wilderness and burned over Israel, come and burn us today. I pray get us to the place to where our temples and our idols would not be put up before our face but we would come sit in your lap face to face, oh God. I pray now that our goose bumps would cease and that the fire would begin to burn; that we would go many levels beyond goose bumps.

A PROHETIC ACT

Perhaps it would be good if we did a prophetic act. The Bible says cast aside the things that easily beset. We need to cast aside idols. Let the Holy Spirit show you what your idols are. When we lay those idols aside we don’t want to hear anything but what His holiness brings to us. I don’t want to hear what my soul wants. David said in the Psalms, “Soul, you will praise the Lord” (Ps 103:1). David commanded his soul to praise the Lord. I think if David could command his soul to praise the Lord, we can command our soul not to speak to us outside of the purposes of God. Soul, I’m not going to listen to you. I will listen to the spirit of God. I will listen to the Word of God. I’m casting aside idols today in a prophetic act. I’m laying aside those idols.

The Bible says, strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. (Matt 7:14, KJV) That word there that describes the narrowness of the gate means this: that the gate is difficult to get to by virtue of all of the stuff that’s around it. Who put those idols before their face in the book of Ezekiel? These were religious folks who attended church regularly. They are the ones that put the idols up in their face. They are the ones that make the gate narrow. God doesn’t make the gate narrow, we make it narrow by all the junk we stack around it and put in our own pathway. We have not tripped over anything that God put before us; we have tripped because we put stuff out there in front of us but the way must be clean. Enlarge your tent, make it clean, clear it out. Make the floor bigger, sweep the boulders and get all the refuse out of the way so there is nothing to trip over, so your tent cords can be stretched and your curtains can be added to the tent. You know what they had to do to add curtains to the tent? They had to kill animals and tan the hides. They didn’t go down to Wal-Mart and buy a few yards of canvas. They had to chase animals down, kill them and skin them. No animal is stupid enough to stand there with you with a knife in your hand and let you kill him, you are going to have to chase him down and tackle him like a football player and you will have to have your brother-in-law come over, even if you don’t like him, and he’s going to have to help you hold that thing down while you kill it and while you skin it and then momma’s going to have to clean the hide and stretch it out on the ground to dry.

There are some posters that need to come down off the wall. There are some magnets that need to come off of the icebox and there are some channels that are frequented on the TV that need to not be frequented. And there is some conversation that goes on at weddings and bridal showers and lingerie showers and bachelor parties that have no business tainting our tents. There are some jokes that need to get cleaned up before we can stretch out our tent, before God can move in. We can’t come in here and fall on the floor and shake and shiver and speak in tongues and then take that to a tent that has refuse all over it.

There’s a generation that’s being taken out of the way, a generation that’s held up their idols before their faces and there is a prophetic generation that is rising up and saying, “We want none of that lifeless, ineffectual, limited-tent religion.” “We want the clean floor tent. We are not going to stick up some idol before our face so we cannot see God clearly.”

(This article has been taken from SEEC Magazine. Email us for a free copy.)