Episode 4: Priests of the Kingdom
Season 1 · Episode 4
Priests of the Kingdom: Embracing Your Divine Calling to Govern and Cleanse
Show Notes
In this episode, Amy and Justin Howard trace the biblical foundations of healing and deliverance through the lens of identity, exploring what it means to be priests. Beginning in the garden of Eden, moving through the Levitical priesthood, John the Baptist, and Jesus as the great high priest, they show how the calling to bring heaven and earth together belongs not to a professional class but to every ordinary follower of Jesus. It is a rich, story-filled conversation about who we truly are, and how contagious holiness now flows outward through us into the world.
In This Episode
- Our ministry of healing and deliverance flows first from who we are, our identity as priests, not merely from what we are called to do.
- Adam and Eve were the first priests of Eden, made to tend, govern, cleanse, and commune with God in the heaven and earth place.
- The Levitical priesthood created a little Eden among Israel, offering atonement, diagnosing what separated people from God, and interceding, as when Aaron stood between the living and the dead in Korah's rebellion.
- John the Baptist took priestly ministry out of the temple to the Jordan, clearing away shame so people could encounter Jesus without hiding.
- Jesus, the great high priest in the order of Melchizedek, reversed the old system: holiness now moves outward and cleansing itself becomes contagious.
- Jesus commissioned ordinary disciples as priests, releasing the temple into the bodies of believers who carry contagious holiness into the world.
- For the first centuries of the church, everyday people, moms and dads, prayed for healing and deliverance, until we drifted toward wanting professionals to do the hard work for us.
Going Deeper — Discussion Questions
- The hosts distinguish between who we were created to be and what we are called to do. Where in your own life do you tend to find your identity more in your roles and career than in who God says you are?
- Adam and Eve were given authority to tend, govern, and cleanse the garden. What does it look like for you to exercise that kind of priestly stewardship in your own family, neighborhood, or community?
- Atonement is described as at-one-ment, bringing God and humans together. Where do you sense distance between yourself and God right now, and what might be keeping you at arm's length?
- John the Baptist made rooms inhabitable again so people could approach Jesus without shame. How does shame drive you out of relationship, and how might you help clear the way for others to draw near?
- Jesus flips the old pattern so that holiness becomes contagious rather than uncleanness. How does believing that holiness now flows outward from you change the way you approach hurting people?
- The episode notes our tendency to crave professionals to do the hard spiritual work for us. Where are you tempted to hand off the ministry of prayer and healing rather than step into it yourself?
- James insists that Elijah was a human just like us and calls ordinary believers to pray for the sick. What would it take for you and your group to practice that kind of confident, everyday faith this week?
Full Transcript
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0:03Introduction
Welcome to Between Heaven and Earth. We're your hosts, Justin and Amy Howard, husband and wife and parents to six amazing boys. We're church planters, coaches, and leaders of a mission agency right here in beautiful New England. We're thrilled to have you join us. Together, we will discover what it means to be a follower of Jesus bringing heaven and earth together in your family, neighborhood, and community. In each episode, we'll explore how to cultivate an understanding of what the Spirit of God is doing in and around us. Our goal is to empower you to thrive in the collision of kingdoms and join Jesus in his great project of restoration until his glorious return.
0:50Discovering Our Identity as Priests
This podcast is brought to you by Encounter Culture Mission Collaborative, a mission agency dedicated to working with ordinary followers of Jesus to mend, make, and multiply disciples right where they are. If you enjoy our conversations, please like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. Let's dive in. Welcome back, listeners. We're so glad that you joined us again for episode two of Between Heaven and Earth. And we're actually going to be jumping into a conversation today, which is all about the scriptural foundations for healing and deliverance. But we're going to take a little bit of a different tack, and we're going to drill down into our identity as priests.
And I think that this is one of the things that we don't touch on too much in the actual training, because there's just so much here. There's so much wealth in what we're going to talk about today. And we're really excited to bring you this content. Because the more that we walk in the power and the reality of our identity, the more power and love we're going to see flow through us to people around us. Yeah, and I think there's a difference between who I am, like what I was created to be and will always be in a sense as a human, and the unique kind of gifts I have, and then the calling that I'm living into, what my career is, the stuff that I like, the stuff that I don't.
And what we want to kind of look at today is more who we are, actually. So this ministry of healing and deliverance, I believe, is in the same party as the conversation of who we actually are. Not just what am I called to do. Right, right. Because it's not like God is just moving chess pieces around on a chess board. We're not automatons. God has actually recreated us to be someone. Yeah. In our sphere of influence. And he's just not sending us out just to do stuff. We are something. Yeah, and some of us will be really good at doing that a certain way. Some of us are called to teach, some of us are called to serve in different capacities.
Some of us have unique gifts of healing and of deliverance. But I believe that there is an overarching reality of being that we need to look at when we consider who we are on the earth as priests. Yeah, so that's what we're going to look at today. This idea of the priesthood of all believers was something that was brought to the fore in the Reformation. Now, of course, you see it in Scripture. And Scripture was written in the first 200 years of Christianity. The New Testament. Yeah, the Old Testament, of course, is written far earlier than that. But this idea of the priesthood of all believers kind of floated to the top. Floated to the top during the Reformation.
Martin Luther, he was a German monk, priest, in the Roman Catholic Church. He saw the abuses of the Roman Catholic Church, and so he nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, and the rest is history. And he began to write prolifically on our identity as the righteousness of God in Christ. And he began to write on the priesthood of all believers. So what does that mean? Where did the notion of priesthood come from? Yeah, so that started way before Luther, or even before the New Testament. The idea of being priests, I believe, is written into humanity. I believe it's part of the telos of being human.
And when you mean telos, you're talking about, like, this is what we will be forever. Yeah. This is what we're—this is the goal. This is what we're living into. We're living into the future. That's right. This is our nobility. Right, right. But you were made for this. You were made to be this. And I actually think that the first time you see evidence of that written into the created world is Genesis 3. I think the first time that you see, well, Genesis 2 and Genesis 3, so God created humans to tend and govern the created world.
You can read about it in Genesis 1 and 2, that he set the first man and woman in a beautiful garden, and he gave them the task of governing as an extension of their relationship with him. So they're in communion with him, and they extend that relationship in good governance over the created world. And the first time I think that we see one specific facet of the priesthood that I really think matters a lot to healing and deliverance ministry, the facet of cleansing, is actually in Genesis 3. And we only really notice it because of its absence. Mm-hmm. So in Genesis 3, there's a serpent in the garden. And we're given to understand that the serpent is crafty.
It looks like somehow Satan himself has taken up residence in this talking snake that back then sounds like they had feet. Yeah. So more of a big long lizard or something. I don't know. Because then he was cursed to lie on his belly. Because he was cursed to lie on his belly, yeah. You can read it in Genesis 3. But so there's this witness of deception and corruption in the garden. And it's saying things that are counter to what God had commanded the first man and woman. And it also just drives them out of intimate, trusting relationship with God and toward self-governance, toward, like, humans are God, right?
7:14Adam and Eve, Priests of Eden
So the snake comes and says, the serpent comes and says, lies to Eve, oh, you're not gonna die if you disobey God. You can be like God. And I believe in that moment that the authority the man and woman had to govern creation was fully intact. And they could have picked that snake up and brought it out of the garden. Yeah, they could have kicked him out of the garden. They could have kicked him out. Now, just wait. So it's interesting because you're talking about governing. So that's a part of the priesthood. So many Old Testament scholars would see Adam and Eve as the priests of Eden. Yeah. So, and Eden as a form of the temple.
So it's the precursor to the temple, because it's the heaven and earth place. God and Adam and Eve are meeting together. There is no veil between heaven and earth. They are in full communion with one another. Now, the cleansing piece, this is kind of interesting, we'll probably get here in a little bit, but as you're talking, I'm thinking about that, that they're tending the garden, which means that they're pruning. They're cultivating, they're tending. They are channels of God's grace to all of creation. They're the mediators of the heaven and earth place. And they're constantly bringing the two together.
Bringing order like God did at creation, they're bringing their own creative capacity in naming things, in giving structure. And I mean, I'm sure that they were doing like you do with our front yard every year, dig up certain plants and put them somewhere else and rearranging things so that it looks the way that you want it to. Or they get more sun and more water. Or they get more sun, that's right. Yep, so fast forward to the priesthood as established in Exodus, we see the Levites called. Aaron is called, he's made the high priest, the first priest.
Yeah, but God's desire was that, and he clearly stated that his desire was actually that all of the people that were in relationship with him would be priests. And you can read about that in Exodus, do you have the passage pulled up there? Yeah, I actually do. So in Exodus 19, he says, "Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all the nations, you will be my treasured possession.
Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation." Yeah, so God at the very beginning, he pulls, we've skipped a lot of material here and you can read about this in your Bible, but we've, you know, we've skipped from the fall, where Adam and Eve abdicated their role as priests. And here's the first time again, you really hear about this idea of priesthood. God's rescued his people from slavery in Egypt, and he brings them to Sinai, and he says, "I want you to be my priests." So he's sort of giving to them again, back to them, this identity. You're my sons and daughters, and I want you to be my priests. Right. For all creation. Yeah, absolutely.
10:31The Levitical Priesthood Established
And so the Lord commands Moses to set the Levites apart from the other Israelites. So this is Numbers 8, because the Levites will be mine after you have purified the Levites and presented them as a wave offering. They are to come to do their work at the tent of meeting. What's their work in the tent of meeting? Well, they are the Israelites who are to be given wholly to me. I have taken them as my own to do the work of the tent of meeting on behalf of the Israelites and to make atonement for them so that no plague will strike the Israelites when they go near the sanctuary. Yeah, so the job of the sort of the official career of the priesthood, God gifts to one of the tribes.
So there are 12 tribes, and God gives a specific assignment to the Levites. I like that you said gift because in Numbers 18, he says to Aaron, I'm giving you the service of the priesthood as a gift. Yeah, yeah, so we have this sense that everybody, this is where everyone's headed. This is what's on God's heart. But for the time being, he's gonna give this job to only one tribe, the tribe of Levites. And part of what they were doing was creating a space where it was possible for heaven and earth to come together. That's right.
So they were sacrificing for atonement, for cleansing, for intentional sin, well, for unintentional sin, there wasn't a lot available for intentional sin, that was death. That was just human death or banishment. They were, so they're offering atonement to essentially clear the space of guilt between heaven and earth. So, and they are also involved in sort of diagnosing the problems. So, where's the distance between heaven and earth? What's stuck in between and keeping people from being as close proximity as they can to the new little Eden that God set up in the tabernacle? And the tabernacle, 'cause the tabernacle is now a little Eden that travels with them.
Here's where God can dwell as close as is possible with humans now just, and not because God doesn't wanna be near humans, because humans in their broken state don't really wanna be near God. Because they don't, I mean, we see it over and over and over again, they don't really want the holiness of God, they don't really want close proximity to God. Right, right. I think Moses, you go up there. Yeah, that's right. You go up on the mountain, we don't really want the cost. Yeah. Whatever this means to be near a holy God. Right, so they offer atoning sacrifices. Yeah. And the word atonement, if you break it up, it's "at-one-ment." Yeah.
It brings God and humans together, or heaven and earth together, that's what atonement does. And an atoning sacrifice does that. Now, it didn't work mechanistically back then. So, it's not like, okay, you slaughter a goat, and now poof, you know, something changes in God, and he's no longer—is that what it is? Yeah, oh, say more about that. Well, I mean, it works sacramentally. I mean, in Hebrews, in the book of Hebrews, the writer says that you've been sprinkled from a guilty conscience. That's the New Testament. In the New Testament, that's right. And so, the writer in the New Testament recognizes that what keeps us at a distance is a guilty conscience.
It's like, there is sin that has kept us away from God, and unconfessed sin will keep us away from God. We have therefore set ourselves up against God in our minds. And we have debts to one another, and that we've hurt. We've hurt each other, we've hurt ourselves. It's not even just that I feel guilty, it's that there's a real debt. There's a real debt. There really is a debt that needs to be paid. There's a debt of holiness and a debt of justice that needs to be paid. So those priests were called to go into the tabernacle and offer these sacrifices.
And what's really neat if you look at the instructions that they were given about the tabernacle and then later on the temple, even the imagery inside of the tabernacle and the temple was like meant to remind everybody of Eden. Right. Like it's like a garden all over again. You wanna look at, I mean, make sure that there are pomegranates and living creatures and the images of those things surrounding, so like when those priests enter into proximity of God, when they look around in the tabernacle or then later on in the temple, they're surrounded with this image of like, oh, I'm a priest, I'm in the garden, I'm back in close proximity to God, this is what I was made for.
Okay, so those Levites, they were given the job of sacrificing, they were also given the job of helping to determine where the pain was coming from. So if you had a skin disease, you show up one day and your arms look really funky, you were instructed by God to go to the priests and the priests would, somehow, by divine knowledge, by long practice, they'd look at that skin disease and they'd say, hmm, this looks contagious, you need to go outside of the camp so no one else can get this. Or this doesn't look contagious and you can go on doing what you were doing.
God gave them sort of instructions and how to tell the difference between things that were contagious and things that were sort of benign. And then when if someone did have a contagious disease and they were put outside of the camp so that everybody wouldn't die, when they came back in, the priests then offered sacrifices for cleansing and restoration and they, you know, they'd apply oil for healing and water and blood. And I mean, it's just fascinating ritual. And they did that for diseases. So they diagnosed diseases. They also diagnosed mold in the camp. Yeah, mold things in the physical land.
So they were concerned with actually cleansing the physical space itself, making pots and spoons holy to the Lord by bringing them in close proximity to God, but also making sure there weren't diseases and, I mean, yeah, stuff of the demonic even. So demonic altars and, you know, things that would attract and perpetuate demonic systems even in the, in their, in their camp or in their religion. Yeah. Well, we see that in First and Second Kings, right? Yeah. It's like there is a command to go out and to tear down all the high places. Yep. There's a cleansing that needs to happen of the land. Yeah. So land matters, bodies matter.
17:24The Priests' Work of Cleansing
And the priests are given the job of sort of knowing where the separation between heaven and earth is and then helping to get rid of it as much as was possible in the Old Testament. Right. Unconfessed sin too. Unconfessed sin. That's right. I mean, you can read a really crazy story. The dust that's swept off the ground and then you mix it with water and you give it to a woman. A priest does it. No, no, no. Hang on. So, so if a woman was accused of adultery, yeah, she was accused of adultery. The husband and wife would go to the priest and they would write a curse that basically says, if you did commit adultery, this curse is going to take up residence in your body. Yeah.
And it's going to make your womb swell. Yeah. And then they would take dirt from the floor of the temple and mix it with water. And I think they poured it over the curse itself, the scroll that it was written on, and had the woman drink some of it. And if the curse, if she was innocent, the curse wouldn't stick and she's fine. And otherwise, the lie would be exposed, the distance, the distance between truth and darkness and where the pain was in the community would be exposed. Okay. So, so these, these priests have this job of diagnosing the distance between humans and proximity to God in the land and their bodies in relationships with one another.
And then they would interact with people and God to bring about this is as close as we can all be together. It's still pretty dangerous in the Old Testament. It was dangerous for the priests, right? Yes. No, it was. Yeah. Obviously. Yeah. I mean, if the priests weren't observing all of the ceremonial cleansings and they weren't. When you say ceremonial cleansing for people who don't know what that means, can you just. Well, I mean, you know, they, they had to wash a number of times. They had to make an atonement for themselves before they could minister at the altar even.
It was dangerous for the priests in that they had, there was only a specific, there was a specific kind of incense that could be used in the tabernacle that could not be used anywhere else. And if it was used anywhere else, that was a very bad thing. Like holiness was dangerous. Holiness was dangerous. Absolutely. But also there was a contagious factor, right? Yeah. So disease and, and sin were kind of more powerful than the people who had to be priests.
So in that sense, they were always kind of in danger of contamination themselves, which is why they, if they came in contact with a disease or a, a dead body or they themselves, you know, came in contact with bodily fluids that were associated with death or dying. They were un—So they could catch uncleanness from the people they were ministering to. Yeah, absolutely crazy. Well, I think that, you know, one of the really fascinating stories that goes along with this is the story of Korah. Korah's rebellion. That's crazy. It is a crazy story. You need to read it. I confess sometimes I'm both terrified of that story and I'm a little sad that it is not.
It's in Numbers 16 toward the end of the chapter. But we see that priests intercede on behalf of the people too, to God, right? And the story of Korah's rebellion is that there's a guy named Korah and he drums up a bunch of disaffected, dissatisfied people who are unhappy with the fact that Moses is the only one that seems to hear God. And that Aaron and his children have inherited the priesthood. Right. So these people are deeply envious. They have a spirit of rebellion. They're anti-authority. And basically at the end of the story, God opens up the earth and swallows them whole. And it's a really wonderful—I keep laughing, I shouldn't be laughing. It's very serious.
But everything gets swallowed. That's right. But hey, you know, I mean, if you're rebellious and anti-authority, just watch out. But there's—Where are you going with it? I don't know. But—You just liked the story. You just wanted to get to say the story. You already been going somewhere. No, I know. Yeah, I did. No, I am going somewhere with this. And what basically happens, God releases this plague. And it's just terrible. I mean, it is like an instantaneous plague. So like stuff, like the earth is opening and people just start dropping dead all over the camp. Because he was so—Yeah, but it's like—It's needed to keep everything a holy place. But it's like a wave through the camp.
So there's like a line of demarcation that's moving toward the living. And people just—It's like a zombie movie. And people are just like dropping dead, right? And then—And Moses instructs Aaron as the priest. He says, "Go get incense from the altar. Stand between the living and the dead and intercede for the people." Yeah. And so Aaron runs to the center. He has the censer and he's offering this incense between the living and the people that are dropping dead and the plague stops. Yeah. So there's this sense that the priests are intercessors. Yeah, they're standing between the living and the dying with their prayers. Yeah. Oh, well said. Love that story. Oh, it's a great story.
22:39A Priesthood That Lasts Forever
Nobility, people. It's not a good bedtime story. It's not a good—But my kids do love those kind of bedtime stories, they want. Our kids do. I mean, just a word for the wise. If it might be a little awkward at nighttime, "Hey kids, you want to hear my favorite Bible story?" When the earth swallowed the rebellious. Okay. So we're going back to the—Okay. So the priesthood. So in the New Testament, this takes on a whole new dimension, right? So—Well, first of all, I think it's important to touch on that the Lord prophesies that the priesthood is going to be forever. Oh, say more about that. Well, he—Okay.
So basically we see that in the Old Testament, God is desiring that the priests be consecrated to minister before him in closeness to his heart. I mean, they're in proximity to his presence in the tabernacle. Specific passage. Yeah. So in Jeremiah 33 says, "I'll make the descendants of David my servant and the Levites who minister before me as countless as the stars of the sky and as measureless as the sand of the seashore." So that's around the same prophetic message. He's talking about the—He's going to put the law on their hearts and he's going to give them new hearts and a new mind. And he's now prophesying that Levites are going to be. Countless.
Yeah, you're not gonna be able to count them. So he's basically assuring the continuation of this priestly function. It's gonna be around forever. It's gonna be around forever, and I'll say it a little later, Revelation's chock-full of this kind of stuff. Oh, heck. Yeah. Well, we're gonna get there because Isaiah 61 says, and you'll be called priests of the Lord, you'll be named ministers of God, and that's in the same—That's in the same prophecy that Jesus picks up on in Luke 4 and says this is my mission.
24:23John the Baptist Prepares the Way
Okay, so let's, let's pick up in the beginning of the New Testament, so Jesus is about to enter the scene. Let's talk a little bit about what the priesthood looked like when, like John the Baptist was ministering. So John the Baptist, Jesus's cousin, goes out into the wilderness and he's, he's the son of a priest himself. He's a Levite. His dad was one of the kind of major players in the priesthood. So we know that he was in Herod's temple. Yeah, he was ministering in the temple. He wasn't in some backwater somewhere. He was actually, you know, a somebody. But John, instead of picking up his dad's ministry and following after him, John takes his ministry out of the temple. Why did he do that?
Is that a rhetorical question? No, you—I want you to answer it. Oh, well, I think that, I mean, he's the last—I didn't mean that like—Well, John, John—I love John. It was like a mom moment. John is a forerunner. So he's, he's a forerunner to Jesus, but he's also a forerunner to how I think the new humanity is gonna look in many ways. So he's, he's the last prophet of the Old Testament, we would call it, same thing. Yeah, he's the last prophet of the Old Covenant.
I should say. And, and he is basically forerunning the fact that this priestly ministry is not gonna be tied to this physical temple anymore. Yeah, so he takes it out. And that, it's another conversation for another day, but decentralizing any kind of power always causes problems because no one likes to give away control, control—like that's why the Sermon on the Mount is so radical, the idea that you would be meek on purpose, that you'd have power and only use it to make other people great. That's so counter the human spirit. But anyway, so John begins the sort of counter-temple ministry in the wilderness. He's, he, people come to him and they say, how can we engage the coming kingdom?
There was this sense of anticipation in, in that sort of moment in time. There's these groups of Jews that have taken up sort of practicing real faithful, faithful—how do I say this—faithful practice of?
Following God, mm-hmm, and there's this real growing sense that, like, man, the kingdom of God is coming, and so John begins this movement, people are coming to him, he's baptizing, and saying, what should we do? Like what should we do to gain proximity to God? And John acts like a priest and he tells them where some of their pain is. He said, if you've got two coats, go sell one, I mean, give one away. If you've stolen stuff, give it back. And he starts to diagnose the moral distance between humans and relationship with God. He's clearing the way so that when Jesus comes, people don't hate him. They actually want to be near him.
They're not full of shame and running in the other direction. They're actually feeling like, yes, I'm moving in this direction. I've confessed my stuff out loud. I've received the ceremonial washing by John and now I'm ready to encounter. Yes. No, that's, that's a, that's a really good point. I mean, John's moving ceremonial washing from the mikvahs, right? The mikvahs, well, they're baths that were outside of the southern gate of the temple in Jerusalem. There were over a hundred of them and you had to do ceremonial washings in them before you went into the temple court. So a lot of times they were associated with holy spaces, so with the temple itself.
And now he's moving it to the common river Jordan. Yeah. And that now has become a holy space where people are responding to the baptism of repentance, which is John's baptism, "and I baptize you for repentance, the one that's coming after you, baptizes you with fire and the Holy Spirit." That's right. So he's gonna purify you and you're gonna become the temple. That's right. The Holy Spirit is going to be in you, not just in the physical temple in Jerusalem. So he's moving it out and simultaneously prophesying the time when they will become the temple of the Holy Spirit. That's right. Little temples running all over the world, creating little Edens. Creating little Edens.
Little temples running all over the world, creating little Edens wherever they go. Come on. Wherever they go. So Jesus comes on the scene. He's baptized by John, even though he'd never sinned. He identifies with people who have to confess their sin out loud and go through the humiliation of being known to come out of shame. Yeah, I never thought of that, that John's forerunner ministry that you were saying of repentance was to make a way in that their conscience was then cleaned. That's right. From the evil that they had engaged in. They knew they were forgiven. They were coming home to the Father. And now Jesus comes on the scene and they're not living at a distance, at a shame now.
They're running to Jesus. That's right. But shame drives you out of relationship, out of relationship with other people, out of relationship with yourself. It's like death. It's like little pieces of yourself dying and dying and dying and dying. And then you gotta move out of that little room of yourself into rooms that don't make your face turn red and make you ashamed. And so John's like making those rooms inhabitable again, making it so that people can look at Jesus without shame. They wanna be near him. They're moving towards him. Remember Paul later on teaches that, or in John at the beginning of John, the light has come into the world. Darkness hates the light.
Like when we have darkness in us, we wanna keep hiding. We wanna keep ourselves hidden because of shame. Because we wanna either keep doing the bad stuff that we're doing or we just don't wanna be exposed and have people see who we are and what we've been up to. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So let's just hit pause for a second because I think it's important that we kinda do a review. Yeah, okay, good. So Eden, Adam and Eve are priests. They are—They punk out. Well, hang on, I wanna talk about just their, I wanna talk about their vocation as priests. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, go. Okay, because this is about our identity, right? So they are the heaven and earth space.
They are communing with God in the garden in unfettered communion, right? Yeah. Their job is to tend, to govern, to cleanse, to prune, to do all, so that all the things can flourish. It can flourish, that's right. And then we have a microcosm of the Eden reality. So all things know what God is like. Yeah, so all things know what God is like and things, there's no entropy, there's no death, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, not blah, blah, glorious. So then we move on to Exodus and the installation of the Levitical priesthood, which is meant to create a little Eden in the people of God in the center of the 12 tribes of Israel. And on the outside of the 12 tribes is chaos.
Yeah, that's right, that's right, yeah. But God is king in the center of his people here and the priests are working to make it possible. The priests are working to make it possible. They're removing the hindrances between heaven and earth. That's right. Okay, so then we move on to John. And so John the Baptist. John the Baptist. But we've had all this temple ministry then, you know, over the course of 2000 years prior to John, all this temple ministry. Right, from tabernacle to temple and now lots of years of the temple. Right. With the Levitical priesthood, the Levites serving in the temple. Right. And we're skipping over a lot of history in the destruction of the temple. Yeah.
We're talking about the priesthood. Right. But John comes up on the scene. He's a Levite. He takes the ministry out of the temple. And he's baptizing and making a holy place, preparing a way for Jesus, removing the hindrances. Remember, every valley shall be raised up, every mountain made low. The crooked paths will be made straight. Yeah. And that's what he's doing. And he's making a space for encounter. We're removing the shame. We're removing the stuff in the middle. The work of cleansing. So he's cleansing the people and he's cleansing the land. Yeah. Oh, yeah. All right. So Jesus comes on the scene. And something unique, something earth-shattering happens.
32:59Jesus, Our Great High Priest
Remember how we talked about the way that in the Old Testament, contagion, sin and disease were still dangerous to the priests themselves? Yeah. Well, Jesus comes on the scene as now the great high priest. So in their unique—he's the priest of priests. And for some reason, well, because he's Jesus, because he's made a complete, perfect way, an atoning way for heaven and earth to come fully back together in his own body, which he will do on the cross. Now, holiness moves outward and contagion doesn't touch him. Yeah. So he's almost like, he's a totally different kind of, I mean, he is a priest in the order of Melchizedek, which is a different order of priesthood.
He's a different kind of priesthood. But, like, instead of, so there's, there's no mention in any of the gospels as Jesus is going and raising dead people, touching dead people, touching lepers, touching people whose, whose bodies are falling apart, whose all sorts of, yeah, adulterers, demoniacs in the middle of a graveyard, there's no mention of any provision being made for him being made unclean by, by touching that stuff. So not only does, is he not made unclean himself, it's like the holiness is just, just, just rippling out of him. I mean, the, the, the, the goodness of what he's bringing, it's almost like he doesn't even mean for it to be happening.
I mean, the woman with the issue of blood, she comes up and touches his robe. He doesn't even know about it. And he's like, power has just gone out of me to make heaven and earth come together, to make someone whole, to, to destroy disease in a person. And the cleansing itself is now contagious. Wow. Which is, which is the kingdom of God. It's the kingdom of God. The system has been reversed. And if you, you know, we talked about George Eldon Ladd, who is this New Testament theologian that was, you know, teaching in the 19th and 20th century. You know, we were born in the 20th century. Doesn't that hurt? Yeah. That gets further away. That's it.
I don't know. But anyway, it talks about the king, Jesus's idea of the kingdom, when he talks about the kingdom, the kingdom is rushing in. It's breaking in. Yeah. It's on the offensive. Right. It's, it's totally on the offensive. It's like, you know, when Jesus talks about his church, then the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. Yeah. This isn't bunker Christianity. No, no. He's saying the gates of hell will not prevail. Not the gates are not marching toward the church. The church is like trying to hang on tight and, no, no, no, no. The church is pounding down the gate. That's right. Holiness is contagious now. That's right. Yeah. Holiness is contagious.
The gospel is contagious. The gospel, the kingdom is contagious. Yeah. Light will always overcome the darkness. Yeah. Amen. Okay, so Jesus does this. He teaches his disciples to do the same stuff, right? So Jesus diagnoses where the pain's coming from. He heals people, he drives out demons, he gets rid of the stuff, the contagion, the disease, the demons, the shame, the death that's in between heaven and earth. He cleanses people, he heals them, he puts them back together, and he teaches his disciples and he gives them the power to go do the same thing. We talked last week, I mean, he didn't make different kinds of disciples.
He sent them all out with this renewed identity of the priesthood that they then carried. None of these guys, well, they weren't necessarily Levites. They were just ordinary people from different tribes, from different careers, different backgrounds. And now it's part of their job. Jesus breathes on them in John 20 verse 21. Yeah, and says, in the same way that the Holy Spirit was on me to bring heaven and earth together, to declare the favor of the Lord, the favorable year of the Lord, to heal, open blind eyes and to release prisoners. Now that ministry, that Holy Spirit ministry, the anointing of God is on you.
And we just said, you're like, now little—the temple has been released into the world in the bodies of believers who are now priests with contagious holiness moving out into the world. Yeah, absolutely. And then there's just the apostles then pick up on that message. Yeah, and the early church did it all the time. So we're going to move toward the Reformation here. We may have to break this up into two sessions, two segments. But so we're moving, so Jesus, he dies, he's resurrected, he ascends, the early church begins to minister in the manner of, in the same way that Jesus had been ministering, bringing heaven and earth together, right?
38:03The Royal Priesthood of All Believers
And for the first several hundred years of Christianity, this pattern stayed true to form. There's a lot of early church evidence for normal people being sent out by their leaders with blessed oil to go and do deliverance ministry in their neighborhoods. Just nobody special, moms, dads, just normal everyday people going to pray for healing and deliverance to bring that, to serve as priests essentially in that way in their own communities, right? But there's this thing in us that, that we really want professionals. Like we really—it's not like, oh, the professionals just wanted a lot of power and they took it all. Yeah, the people wanted it. No, it's not that the people wanted it.
We actually like to not be in the line of fire. I think there's something in us that craves professionals doing the hard stuff. Right. So the people wanted it. They didn't want to do it themselves. They craved that someone else do it for them. Yeah. You see that in James 5, right? So James is like, oh, there's somebody sick in your midst. Pray for them. You could see them kind of wringing their hands. Yeah. I like to imagine this early church that James has started. This group of people kind of wringing their hands like, oh, somebody is sick, quick. Can we get ahold of Paul? Where's James? Is Peter around? And James puts it right back on them and says, you do it.
Elijah, the superstar of the Old Testament, was a human just like you. He prayed for miraculous things that happened. James has profound confidence that if these people practice that kind of faith and prayer that they also will see heaven and earth coming together and, and bodies cleansed of illness. So that continues for several hundred years. Yeah. Well, I think one of the passages that I, my all-time favorite passages is—well, Jesus's Upper Room Discourse from John 13 to 17, but just in his talk to his disciples about, you know, cleansing and pruning and abiding and fruitfulness. He talks about the cleansing piece.
He says, "You're already clean because of the words I've spoken to you." And he actually, there's a play upon words there where to clean is the same thing as to prune. It's the same Greek word. And so he's saying, "I have already cleansed you." And I think, so that's one of his priestly ministries, right? Is that he's cleansed us. That's right. He's driven the prince of this world. He's made abiding possible. And he's made abiding. He's driven the prince of the world out from us, cleansed us and brought us into the fellowship of the Trinity so that we now are the dwelling place of God. And so the early church is operating that way.
The apostles pick up on that and say, "You're the temple, right? You're the royal priesthood now. You're kings and priests," Revelation picks up on, "and we will forever be kings and priests over the world," because Eden will then be all—the face of the earth will be Eden when Jesus returns. Yeah. So anyway, this is, I think we're going to have to do this in two sessions. Yeah, let's take a quick break. Well, we're—And we'll keep back in to this conversation. This has been great. Yeah. I'm really excited. We're going to see you next week and we're going to bring—We're actually going to get to Martin Luther in the Reformation. Yeah, Reformation. So hang in here.
Not just the Reformation, but also what does it look like now? I mean, because we were all brought up in traditions in the church. And I really believe that this is something that the Holy Spirit's breathing on for the people of God in our day. And we're seeing it happen all over the earth right now. Ordinary people starting church plant movements. You know? I mean, it's just beautiful. Yeah. So I really look forward to next week. Continue. And we'll see you then. Bye. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Between Heaven and Earth. We hope that you are stirred to curiosity and courage as we explored bringing heaven and earth together right where you are.
Remember, you're not alone on this journey. We're here to support you in understanding what the Spirit of God is doing in your life and responding in obedience to his good leadership. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please take a moment to like, share, subscribe, and leave a review. We'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and questions with us on our Facebook page or by email, podcast@encounterculturene.com. Your support helps us reach more people who are eager to join Jesus in his great project of restoration. Also, check out our website, encounterculturene.com, for upcoming events and equipping opportunities for you and your church. Until next time, may you find joy living in between heaven and earth and the courage to bring them together wherever you go.