Power and Authority in Christ (Part 1)

Jesus made the promise to us that upon the truth that He is the Son of God, He would establish those whom He had called out.

Matthew 16:18: “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”

That’s a tall order. He’s promising that hell will not prevail against those who are founded upon the truth that He is the Son of God, the Christ.

There is the norm, in which people think that the gates of hell are coming against us, and the purpose of the church is to “hold out until Jesus comes or until we go to heaven.” That’s garbage. "Gates” do not go after anybody, gates are stationary; gates are meant to protect that which lies behind the gates. Jesus clearly had in mind, here, the concept of an ancient city that had its battlements, its fortifications, and its gates.

The gates of a city, in ancient times, were ways that the residents of the city would entrap the attackers and make it a killing ground. Jesus was telling us that He has sufficient authority against the domain of hell, so that whoever comes against hell in the name of Jesus Christ, by His authority, would overcome the entrapment of hell and would rescue those who were in and behind the walls of hell in the domain of that city, because they had come in the sufficiency of the authority and of power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It’s not so much that people, when they die, they are going to hell; it’s that they are already lost and if you’re not saved, your position never changes. How did you, if you are saved, how were you saved? The likelihood is that somebody who had the message of Jesus Christ came to you, when you were lost, rescued you, brought you out of that condition through these chambers of the gates of hell and, according to Paul in his letter to the Colossians, “He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” And there was not a thing that hell could do about it.

You were rescued by someone who had the sufficient authority and power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, sent by the Lord Jesus to rescue you and the rescue was successful. And it has been successful for uncounted numbers of cases. Why? Because we have the authority of Jesus Christ.

You see, this Scripture from Matthew 16 “And upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”... That is true, it’s factually true, and everyone who is saved, in their lives that Scripture is true. Upon the truth that Jesus is the Lord and Christ, anyone who is captured by hell may be rescued, upon that truth. Now some have perverted this truth to say that Peter is the foundation of the church. That simply is not true because this is an issue of authority. What was it that Peter had confessed? Peter said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

The same Peter in Acts 2, makes the statement that God raised Jesus from the dead and made him to be “both Lord and Christ”. Now what does it mean for Jesus to be “both Lord and Christ”? What’s the difference between being “Lord” and being “Christ”? Here, he says it this way, “God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact. Exalted to the right hand of God, He has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.” (Acts 2: 32,33)

So, he was explaining to the audience on the day of Pentecost this: “Therefore, let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

Now what’s the distinction between “Lord” and “Christ”?

“Christ” is the word “mashiyach” in the Hebrew, “Messiah” in English, and it means “the anointed one”. God has made him “Lord” and “the anointed one”. “Lord” is the title; “Christ”, the anointed one, is the power by which the title has authority. There is power and then there is authority. “Power” is the ability to do a thing and “authority” is the right to do the thing. It’s sort of the “gun” and the “badge”. The policeman has power because he carries around a gun strapped to his side, or some weapon, but if he uses that power or that weapon outside of the scope of his authority to use it, he may be charged with criminal activity. But if he discharges that weapon or uses that force or power within the scope of the authority that he has been given by the state, and by extension, by the people, then because he has the requisite authority, he may properly use the power.

Jesus has the authority of Lordship; He is Lord of Lords, He is Ruler. But He has the power that comes from being the Christ. God gave Him the title of Lord, therefore the authority, and God gave Him the power with which to act, Christ. So against His enemy, Jesus has all power and Jesus has all authority in heaven and on earth.

Now why would the Scriptures say that He has authority in heaven?

Paul identifies the seat of that which opposes Him, as being in heaven. Here he says, in Ephesians 6:10, “Finally, be strong in the Lord (that is within the scope of the Lordship of Christ) and in his mighty power.” There you have it: power and authority. “Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6: 10-12)

There it is, verse 12. The seat of that which opposes us—who are “the called out”, who are the body of Christ, who are the presence of Christ in the earth, endowed and clothed by the Spirit of God, that which opposes us is the “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” It is clearly the demonic; the demonic opposes us. That’s who our enemy is. Our enemy is not flesh and blood. Our enemy is not one political party or another. Our enemy is not one political candidate or another. Our enemy is not one particular human being or another. It’s when we get crossed up on these things we lose our focus and we lose our way. So, we take up battles against humans. We get into the battles against homosexuals; we get into the battle against abortionists. We get into the battle against this and the battle against that. The struggle is not against humans or against what humans are thinking. The struggle is against the demons that put these ideas in humans. If we are going to win the battle, we cannot focus our effort upon the humans who are the unwitting pawns, even if they are willing, in what is a spiritual struggle. This is a struggle against the enemy of God and man, and us, who are the people of God, and therefore the struggle is spiritual.

What is the underlying root of the sin of abortion? It is spiritual. What is the underlying root of the sin of homosexuality? It is spiritual. What is the underlying root under every sin? It is how the enemy of God and man uses humans to wage war against God: that’s the battle. If you miss that, how could we possibly hope to understand spiritual warfare? How could we possibly hope to exercise sufficient power in the realms of mankind against these things? This is where we’ve been misguided. People don’t know what to do because they don’t know what we’re doing. They don’t know what the theater of our conflict is, they don’t know what the definitions of the conflict are; they don’t understand what the war is about. The war is not against flesh and blood. The power that you have from Jesus Christ is meant to be sufficient for your warfare in rescuing people out of the domain of hell and bringing them into the kingdom of God. That’s what Jesus said He would do.

Part 2 should be posted today.

Why do you need power? The church has lost its way because it simply does not understand even the most basic things about its existence. You need power because your enemy has power and he has entrapped the world by various lies and schemes since the days of Adam. Jesus came to undo the works of Satan, which is to bring light and hope to those who are in darkness. Is the enemy going to simply allow you to do this? No, he is going to oppose you every step of the way. If you try to do this in the power of your own doing or the power of the people who are gathered together as a show of force, like in a march, perhaps … if you try to do this in the power and support of a government, the Crown, the empire, the goodwill of a nation, all of it will not meet the requirements of having power in Christ.

When I write that the church has lost its way I’m not talking about the fact that the church is thinking only in terms of building buildings and stacking up people. It’s lost its understanding of its very purpose for being. And to come up with some new entertainment format to draw people into the meetings is about as pointless as anything else we’re doing. So, what if you did get a large number of people coming and observing the entertainment and getting all excited about that? The power of the risen Christ, who is Lord and Christ, Who has power over the realms of the earth and power over the realms of the heavens, that’s the power that has to be operating in you if you have any chance at all of fulfilling God’s plan.

Our purpose is to present the Father, as did Christ, to a people who need rescued out of the domain of hell. Not just to save them from it, but to allow them to fulfill the destiny of Christ, living in them and Christ, Himself, living through them. That’s what the power of God is about; it’s what the authority of Christ is meant to be.

The whole world lies in that darkness, and it lies in that darkness until He sends you and you come, by the authority and power of the one who sent you. But when you come in that way, by the authority and power of the one who sent you, when you come as the representative of Jesus Christ, in the flesh, (because you are His flesh in the body of Christ “the church, which is His body”), you then have the power and authority to go against the enemy and his schemes.

That’s the simple story. Now how much power does Jesus have to do this? All power. What authority does Jesus have to utilize that power? The authority of being made Lord and Christ. God, himself, recognized Him as Lord. “The Lord says to my Lord:” David said, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” (Psalm 110:1) The Lord God Almighty made Jesus, Lord of lords, which means that whatever He does is “right”. That’s the foundation of His authority.

He is Lord of lords. That means He is enthroned in that authority. He sits upon the throne as the symbol of possessing that authority. The power by which He operates is the power of being the Christ, the anointed one, God with man, God recognizing Jesus as being God, the anointed one.

Jesus is not, as some have said, one who possesses attributes of God. No, it’s far more than that. Jesus is God; Jesus is the Living God. In nature and in kind, He is the child of the Holy Spirit. His nature is holy, as God is holy, and the divine godhead lived in Him fully in bodily form. Jesus is the Christ and because of that He has power and He has authority and He has all power in heaven and on earth, where the seat of the demonic is and where men are.

Now, we know that He is enthroned in heaven. But how does His power come to the earth where men are? We sometimes think that He has power but His body does not, and we are His body. I understand we need to look at how His power and how His authority are meant to function His body. The promise to all those who receive Him is that God will translate them from the powers of darkness into the kingdom of His Son, if you are a believer, because the gates of hell cannot maintain their integrity against the power and the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Son of God was revealed for this reason, “He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.” (I John 3:8) And He intends to do it through you, but we need to understand how.

That will come in part three.

Blessings,
Aaron56

uh... waiting for part 3, and Happy Thanksgiving to you are yours sir, take your time, just didn't want the thread to be buried so deep I couldn't find it again

Working on it my friend.
Our daughter is home from New Hampshire so we're enjoying the time with all the family.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Why do we not have power today as believers? We watch, in these troubled times as believers run back and forth being scared, being easily turned to one point of view or another. Outwardly they will declare that Jesus is their Lord and Savior and that He will protect those who love Him but then they will carry around, for all to see, large automatic rifles and guns. It is as ironic as it gets.

Why do we not have power? Why are Christians running around scared today as the world changes? The answer is that we have only the power of our churches or our denominations and that’s not sufficient for the day in which we live. The day in which we live requires divine power and mighty strength working through us. The only way you can safely navigate these times is to know the Lord in a way that goes beyond how the typical church member knows the Lord.

We have been enticed to become church members on the promise that if we do, we will have a good time, we’ll be good citizens, God will bless us and take care of us and when we die, we’ll go to heaven. No suffering is part of any of this and no encounter with the demonic or the schemes of the enemy figures into this. It’s much about reason, logic and political maneuvering; things you could do for God, reading and quoting Scripture like spells to ward off evil. But that theology is breaking down before our eyes in light of present challenges in the world. The churches that have built their power base on appealing to people with these messages are being discredited, if for no other reason than the exodus of people will continue.

Christ grants to the church, the ekklesia, sufficient power to overcome the attacks of our enemy against us, “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms”. That power is sufficient because it is a total power, plenary power, a complete grant of authority in heaven and on earth. But that clearly is not the same power by which the majority of churches, churches in general, are displaying today. Their power is the power of the good will of the community or the power of a nation if you are talking about a state church as is common in European nations or the membership’s resources and influence. But that’s not the power of Jesus Christ.

The power of Jesus Christ comes to us, and vests in us, via His delegate, the Holy Spirit. This is kingdom speak: delegate. Believers in the U.S. are unfamiliar with the inner workings of a kingdom because we have rejected the rule of a king. The birth of this nation literally arose out of rebellion against the rule of a monarch. It is no wonder how we, as believers in the U.S., have difficulty understanding the structure of a kingdom. Jesus is the King of kings and of the increase of His rule there will be no end. So, it goes without saying, that we should study the structure of a kingdom if we are to understand how Christ rules His ekklesia.

Jesus said:
John 14: 12-15 “If you love me, you will obey what I command. And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Counselor to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. But you know Him, for He lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”

In the 16th chapter, Jesus goes on to tell us about the Holy Spirit,
“Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. When He comes, He will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own; He will speak only what He hears, and He will tell you what is yet to come. He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you.”

The questions become: What is it that the Holy Spirit takes that belongs to Jesus, that Jesus got from the Father, which now is given to us by the Spirit? What is it? What did the Father have that He gave to Jesus, that Jesus now gives to the Spirit and the Spirit gives to us?

Jesus said, “All authority, in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” Who had all authority in heaven and on earth? The Father. That’s why the Father could give it to the Son and that’s how Jesus got it. The Father gave authority and power to the Son.
The Son is seated on the throne; we are on the earth. But, we are in fact, His Body. (I'll come back to that.)

So, how does His power come to us? The answer is: He told us that He would send us the Holy Spirit. Now, He gave us a secret about the work of the Spirit by saying—and we read it earlier in the 14th chapter.

He said, “I will not leave you as orphans,” (John 14:18), “I will come to you.” Now how will He come to us? He is in heaven.
He continues, “Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me.” Well, how are we going to see Him? Was He coming back? He still hasn’t been gone. How would this be fulfilled? He gives us understanding in this sentence: “Because I live, you also will live.” He says, “On that day (meaning: when I’ve gone, but you will see me) “you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” What does that have to do with the power of Jesus coming to us by the Holy Spirit?

In this context, He tells us that He “will not leave us as orphans, but He will send us the Counselor, who is the Holy Spirit.” How does all of this tie together? How does this relate to having the power of Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit? Well then the question becomes: How is He in us?

Paul writes the following

Ephesians 1:17-22 17 "..that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, 18 the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power 20 which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. 22 And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church, 23 which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.

So, How is He in us?

The answer is “By His Spirit”. He sent the Holy Spirit who has all of His power, who has all of His authority, to live in us.

I'll continue with what that looks like in Part 4.

That is really "the gates of Hades" (not "hell" which was an incorrect translation in the KJV, since Hell is Gehenna, the Lake of Fire).

"The gates of Hades" is a metaphor for the prison of Sheol/Hades. Hades does not have any literal gates, but the OT saints were virtually held captive in Sheol/Hades until the resurrection of Christ. On the day of His resurrection, He took all the saints which were in Abraham's Bosom (in Hades) to Heaven (the New Jerusalem). He "took captivity captive". And ever since His resurrection, no saints go to Hades upon their demise. Every child of God goes to Heaven immediately when they die (as did Stephen the first martyr). Thus "the gates of Hades" do not (and cannot) prevail against the Church (the redeemed of the Lord).

So who was the Rock and who was the stone? Christ is the solid and massive Rock upon which the Church is built, and Peter (Cephas or Kepha) the stone was the one who made that confession about Christ. It would be absurd to think that Peter was the Rock on which the Church was built.

Both hades and hell are names taken from mythology.

We are the body of Christ, so not only is He “in us” by His Spirit, but we are “in Him”. In the book of 1 Corinthians the 12th chapter, it tells us how we are placed into the body of Christ. “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” (1 Corinthians 12:12,13)

Why is the Holy Spirit required to assemble us into the body of Christ? The answer is this: no man knows what part of the body of Christ you are except the Spirit of God. The Spirit who searches the mind of the Lord (1 Corinthians 2: “For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.”

The Spirit knows what part of the body of Christ you were meant to be. So when God saves you, the Spirit assembles you into the body of Christ as that part of the body that God designed you to be. Jesus said it would be this way: He [Jesus] would be “in us” and we would be “in Him”. He is in us by His Spirit and His Spirit lives within our spirits and changes the mind of the human being: from being governed by the soul to being governed by the Spirit. He is in us; we are in Him. We are in Him because He has a body and of that body we are members. He has called us to be members of His body. When we are saved, the Spirit of God assembles us into the body of Christ and the Spirit knows precisely where we fit in the body because we are assembled according to the part that
God made us to be. We are parts of the body of Christ and the Spirit fits us into the body as that part of the body that God foreknew us to be and designed us to be.

So your destiny, then, is not just some generalized notion of how you may serve as a Christian. It is exactly how God intends to live in you and how He intends to live through you because you are a member of the body of Christ. He is the head, and the head directs the body according to the pleasure of the head and your ability to respond is by the Spirit who dwells within you, He tells you what the Head is saying to that part of the body that you are. Now you have the power of the Lord Jesus Christ resident within you because you have the Spirit, who is the delegate of Christ, resident in you. And it is this Holy Spirit, who is called the Counselor, who has been legally charged with the authority of Jesus, to come and to dwell in you and to empower you.

Therefore, the power of Jesus Christ, from the throne where Jesus is sitting—where He has all power in heaven, over the demonic, and on earth, over man and the institutions of mankind, that power comes from heaven where Jesus is seated on the throne and it comes to you via the Holy Spirit who dwells within you. Jesus, therefore, sent us the Holy Spirit as His sole and exclusive delegate. There is no other way for you to have the power of Jesus Christ operating in you except by the Spirit.

Now here is the critical factor about a delegate: a delegate does not do his own will; a delegate only does the will of the one who sent him. Therefore the power of Jesus Christ, working in you, can never be harnessed to support your ambitions. The power of Christ working in you is measured to accomplish His purposes in you. The fact that we don’t have power today is because we don’t even know what Christ wants to do. We’re doing what we want to do, and because that is so, we must empower our own agendas. That is why the church is embroiled in politics: harnessing the will of the masses is the only way it can ensure power apart from the Spirit of God. But if we are ever going to do the purposes of Christ, we must learn to operate exclusively by the restraints of the Holy Spirit. He is the delegate; we are subject to His absolute work.

Grace and Peace,
Aaron56