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My journey in the study of God's law, part 2

From 1973-1978 I learned that the law had not been abolished but had instead been upheld and respected by Christ’s death on the cross. I was taught a few specific laws which preachers focused upon, but I soon began to see the need for a broader understanding of the entire law.

The legalization of abortion in 1973 brought about an awakening among evangelicals that their country was being changed and taken from them. The American bicentennial in 1976 caused them to yearn to return to the original Christian Republic that had been replaced by a Secular Democracy in the 1930’s. So I embarked upon a study of the law in order to see what a Christian Republic looked like.

From 1978-1979 I spent more than a year studying God’s laws and then (as an assistant pastor) began to teach it publicly. I discovered that many others were very interested and hungry to know the law, because most of them had been taught only the favorite laws of the preachers. I was given the opportunity for 12 weeks in a row to preach from the pulpit, so I taught a series on the various commandments. These teachings were very well received and gave me a favorable reputation as a Bible teacher.

However, God knew that I needed more than an understanding of a Christian nation. Later I realized that I needed to understand a Kingdom nation and its laws. A Christian nation is a manifestation of King Saul; the Kingdom was typed by David with Christ as the Antitype. But because I did not yet know the difference, God exercised His sovereignty to lead me into that understanding.

Learning to Hear His Voice

I had also been learning the sovereignty of God in the 1970’s, and I eventually came to the place where I no longer knew how to pray. My thought was that if God was sovereign, why do I spend so much time keeping Him informed or reminding Him of all the things that He has forgotten? Why do I ask Him for provision when He has already promised to provide for my needs? If I were to stop teaching God or instructing Him, and if I were to be content that God would provide for that which He had called me to do, I would lose 95 percent of my reasons to pray.

So in 1979 I asked God to teach me to pray. I did not know God’s teaching methods in those days, so I did not realize that He would teach me through experience, not just pour His knowledge into my ears. But I did get one insight that was of particular value. I discovered in 1980 that God had separated Eve from Adam and then married them in order to provide a double witness in the family. But yet it would take more than a decade to understand this more fully.

Meanwhile, God did not immediately teach me how to pray, nor did He teach me His laws the easy way. His answer was for me to leave the church where I had been ministering as an assistant pastor and to start a church of my own (1981). He knew that this plan would fail, because (as I realized later) I was not a pastor but a Bible teacher. That is how I ended up in my “wilderness” experience in 1982. It was a time when I had to retreat from the influencers of my past and to depend totally upon God.

The first thing I discovered (February 1982) was that it was possible to hear God’s voice. I was able to break through in this regard in June, but the promises of God still appeared to fail. Being impatient, I was soon discouraged and concluded that I did not want to hear any more promises until He made good on those He had already given.

By the end of 1982, I had been brought down to almost nothing. There was nothing I could do but trust that God would deliver me. I could not deliver myself. I felt totally dead. But then He began to move to raise me from the dead. I was offered a typesetting job in Arkansas and moved there in early 1983.

Also in January 1983, I joined the Net of Prayer and began to learn the art of intercession and spiritual warfare. This, along with the move to Arkansas, gave me a new life. However, my training was for 12 years, not just 12 months. During that time, I made new friends and learned how to pray as a group of 4 to 6 people around a table. We met weekly to seek God’s will, rather than to tell Him what we thought He should do.

I did not realize until later just how radical this approach was. Not only I but others too were learning how to pray. We learned how to hear His voice and to respond by declaring His word. We were bearing witness on earth to the word we heard from heaven. We were bringing heaven to earth, not bringing earth to heaven. Eventually, I came to see this as the Amen principle.

Almost imperceptibly, God was answering my request to teach me how to pray. This was learned by experience even before we understood what we were doing.

The Law is Spiritual

Meanwhile, in the Net of Prayer we were engaging in multiple prayer campaigns, and I soon learned that the laws of war found in Deuteronomy 20 were also the laws of spiritual warfare. This was another major breakthrough, because I finally began to understand Paul’s statement in Romans 7:14, “we know that the law is spiritual.” I came to see that the laws of war had an earthly application, but the same laws also were the rules of spiritual warfare.

Having been involved in multiple prayer campaigns already, I began to notice that whenever we violated one of the laws of war, we suffered casualties. The more I studied this, the more concerned I became. I took note of the story of Achan, whose sin in the battle of Jericho (Joshua 7:20) caused the death of 36 Israelites in the next war (Joshua 7:5).

This again drove home the importance of knowing the law. Our ignorance of the law blinds us to our sin, because, as Paul says in Romans 7:7, “I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’.” Again, he says in Romans 3:20, “through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.” I had heard some teach that we should not study the law, because if we do so, we obtain “sin-consciousness,” which then defiles us. Ignorance, however, has killed many people—even those who engage in spiritual warfare.

Some have taught that the law is carnal or evil, when in fact Paul says it is both “spiritual” and “holy and righteous and good” (Romans 7:12). To say that the law is carnal is to say that God’s character is carnal. To say that the law is evil is to say that God is not a good God. The law is not the problem; the problem is our own carnality, because “nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh” (Roman 7:18). Hence, the will of the flesh runs contrary to the law of God (Romans 7:25).

Those formative years in my life taught me by personal experience and ingrained in me the need to know the laws of war in order to lead people into spiritual warfare. I knew, of course, that not everyone would necessarily follow those laws. Joshua knew the laws of God, yet Achan sinned without Joshua’s knowledge until God revealed it to him (Joshua 7:7, 10, 11). I knew that some day I might be called to lead people into spiritual warfare, and I resolved to do so lawfully.

During my 12-year training period from 1981-1993, I made many mistakes while I was still in the process of learning the law. God held me accountable for all of my mistakes so that I would remember not to repeat them. I knew that after 1993, any mistake or sin would hold me much more accountable than during my training.

More Cleansing and Learning

In 1981 the Net of Prayer had received revelation to issue “a call to arms” and to ask people to commit themselves to five years of spiritual warfare and intercession. God joined me with this prayer army on their first day of battle, November 12, 1981. However, He did not tell me that I had been conscripted. I had to face the trials of the wilderness without knowing why these things were happening to me.

In 1986 God told me to leave the Net of Prayer. I did not want to leave. I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life. I felt that I had found my place and purpose in life. God sent 12 witnesses to tell me to leave, but I took it to the head of the organization. He contradicted the 12 witnesses, and I believed him. This caused me trouble until finally in October 1989 I was forced to resign.

I then learned another lesson about the law of witnesses. We tend to search until we find a witness that appeals to us, that is, our flesh. I do not blame the witness, of course. I know that God engineered this not only to teach me the law but to show me the condition of my own heart. My fleshly desires still had a tendency to oppose the will of God. Once again, He thought it best to teach me by hard experience. It was part of my training.

Those three years from 1986-1989 were spent in Cursed Time (414 x 3 days), which is actually a grace period to give me time to repent. The revelation to leave the Net of Prayer came through the head of the organization. He demanded my resignation in 1989, saying, “The Lord told me that Stephen has been in rebellion against Me for three years.” That was indeed the word of the Lord. He thought it meant that I had not submitted to him sufficiently since 1986. But I knew that it was because I had submitted to a man in 1986 rather than to Christ.

Having repented just prior to the end of my three cycles of Cursed Time, God moved me out of Memphis, TN (my “Egypt”), where I had spent 2 years in difficult labor. He gave me a job back in Arkansas and brought me out of Cursed Time at the appointed time (January 27, 1990). As most of you know from reading Secrets of Time, Cursed Time (414) always ends with a 76 to bring us into Blessed Time (490). 76 is the number of cleansing. So He moved us to Rt. 2, Box 76, Leachville, AR. To “leach” is to cleanse or drain. We moved to Box 76, Cleansing-ville.

A year later (1991), I learned the significance of Cursed Time and the number 76 and saw how this had applied to my own life. This set me on a course of learning the laws of time, which are basic principles of prophecy and divine judgment. The judgments of God are not open-ended. The judgments of God are based on time and therefore have limits, because all judgment proceeds out of a heart of love. Hence, the law is designed to correct us and teach us so that we may be fully restored to Him.