THE COLONY

Luke Chapter 19










Today we are walking in: The Colony










Today we look to the word-OVERTAKE- H5381 nasag--to reach, overtake, take hold upon, attain to, cause to reach, to be able to secure, have enough, overtake












The Torah testifies...............




Deuteronomy 28:45




Moreover all these curses shall come upon thee, and shall pursue thee, and overtake H5381 thee, till thou be destroyed; because thou hearkenedst not unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded thee:







The prophets proclaim..................



1 Samuel 30:8




And David enquired at the LORD, saying, Shall I pursue after this troop? shall I overtake H5381 them? And he answered him, Pursue: for thou shalt surely H5381 overtake H5381 them, and without fail recover all.











The writings bear witness...........................



Psalm 18:37




I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken H5381 them: neither did I turn again till they were consumed.







The Principle and Power of Kingdom Citizenship: Keys to Experiencing Heaven on Earth by Myles Munroe--Ch. 2



THE COLONY




This morning Fiveamprayer, we have to get an understanding of a colony. The Bahamas for example, is an island nation in the Caribbean Sea that was a part of Great Britain. All of the Caribbean island nations have been colonized by various European countries--including Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Thomas, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago, just too many islands to count!




What is a colony? A colony is a territory that is under the direct control of a central, imperialist government. This government, which in the case of the Bahamas is England, considers the colony an outpost of the faraway central authority. Great Britain is on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean--4,300 miles away, but those who lived in the territories were considered citizens of England.




Why do they still speak English in the Bahamas and not some other language? Because of the British. Why do they speak in the ‘king’s English’ and not American English even though America is much closer than England? Because of their status as a British colony for 200 years. There are generations of people from the Bahamas who were educated in that particular type of English and all of their business is transacted in that language. Despite the fact that over 90 % of their population is of African descent, their ancestors have been brought to the islands as slaves to work on the plantations, very few of them know even a few words in their ancestors native language or their customs. While they have bloodlines that reach back to the continent of Africa, yet so many do not know any African history. What they have been taught about is various notable English people, the long succession of English kings and queens. And read all of the plays of Shakespeare.




Great Britain gave the people of the Bahamas other distinctive features, as well. They gave them the style of dress, long socks with short pants, neckties and a preference for straightened hair. They also gave them knives and forks, and drinking tea. Driving in the Bahamas, you will drive on the left side of the road, just as you would in England. These are narrow roads that also have english roundabouts at intersections. It is the strong colonial influences that you can witness even now, visiting the Bahamas today.




You can find more colonial influences wherever you go in the world. For example in Suriname which is in the northern part of South America-- still has the imprint of Holland’s influence. When you arrive at the airport, you may see a black man that only speaks Dutch. Of course he is speaking the language that he is fluent in, the language of the nation’s former kingdom!





Established Standards

A kingdom is a nation under the king’s rule, which means that the king himself establishes the standards for the country and its colonies. There is a great example of this in France. King Louis the 14th, decreed that the length of his royal foot was known as the standard 12 inch foot. Other people's feet were smaller or larger than his but, his foot became the rule. Today the French use the metric system, but when King Louis the 14th was on the throne, they did not. The king established the standards, and everybody was compelled to follow them. To this day, children in school use a straight measuring stick of a specific length called a ‘ruler’. They use it to measure things and to draw a straight line. They do not get to discuss or change the standard. They just have to accommodate themselves to it.




I am gonna say that again, the definition that I used in the first teaching, a kingdom is the governing influence of a king over a territory, impacting that territory with his will, his purpose, and his intent, producing a culture and a moral standard for his citizens. In other words, a kingdom is not just a piece of real estate. It has a culture. It has morals and standards. It has values. And they get exported to the colonies of that particular kingdom. By definition, a colony is a group of citizens established in a foreign territory to influence that dominion for their home government.




In terms of the Kingdom of the Most High, you could say that when you come into the Kingdom you change colonies. But it can take a long time to lose you old ways of thinking and behaving just as the people in the Bahamas, their current culture today is saturated with British ways despite the years of being an independent and sovereign nation. When you come into the Kingdom, your personal life will carry many of your old ways as you learn to think and behave differently to match your new affiliation.




Regardless of where we live on the globe, those of us who are citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven were born as colonists of the kingdom of darkness. But somewhere along the line we switched loyalties, joining forces with the colonists of the kingdom of light. When we switched, we began to shed our old habits and worldview, along with our old ways of thinking and our expectations. In time, we should begin not only to represent our new King, but to resemble Him!




When people become colonists in the Kingdom of the Most High, they sign up for a steep learning curve, but it is worth it. You may or may not know what I am talking about from personal experience. The fact of the matter is that unless we learn what it means to be a citizen of this earth-colony of the Kingdom of Heaven, we will miss out on all of the benefits that come with colonial status.




Occupy

What I am trying to explain is how colonization describes both a king’s expansion of his kingdom territory as well as an expression of his personality. Colonization means that a kingdom has been extended to a distant territory and after a time the colony can be expected to manifest the culture of the kingdom, even though the citizens possessed a different culture in their past.




Colonization does not always work out. Here is a 2000 year old parable about some of the difficulties of Kingdom colonization. It begins like this….




A certain nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom, and to return. And he called his ten servants, and delivered them ten pounds, and said unto them, occupy till I come. (Luke 19:12-13, KJV)




The “far country” is a new colony. The man went to that territory because he was supposed to receive kingship there. He left ten of his servants behind, giving them resources and telling them to transact business until he returned. “Occupy” is a word that implies not only staying behind to represent the owner, but actively conducting business. The nobleman wanted his servants to administrate and take control of the business in the place, and he told them that he would come back to check on them.




As you read the rest of the parable an unhappy story unfolds that looks like the story of humankind on earth. The nobleman-king gets rejected by the citizens of the new country, and at the same time the ones to whom he entrusted his business dealings let him down badly. True, some of the servants succeed in their business dealings and let him down badly. True, some of the servants succeed in their business dealings to varying degrees, but at least one of them refused to do anything at all with the money his master left with him; he hid it away inside a piece of cloth and left it there the whole time his master was gone. Did the king appreciate this? Not at all. He swiftly exercised his sovereign power to punish both the unworthy servant and the rebellious colonists.




It did not have to turn out that way, but the citizens and the servants chose to abandon their master’s wishes. When he came to claim his kingship, they excommunicated him from the colony territory; they told him they did not want him. Isn’t that just what we have done in many of our countries today? We have taken The Most High out of our schools and universities, out of our government. In the Bahamas they haven’t decided to erect a legal separation of The Most High and government and I hope we don’t ever do it, but in many other countries, that is the law.




The servants in the parable were instructed to “occupy” because their territory was never created to be governed without the king. But they did not. They took matters into their own hands, and the result was ruin. The stewards in the story blame their actions on their circumstances, and even on the master himself. “For I feared you, because you are a harsh man. You collect what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow” (Luke 19:21). This sounds a lot like what the King, the Most High finds when He checks on the people He left to occupy the planet for Him. We say this to The Most High: “We think you are too harsh. We can’t trust you, and we prefer to do things our own way.”




The King is still bringing in the Kingdom, one colonist at a time.




How has the earth colony turned out? Just look around you. Does earth look like Heaven? Look at the bars on our windows and the guns in our houses. Every day a murder. We are afraid to jog outside, so we buy a treadmill. We are afraid to let our children visit certain family members, lest they be abused. We are unable to succeed in marriage, so the divorce business is booming. We have got nothing to show the King except broken lives, disease, depression, conflict, religious clashes, war, frustration, bankruptcy, tyrants and dictators, broken homes and broken nations.




Is it too late for us? I don’t think so. The King is still bringing in the Kingdom, one colonist at a time. Yet the only way we can occupy until He comes again is to change. We must recognize that we cannot do it on our own. We need the King to save us from ourselves. We need a Savior to save us, to salvage the colony. He is coming to bring in a new government-if we will accept it. We should realize by now that none of the governments human beings have produced are working: democracy, democratic socialism, communism… none of them. That is because they all belong to the kingdom of darkness, which people have affiliated since our earliest ancestors first declared independence from the original King.




Referring back to the parable, we need to realize that the King will be asking us to give Him an account. He will not care how your pastor did or how your boss did. He will want to know what you did with the resources He gave you to oversee. He has questions for you. “I want to know how you have been doing,” He says. “What have you done to represent my Kingdom? How have you explained and expanded my Kingdom to the people in your environment? Have you demonstrated integrity in your workplace? Have you been a good father or mother or child or friend? Have you made things better in your circle of influence? What was your attitude? Are you making investments with what I have given you? What kind of job are you doing?”




The fact is, those of us who are known as Kingdom colonists are not earthlings; we are “heavenlings” or “heavenians,” if there can be such words. We are citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. Many of us learned a prayer that includes these words: “Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). When we pray it, we are expecting the Father’s will to be performed in our colony, just as it is in Heaven. We are acting out of our identity as true colonists who see themselves as full citizens of Heaven and representatives of the King.




Citizenship VS. Membership

Most organized groups within societies, including religions, function on the basis of membership. However, countries, nations, kingdoms-and their colonies-are different because they function on the basis of citizenship. This is an important distinction to make, because otherwise you might assume that being part of a colony relegates you to some kind of second-class citizenship that is more like membership in a club.




You need to know that you are a full citizen of whatever nation claims your territory as a colony. This applies even to Heaven and Earth. Heaven is the territory of the King called The Most High, although it remains largely invisible to human eyes. Heaven is The Most High’s country, if you want to call it that. Heaven is an actual place. Heaven is The Most High’s headquarters. His throne is there. (The word “throne” does not mean just a fancy chair. It means a “seat of power” or fortress.)




You will hear two terms used interchangeably: the Kingdom of The Most High and the Kingdom of Heaven. They both mean the same thing except that the first one is referring to the One who owns the Kingdom and the other is referring to the territory.




That is where we get some of our descriptive terms for The Most High. People call Him the King of glory, the King of Creation, the King of the Universe. He is the King of everything seen as well as everything unseen. He owns it all and He rules it from within His original territory, Heaven.




Often, those of us who dwell on the planet called Earth fail to understand the setup. We see the physical planet all around us, and we find it to be delightful and fearful at the same time. We may recognize the existence of a world outside of our immediate experience, but we do not understand its importance. We recognize our citizenship in some nation, but we do not realize that all of us possess dual citizenship-in a physical country or colony and in an unseen one.




Since Kingdom of The Most High is a country, a real place called Heaven, and since countries bestow citizenship on the people who dwell there, it is citizenship (not membership) that has been bestowed on the “heavenlings” who dwell on the colony called Earth. Citizenship comes with more guarantees and privileges than membership does, along with specific responsibilities.




You can become a member of a community within your colony or country, but your citizenship is what ties you to the community in the first place. In the same way, you can become a member of a religion or a branch of religion, but your citizenship in the kingdom of light (or, sad to say, the kingdom of darkness) will take priority over your membership in that particular religion.




Naturalized citizenship is the goal, not mere membership, whether you live in the primary country or one of its colonies, You need to pursue full citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven as if your life depended upon it, because it does. As a citizen, you will grow to reflect the culture of the country, which in turn reflects the ruler of the country. Your life will be radically changed and improved as a result.




Citizenship is a legal position. Membership is more of an accomodation. You can apply for membership in the local lodge or Rotary Club and they can decide whether or not to accommodate and include you. They can also decide to de-member (I could have written dis-member) you, making you a non-member. But once you are a citizen, no one can take away your citizenship just because they don’t like you, not even the government. (You can read how this applies to a citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven in John 10:28-29.)




Having legal citizenship entitles you to certain rights, and those rights do not depend on feelings or emotions; they depend on much more powerful things: position and law. You can switch religious affiliations or other memberships without losing your citizenship in the Kingdom, and people do. They get their feelings hurt or they offend somebody, so they move on. They change their minds about what they want to do, so they find a new place that will accommodate their viewpoint.




The Declaration Of Independence

Now even though a country will not remove your name from the citizenship rolls, a citizen can remove his own name if he or she chooses. In any kind of kingdom, that is called rebellion, and it happens all the time. When the American colonists wrote their Declaration of Independence, they were announcing their intention to renounce their English citizenship, to break off legal ties with that country, to establish their own independent nation.




Independence and private ownership are an abomination within a colony. They cannot coexist with a kingdom mentality. To this day, the “American spirit” is the same as a spirit of independence, and a strong streak of individualism and private ownership has resulted in the growth of capitalism and its inherent conflicts.




When the first man declared independence from his government in the Garden, he resigned his citizenship by switching it to the kingdom of darkness. (Remember what we taught about darkness is synonymous with ignorance. Adam was ignorant of the importance of obedience to the single legal regulation of his government, and he was ignorant of the goals of his government.)




A declaration of independence results in the loss of citizenship. You may not even know what you are doing, but the end result is the same. If you change your mind, you may decide to seek citizenship again, and you may eventually be repatriated. But it will not be easy to regain your citizenship once you have lost it.




Just a note here about what the human race lost when the first human being declared his independence from his original King. We need to know what we are looking for if we ever hope to regain it. The human race did not lose residence in Heaven. I am going to say that again, the first human race did not lose residence in Heaven. The first human was created on earth and out of the earth. His residence was on earth. He never resided in Heaven and he did not fall from Heaven. He was the original colonist, and he had been allotted full citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven even as he dwelt on the earth. What he rejected was his assignment, which was to exercise dominion over the earth in obedience to the King. When he refused to follow The Most High’s directions in fulfilling his assignment, that first man lost dominion and citizenship at the same time.




As the story goes, Adam’s wife, Eve, was persuaded by a talking serpent, otherwise known as the devil, to eat some delicious-looking fruit from one of the trees in their garden paradise. Trouble was, that was the one and only thing their Creator-King, The Most High, had instructed them not to do. They had only one rule and they broke it. So they got kicked out of their garden, and all of their children, grandchildren, and so forth were born outside of the colony territory-which means that none of them were born into citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven.




Because of what the first man did, every one of the 7.3 billion people on earth and the 259,000 who were born last night are hungry for the Kingdom of the Most High. It is not about going to Heaven someday (although most religions think so); it is about becoming repatriated into the Kingdom that our long-ago forefather lost. It is about resuming exercise of the dominion over the planet, expanding the original colony until it covers the entire globe.




In the Garden, the first man had it all. He had every provision and all the privileges that come with the assignment of stewardship and management. The Garden was the first settlement of the colony of Heaven, and the Fall changed all of that. We call this “the Fall” and yet we do not really think very much about what those first humans fell from. Innocence? Goodness? Obedience? Yes, but more importantly they fell from dominion. They fell down on the job by breaking the one rule or law they had been given. For two bites of fruit, they lost their citizenship in the colony of the Kingdom of Heaven. Through the Fall, Earth was disconnected from Heaven. No longer did Adam defer to the direction of The Most High.




When you cut off the relationship with your kingdom, you have to set up your own government. Independence can be hard to live out. Ever since they declared independence in the Bahamas, they no longer refer to England to make governmental decisions. They encountered endless problems that they never came across before, and they had to figure out what to do on their own.




High Treason

The first man’s decision to disregard The Most High’s prohibition and to eat of the fruit tree seems like such a minor thing. But The Most High regarded it as high treason. Treason involves deceit and corruption. The highest form of trust has been broken. Adam not only disobeyed the one rule he had given, he lied about it afterward.




If an ambassador of a country should sell the secrets of his country to another country, that is treason. In every country in the world, treason is punishable by death. That is why The Most High, when He gave Adam the whole world to run, entrusted all of it to his stewardship, but gave him the one single prohibition, and leveled with him about the potential punishment: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Gen. 2:17, NIV).




The pronouncement of the punishment of death revealed the gravity of the sin. The word sin means rebellion against authority. Now Adam and all of the individuals who followed him would find death inevitable. He had committed treason. The man himself could not undo the punishment. A new Adam would have to come from Heaven to do that, and He did. He came to restore what Adam lost-everything.




The Governor Of The Colony

When the Bahamas was still a colony, the Queen hardly ever came there. And yet she was their ruler. This shows how a sovereign does not have to come into the territory in order to claim it or retain it. What she did was to send a man called a governor to live there. As long as he was there, the queen was represented there. A succession of governors lived in a big pink mansion known as the Government House on Duke Street in Nassau.




Naturally, when a colony declares independence from the home country, the appointed governor must leave. In the Bahamas, this happened peacefully, but in other colonies it happens with violence. Then the newly independent government must step up its own structure and rules. As the new country adjusts to its sovereign status, many citizens may long for the “good old days” when they were under colonial rule. Others will be perfectly happy forging an independent existence and creating a distinctive culture.




How does governorship translate into the Kingdom of Heaven and its expanding colony on earth? First of all, the native population cannot assume the colonial governorship role, although they can be loyal citizens. That role is reserved for a special, divine representative of the heavenly country known as the Ruach HaKodesh. The earth-colony was never intended to function without its heavenly governor, but when humankind declared independence, He had to leave. The citizens lost their legal connection to their first country, Heaven. They threw off its constitution and rulership and culture.




As a result, we have inherited a mess. Our world today is a culture of death. We have become citizens of a country (the whole earth) that, minus the stabilizing influence of Heaven, has gone completely berserk. Fighting within our homes and waging wars overseas, we keep trying to control the out-of-control situation we find ourselves in, but we can’t agree about how to do it. Can we get our first governor back?




Do you know the answer to our dilemma? Let’s explore this a little more in this series.