GOD-CONSCIOUSNESS

I have long recognized a richness with those I have counted as friends. Rich friendships trigger the potential for the exponential between one another. That is how relationships were designed, by the Designer. While clearly a blessing of God, for me at least in part, this richness in relationships reflects a gift I have of seeing past the superficial, accompanied with a desire to establish something real with those I’m drawn to, as trusted friends. Such trust has got to be based on truth and what is real.

This is the foundation the Lord longs for with those He calls His own.

With these thoughts in mind, I can’t think of one I call friend that I don’t view as remarkable in their distinctive characteristics and gifts. It reflects a “oneness,” a harmony or love which connects such relationships. When that connection is true and unconditional, when it is pure, it releases a potential by which instead of two and two making four, it engenders an incredible multiplication in the gifts of each, perhaps to a hundred and four.

One of the more remarkable of those I have called friend, a triple-certified physician, did a study, uncovering truths that related to Abraham’s incredible relationship with the Lord, by outlining levels the Lord took Abraham through, in his consciousness of God.

Without presuming to tap the depths of my friend’s God-consciousness treatise, I would like to borrow his premise and draw my own conclusions concerning this significant process that took place between God and Abraham, that operated within and outside the realm of time.

An encounter with God begins a process. A process of a relationship. The level to which one reaches for God, perhaps better expressed, comes from recognizing and responding to the significance with which the Lord has first reached to them. The response determines if the relationship will be superficial and confined by being religious — or will begin a spiritual journey that transcends the natural world and the parameters of his or her own thinking.

The Abrahamic God-Encounter
Abraham, originally called Abram, came from the land of Ur, the land of the Chaldeans. Chaldea was a culture of sorcery, a people who understood the spiritual and operated in the supernatural, but typically not with God, instead with other spiritual entities on a far lower level.

Yet from within this culture, God encountered Abram, one whose response to Him was pure, without the defilements of the spiritual games played by the majority of the spiritually fickle pagans. Abram was one who discerned Him for who He was. God was not in competition for those seeking the favors of His created spiritual beings, an insurgent band of whom were once among those God created, as sons of God.

So it was that Abram knew God. They interacted. They were in harmony. They communicated with one another. From that, came the potential for something more that would come from the process that unfolded in this relationship.

Without ignoring the events that took place from the time when God assigned responsibility of the nations to those, then referred to as the sons of God and the time of Eden; at the time of Abram, God sought a culture of God-conscious people who, because of their response to Him, would be unique from all the other people of the earth. He told Abram that if he would follow Him to a place He would show him, that he would make him distinctive, essentially a prince, and would give him the land and build his offspring into a nation.

In doing so, God did a number of things, that not only were both within and outside the realm of time, but that were unique in both the process and way God presented Himself to Abram. In short, God was grooming Abram for what his response would trigger – that was outside the realm of time. In doing so, God was giving Abram the tools to operate without defilement, in this spiritual, beyond-the-natural dimension where God resided.

So, Abram knew God, by the Spirit, before he received the charge and promise to leave the land of his culture and family to establish himself solely with God, to reach for promises in a dimension beyond the natural. It is written that many are called but few are chosen. Being chosen depends not just on the hearing but on the doing, the acting on what is heard.

Abram heard and he responded by leaving his family and the familiarity of his cultural surroundings – to walk more deeply and purposefully with God. In doing so he activated these promises from God that involved the natural world currently around Abram, but also the vast spiritual realm in which God lived, outside time and space. What resulted became perhaps the first real and successful Joint-Venture.

The Journey with God
For Abram, this was a journey. It was an unfolding adventure, together with the discovery of an identity driven by Abram’s gifts. From that identity came the purpose and destiny that would unfold from walking with God. For God, it was taking Abram at the level of spiritual awareness he operated in and repeatedly wooing him to the next level and dimension.

So then, following Abram’s response of leaving the familiar to follow his God-mandate, God initiated a new level in Abram’s consciousness of Him. Upon arriving in the land of Canaan, it is written that God “appeared to Abram.” This is what theologues refer to as a theophany. God came from outside the spiritual realm – beyond the constraints of time and space – and in the form of man, entered the realm where Abram lived. In seeing these divine beings in human form, Abram KNEW. He dropped everything to give honor and obeisance to the One he had previously known simply by the Spirit.

In this encounter, God punctuated His promise by telling Abram that this land of Canaan would be the land He would give to Abram’s descendents. The appearance of God and confirmation of the place represented a heightened awareness of Abram’s consciousness of God – and the vision-purpose-destiny God was instilling in him. This is significant in the process as it fosters the interaction of this relationship, that fuels this connection between the natural and spiritual worlds.

Then came the spiritual backlash, the response of darkness to Light – and the famine that drove Abram to find more fertile territory, in Egypt. Egypt was another, but different pagan culture. With Abram arriving in Egypt, we see a subtle dynamic manifest that would follow God’s people in their encounters with pagan cultures in the ages to come: the fear of man versus the fear of God.

The power represented by the local king, Pharaoh, caused Abram to fear for his life. So he foolishly used his wife as a bargaining tool to gain the favor and pecuniary benefit of Pharaoh. Simultaneously, God intervened and brought judgment and affliction against Pharaoh to get his attention. With this being a spiritual culture, Pharaoh quickly discerned. What was accompanying Abram through his journeys was not only the presence of God, but the fear of God, which was clearly recognized and respected by these pagan power-brokers.

With this interaction, the stage was also being set for subsequent times in Egypt with God’s people, with Joseph and with Moses. The anticipatory responses of God on behalf of His people, that operates outside time and space to override the misfires of His chosen ones tied to God’s plan for them. Still another dimension of how the level of God-consciousness of His people correlates with the unfolding of His plan for them.

Setting the Stage for More
So Abram, very wealthy and powerful in his own right by now, returned to the land of Canaan, to the place by the tamarisk tree, where God had first appeared to him. His nephew Lot, who had tagged along with his departure from his homeland, was also prospering. Yet the land was not big enough for the flocks and herds of both. So Abram gave Lot his choice of where to settle, while himself staying in the land of promise. Following this separation, the Lord spoke again to Abram.

This marked another significant encounter with God, by which God was expanding Abram’s view of God’s promise and plan for his destiny. It is written that this time, the Lord simply spoke to Abram and told him to look across the land. He told Abram that the land as far as he could see would belong to his offspring. God added, with Abram still childless and already old, that his descendents would be so numerous they would be beyond counting. In doing so, God was expanding Abram’s vision.

Simultaneously, He was also reshaping Abram’s thinking — to more consistently be able to access the dimension outside of time and space, the spiritual. It would involve a progressively deeper response with Abram’s consciousness of God.

With Lot heading out on his own came a series of encounters, both with God and with the seedbed of wicked locals. Also, an encounter with Melchizekek, a king-priest who also intimately knew God and served to intercede during Abram’s quest to rescue his nephew. What followed was still another significant interaction in which God came to Abram in a vision, addressing Abram’s fears by affirming that He was both Abram’s shield and His great reward. Abram responded by noting that he still had no heir.

God’s response was to seal the relationship by establishing a covenant with Abram. Once again, the interaction took Abram into the realm between the natural and spiritual worlds, beyond that of time and space. Despite God being with him, the words used to describe this place, during this encounter with God were pretty scary to the natural mind. Yet, during this dramatic engagement, the Lord told Abram of things to come — in places Abram had been with the descendents of those he had had encounters with — that would happen to those becoming his own descendents. With the expanded vision, reshaping of Abram’s thinking and this covenant, the process began taking on new dimensions.

The Countdown to Fulfillment
With the covenant came the countdown toward the supernatural miracle from which the promises beyond the realm of time would be fulfilled. Yet, throughout the history of God’s people such times of countdown have been plagued with dynamics by which it seems the supernatural dimension sought is either undermined or replaced. Whether short-sightedness, impatience or heightened spiritual activity from the dark side, there is a pattern that seems to converge when God’s people are in this most significant time of birthing. For Abram, it was listening to and acting on the unbelieving influence of others — and then replacing the genuine promise with his own well-intentioned, but myopic fulfillment of God’s promise.

When God establishes a covenant with His own, we have already seen that it is both within and outside the realm of time and space. Such agreements with God are eternal and carry a significance far beyond the natural. Despite the glimmer Abram had of what God was showing him, outside the dimension of time, his grasp in terms of how this promise was to manifest was still at best vague.

This points also to an issue that interim success spiritually can foster myopic blind spots from which will come impatience and presumption. It bears on still another issue, integral to when God releases purpose — purpose that He has initiated — through His people: set-times. Times beyond human understanding, set independently on God’s schedule. Yet, due to the fact that Abram was now in covenant with God, even his failure to see the process clearly was going to carry a level of God’s sanction to it, despite the disruption and pain that would come, when THE promise began to manifest. It is the reason humility is not an option. God-consciousness, as we have gleaned from the life of Abram is a process which involves our degree of interaction with the Lord. As milestones are reached, we MUST be alert, aware and sensitive of the need to reach for the next level, discerning beyond it.

The issue of blind spots is also tied to another factor God used to strengthen the process of Abram’s God-consciousness: the separation from ones whose influence would adversely impact the process. These separations did not break the relationships. The first was with Abram’s family and surrounding culture. The next was with Lot. Then, it was Abram’s son of Sarah’s Egyptian maid, Ishmael. Each case suggested that what God was establishing through Abram was not to be blended with the influence that would trickle down from these relationships — with cultural and spiritual dispositions that would ultimately weaken the protection and power God knew His chosen would need to fulfill their destiny.

This time of countdown also marked a time in this process of Abram’s God-consciousness that the level reached greatly enhanced Abram’s identity. With that enlarged identity was his destiny outside the realm of time. Abram’s identity had already been enlarged and refocused from his original encounter with God — together with the redirected journey and promises unfolding from the relationship. Yet at this point, God told him that he would no longer be called Abram, High Father, but Abraham, Father of Multitudes. This was when God told Abram that Sarah would bear him a child.

Friendship with God
This also ties to another development in the relationship. Scripture tells us that Abraham was God’s friend. That being so, it is significant that God dealt with Abraham in the world of the natural he lived in, but simultaneously drew Abraham into the world He lived in, the supernatural. Abraham knew God within the context of time and space and outside the context of time and space.

There is no friendship one can have that can be richer than a friendship with God. Rich with the potential for the exponential operating between them. For the multiplication factor to operate in friendship, it must be based on truth. This is what God was doing with Abraham, in getting past the superficial, establishing trust with something real. The level of response by Abraham all hinged on his God-consciousness.

The process and interaction of developments continued to deepen and mature following these foundational steps. There were additional theophanies and angelic visitations. During one, the Lord revealed a key reason He had chosen Abraham was because He knew He could count on Abraham imparting God’s ways to his children and his household — as the baseline means from which God would fulfill His part of the Joint Venture throughout the generations to come. The means by which, through Abraham, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. After Isaac became a reality and an integral part of Abraham’s interaction with God, the Lord reaffirmed His promised intentions and summed it up by saying: “because he obeyed My voice.”

Abraham had a consciousness of God, that developed as he communicated with Him. It included recognizing and honoring God for who He was. Then as the relationship unfolded, his consciousness of God deepened, as he adhered to truth, the response to reality, and the direction God gave him, adhering to his role, as he understood it at the time. When God spoke, Abraham believed and acted on it. With the exception of the utterly wicked cultures, whose depravity had seared their collective conscience and fear of God, that response engendered a recognition of and fear of God along with Abraham’s relationship with Him, by those wielding the authority and power in the surrounding cultures.

During the process of this developing relationship, covering the significant recorded events during the course of Abraham’s life, God was grooming Abraham’s thinking and response to reality. This preparation was imparting the means needed to know God and to operate as His representative both within and outside the realm of time and space.

The benefit was personal to Abraham and his descendents, but as the representative of God and his ways, Abraham became the example of a higher dimension spiritually, which resulted in him and his seed being blessed to be a blessing. As it was spoken to him: “Through you all the families, that is all the cultures of the earth will be blessed.”

Over the centuries, the descendents of Abraham have been people of influence and advisors to kings, rulers, merchants and societal-cultural shaping leaders. In times in which there was no middle class, they became the middle class, simply by following the standards economically, community-wise and leadership-wise laid out in the covenants God initiated with Abraham, Moses and David.

This influence and impact, benefiting communities and societies, has resulted in cycles of backlash, the basis for anti-Semitism and replacement theologies. Backlash based on evil reports promulgated by the wicked suggesting conspiracies and evil intents. Wickedness has its source in the attempt to destroy or undermine someone or something God is nurturing. Peace comes from the response to truth. It is why there is no peace for the wicked.

One of the more wicked, Hitler, in these efforts, employing the resources of the occult, sought to remove these chosen of God from the face of the earth. Yet this God-conscious impact and influence has been the result and manifestation of the promise God made to Abraham, to be fulfilled through Isaac and those to follow of being blessed to be a blessing and a light to the cultures within whom these descendents resided.

This impact and influence has been expressed as disproportionate achievement. Illustrating today’s world population, in a room of 1000 people, less than two would be Jews. Yet, their modern-day accomplishments, as a people, far exceed any other ethnic group: whether in Nobel prizes, technologies developed, philanthropy and generosity, leadership in government and business, finance, literature, the media, music, the arts and on and on. As a people, they carry a dimension — of something more — that only can be explained by Abraham’s destiny.

Understanding Abraham is significant to the season and the unique calling of those whose mantles are designed to influence and be a Light to the cultures around them. Likewise, the consciousness of God and ability to navigate in and out of the realm of time, as an arbiter of influence finds a profound significance and example in Daniel’s role in Babylon. The many who have been drawn to the mantle of modern-day Josephs will find release and understanding from Daniel’s God-consciousness and response to God. Indeed, it is described by Jesus when He gave insight into the Kingdom realm: “Narrow is gate and difficult is the way that leads to Life and there are few who find it.” As I have previously expressed, it is a narrow corridor between Life and death. It is neither a game nor a path one can travel frivolously or half-heartedly. It is an exchange of paths of destruction for Life and it costs everything. The standard comes not from human comparisons, but rather the consciousness and response to God. So it is that many are called, but few are chosen.

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Morris Ruddick has been a forerunner and spokesman for the higher dimensions of spiritual business leaders since the mid-90s. As founder of Global Initiatives Foundation and designer of the God’s Economy Entrepreneurial Equippers Program, Mr. Ruddick imparts hope and equips economic community builders to be blessed to be a blessing where God’s light is dim in diverse regions around the globe.

He is author of “The Joseph-Daniel Calling;” “Gods Economy, Israel and the Nations;” “The Heart of a King;” “Something More;” “Righteous Power in a Corrupt World;” “Leadership by Anointing;” and “Mantle of Fire,” which address the mobilization of business and governmental leaders with destinies to impact their communities. They are available in print and e-versions from www.Amazon.com, www.apple.com/ibooks and www.BarnesandNoble.com.

Global Initiatives Foundation (www.strategic-initiatives.org) is a tax-exempt 501 (c) 3 non-profit whose efforts are enabled by the generosity of a remnant of faithful friends and contributors whose vision aligns with God’s heart to mobilize economic community builders imparting influence and the blessings of God. Checks on US banks should be made out to Global Initiatives and mailed to PO Box 370291, Denver CO 80237 or by credit card at http://strategicintercession.org/support/

Likewise, email us to schedule a seminar for your group’s gathering on the Joseph-Daniel Calling or on anointing the creative in business.

2020 Copyright Morris Ruddick — info@strategic-initiatives.org

Reproduction is prohibited unless permission is given by a SIGN advisor. Since early 1996, the Strategic Intercession Global Network (SIGN) has mobilized prophetic intercessors and leaders committed to targeting strategic-level issues impacting the Body on a global basis. For previous posts or more information on SIGN, check: http://www.strategicintercession.org