Romans – The Play Part 4

Oh, brothers, to have a sense of the unseen. To get a sense of the unseen. Now, you need a sense of the unseen, to know that there are things going on around you, there is another realm. That realm is populated. It has things going on; as sure as there are forms of life in this realm, there are forms of life in that realm. It does exist, and it has given us a good part of our Christian vocabulary. I’m going to repeat again, it has given us the engine of our faith. It’s from there that the engine of our faith is located, in contrast to things within our own realm.

Have the eyes of Elijah, who could see the unseen. You know what he did. His servant, what was his servant’s name? Anybody know? I’ve forgotten. I should have known. I should have impressed you tonight with my Bible knowledge and looked it up, and then you would have thought I was so wise. He had a servant, and his servant was scared. And he said, Lord, open the eyes of my servant. His servant’s eyes were wide open, but his servant could not see the unseen. Now, when they did open, you tell me what they saw. What did his eyes see? Tell me. All right, one more of some of the things he saw. He saw chariots. He saw angels. He saw a mighty army. I think those angels had drawn swords, didn’t they? Yeah, they were up there on the mountain tops. And he thought it was just him and Elijah against this enemy. And Elijah said, Open my servant’s eyes.

Let me go back to Joshua. Joshua saw someone out there in the field, but he did not know who he was. Walked out to him and did not realize that that field was being led by unseen angels. Only one person in the army was visible, but there was an entire army of angels standing beside him that Joshua couldn’t see. The only person he could see was who? The captain. The Captain of that army. The captain of God’s host. Now, one of the things you all learned by now is their visitations from that of the realm.

Alright, now I’m going to come on down to a brother who really got a first-class look at the other realm. Young man, very sad young man. See, you don’t even know who I’m going to talk about. The lot went to him that year to be the one who would go into the Holy of Holies on the one sacred day that a priest went into the Holy of Holies. Maybe they, I don’t know if it was the tradition that far back, probably, if it did, he had a rope tied around his foot in case he dropped dead in there. They could haul him out by his foot, like this. I don’t know. That was the tradition, perhaps, that came later. But he’s standing in there in the Holy of Holies, and the Holy of Holies bumps into the real Holy of Holies. And the wall disappeared. And in the year the king Uzziah died, he saw the Lord, high and lifted up, and the train of God filled the temple. And there were angels in that other realm, and they were crying. Holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. Well, he cried out, “I’m a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among the people of unclean lips.” He didn’t even know that. He didn’t know if people were unclean; he didn’t know he was unclean until he saw the throne of God.

I’m going to repeat myself. It’s out there, saints. It’s over there, but the one thing that I think that we just so neglect and don’t understand and don’t see is that Jesus Christ came from there. And I am, and I’ve said this before, and I said it at the summer conferences; I’m going to say it again. I’m sometimes almost offended when I’m reading someone talking about the Lord. He said, then the Lord said, and He told us so and so. And the reason He said this was because of his Jewish culture. Perhaps his mother taught this to Him when he was young. And I think, man, you’re taking the deity of my Lord away from Him. You’re taking his eternal nature away from Him. He was totally aware of a life lived – there, just like when Columbus brought an Indian over to Queen Isabella. Now that’s not her name. Was that her name? Ferdinand and Isabella, that’s right. Okay. And that Indian didn’t just suddenly appear in Spain. That Indian had a lifelong habit. And when Columbus went to the New World, he didn’t just suddenly appear there, born that day; he had a lifelong culture behind him. Each of them had totally different experiences.

When Jesus Christ was born and raised, and came to this earth, he had a storehouse of great vital experience with Him. And one of the things He did was He brought with Him the engine of the Christian life and brought it into collision with this realm. And now two realms’ vocabularies meet. In my realm is the flesh. In my realm is the soul. In my realm is human life. In my realm is the law of the mind. In my realm is the law of the flesh. In my realm is the law of good and evil. In my realm is the law. In my realm is good deeds. This is my realm.

But He came out of another realm where there wasn’t any of that. There was no law of the flesh in the other realm. There is no domination of the soul in the other realm. There is no flesh in the other realm. And He was, if you please, before his incarnation, a spirit being. We’re talking science fiction here, folks. We’re talking about a visitation of a creature from another realm, who is not constructed as we are, who does not live as we live, who has come to invite us into the fruits of that realm and one day into that realm. And if you please, that day is not after you die. There is, please hear me, there is the foretaste of that realm on this earth. He brought other principles, other things, other realms into this realm. And one of the things He brought was the vocabulary of the word spirit, but behind that was the reality of that vocabulary. And I guess this is what I really want to impress on you. This is not words; that realm’s out there. And that word got into our universe because it was real in another universe.

This week I did something. I sat down in a sound booth in a recording studio with a microphone in front of me, and about 40 feet away, in another sound booth, was a man taping what I had to say. What I did was I read the autobiography of Jesus Christ on tape.
It’s seven hours on that; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John together take you about seven hours. I didn’t know that. It took me a whole week to do this, an exhausting experience, physically, I’m speaking of. You know, I passed over passages that bother us all. I passed over passages so familiar that I have to confess sometimes they’re worn out.  And I passed over the things I’ve never seen, but as I read, it struck me one more time how often He related Himself to His past. He related himself to His past. Before Abraham was, I am.

This was driving people crazy. Other things about the fact that there are two realms. Abraham saw my day and rejoiced. I looked at that, and I can’t help but ask. Does that mean he saw it in a vision way back hundreds of years ago? Or was that yesterday? Or perhaps today, Abraham saw the Lord in this realm and rejoiced? I don’t know, do you? I don’t know. But Abraham not only pierced into the other realm, he pierced into the future of our realm and saw someone from the other realm in our realm hundreds of years after his time. Now that’s what you call space travel.  Time-space travel. That’s a time traveler, isn’t it? Not a space traveler, time traveler. He saw my day and rejoiced. I’m going to repeat. I know you’ve heard me say this before, to Nicodemus, he said, the son of man who came down from the heavens and is now in heaven.

But there were many others as I passed over, and I’ve never seen them before. He had such a consciousness of having come from other places. Other places. He said to them, The Son of Man, you know not where He came from nor where he’s going to go. “What do you mean, we do not know where you came from? You are a Nazarene.” You do not know the Son of Man. And you do not know where He came from. And you cannot go where He is going because my Father has not chosen you. If you had believed my words, then you could go where I am going, but because you have not believed, you cannot go where I am going. I am from above. I am from above. You are from below – here. I am not from this world.

Now that word ‘world’ can throw you. Let me just give you some possibilities for the word cosmos. The created universe, the world system, the realm you’re living in. It’s a big word, cosmos. You yourself know how big that word is in the way that it is used in our day. He used the word cosmos. I am not from this world. I am from the above world. And I was once more struck by how many times he said I am from above. I am from above. And he said to Nicodemus, “You must be born up above. Not again, but you must be born up there, just like I came from there; you’ve got to be born there.”

He was calling us into that realm. Someone hand me a watch. Thank you. We will go broke here if I run any longer. Saints, there’s another realm. He’s from it. Now, I just want you to be impressed with all this. By the way, I’m going to run ahead of myself here. Paul visited that realm.