Open Heaven

I have been sharing my "journey" that God took me through where He began to work on my personal theology about angels, and help it better line up with His reality. He started doing this long before I was aware of it, causing me to have experiences I did not understand at the time that He would later go back and explain to me in a new light. God did this by using people to tell me things and also by having me experience certain supernatural things as I ministered. Then God began to put it all together for me.

I had been telling Him, "God, I don't understand why you need angels." Then all of a sudden I understood something. Because of my Baptist background, I know a lot about Baptist history. I knew that the first protestant missionary movement was begun by William Carey in England, a shoe cobbler. He stood up in the Baptist association and said, "I feel like God is leading me to preach the gospel to the heathen in India." And a great theologian, teacher and leader in the Baptist association stood up and said (of course at that time Baptists were extremely Calvinistic), "Young man, sit down! God does not need you to reach the heathen of India. God is sovereign and if He wants to save the heathen of India, He can save them without you." There was no missions-mindedness of Baptists yet. That was being birthed.

I remembered that and it was like both of those men were right. "I am sovereign. I can do it any way I want." The question is not what is possible for God to do, the question is understanding the ways God has chosen to work. So much of the time we work in the realm of deduction and possibilities and our philosophy of what God could do. We think to ourselves, "God is perfect, so He's going to be like this." We draw upon Greek philosophy of Plato and others.

That type of thinking really corrupted some of the early views and theology of the churches -- things like: God is impassive; He is not subject to emotion, though everything in the Bible talks about emotion. Anthropomorphism is attributing human characteristics to God, but God is above them. God doesn't feel. God can't be moved upon. God doesn't get angry. God does not get jealous, He doesn't have wrath. God is beyond all that. And we reason out what we think God is like from our own limited natural/carnal minds that can't understand spiritual things and we get it wrong. The Bible says He gets angry, He gets jealous. It also says that He is loving, that He feels.

So I understood that it's not about what God CAN do, it's what God has revealed that He wants to do. Then I started to read the Bible and I started to see things that were there all the time. You know you can see things in the Bible and not see them? Then you see something in life that opens your eyes to see in the Bible what was in the Bible all along, but you just didn't see it there before. Scripture is recording reflection upon what God has done under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It's an explanation of what the people of God have already experienced. The experience came first, out of which God gave understanding to His apostles or His prophets, or He gives them an understanding of what He's doing. Then it's written down as Scripture. It's God-breathed, it's infallible, but it's not just created out of a vacuum. It wasn't created in an ivory tower in some seminary. It was created on the crucible of life in history, and revelation that was happening in experience. It wasn't logical reflection and deduction and the reasonings of man. It was breathed by God.

Sometimes we gain understanding of Scripture that we really didn't have much room for or understood before after we have had some of those experiences. For example, I thought, "I don't need angels, I have the Holy Spirit. So why do we need this angelic stuff?" Then I read about Jesus in the wilderness after His fast, where the Holy Spirit had led Him into the wilderness. It says, "Full of the Holy Spirit, He left." But while He was there, after the temptations, it says God sent angels to strengthen Jesus. Now I thought, "If Jesus could be strengthened by angelic beings, who am I to be beyond the need of the help of being strengthened?"

I learned about 'strengthened' divinely. Mahesh Chavda's wife Bonnie was in a meeting and we were praying for 400 pastors when her eyes were opened. She said, "Randy, do you want me to tell you? I'm in a vision. I see what's happening! Do you want me to tell you what I'm seeing?" I said, "Yes, tell me what you're seeing." She said, "When you start praying for people like these, when you ask the Spirit to come, hundreds of angels come in. When the Spirit of God fell, hundreds of angels came, too. When you touch and pray for the people, they enter into this pouch-like place."

(Now I don't know if it's the vision or symbolic or what, I don't understand a lot of this stuff; I'm just reporting it.)

She continued, "The angels would put strength, like an anointing of strength in the people. And then there were three angels, they were three feet taller than everybody else, and they had a greater glory about them, a greater shine, closer to the Throne, I guess; I don't know. But they didn't come to strengthen. They came to commission. They would come over somebody and they'd open up a scroll that had been given to them from heaven and they would declare, kind of like Gideon and the angel: 'Mighty warrior!' 'Who me? I'm the least of my tribe!' But the angel said, 'No, God says you're a mighty warrior!' And God made him into what He said he was. And so the angel would open the scroll and declare into the heavens. The angel would speak what God had given him and then the angels stamped the people on the forehead." (That's in the book of Revelation, 'the angel stamped them.' It was not just the mark of the Beast, but the mark of Christ.)

All of a sudden I understood that there are two things that happen in meetings. Some people get strengthened and other people get commissioned. There is a whole lot less of the commissioning than there is the strengthening. You might say, "I'd like to be commissioned!" Here's the other side about the commissioning part: The greater the anointing and power and experience, there's almost always a commensurate difficulty to the task that you've been called to do.

I'm thinking about that as God is refining my "angel" theology. Not only did an angel come to the Lord Jesus, but an angel also came to Paul and told him, "If you all stay in the ship, nobody's going to die. But if you try to get out of the ship, somebody's going to die." And Paul was encouraged because the angel spoke to him. Peter was in prison and an angel got him out of prison. And John, he didn't understand what he was seeing, so he had an angel that was helping him interpret all the heavenly visions he got in the Revelation. I thought, "Whoa, my gosh! We've got Jesus, Peter, Paul, John and then even Phillip the evangelist-deacon. Well, Lord, I need to change my theology and get open to the possibility that there's a whole lot more going on in this invisible realm that I can't see than what I understood."

In Genesis 28 beginning in verse 10, Jacob has a dream there at Bethel, what he called it. In verse 12, when he had lain down and he had gone to sleep, it says, "He had a dream in which he saw a stairway (or a ladder) resting on the earth with its top reaching into the heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it." On what? On the ladder or the stairway.

There is such an interest in this stairway to heaven, that even the phrase captures people's attention. There really is a stairway to heaven, but it is not the one that Led Zeppelin talked about. There is such an interest in that song; it's popular because there is something in us that's attracted to these Biblical realities. (But it was a perversion of it.) That stairway is Jesus.