17.1 Our Site: Jerusalem

The first pattern of the Kingdom is “inhabiting the site.” This means that we think about the place wherein the Kingdom is to be built and orient our design towards that place. We have matched this pattern with the ruling verse of the Bible, Romans 8:28-30, in that this verse gives us the broadest and deepest scope of God’s entire picture. The “site” includes as well the inhabited portion of heaven-earth, which we have already called “Jerusalem,” the City of God, the city of peace.

To inhabit is to dwell, to make a place to be HOME. This home is first for God, then for His people, and inside their concern, all created heavenly and earthly things.

Elements of the Pattern (adjusted from Patterns of Home). In Symmorphy V: Life, we applied these things to community, now we are considering the entire habitation of heaven-earth.
 

• Protect the heart of the site by centering dwellings and making work and utility spaces peripheral.
• Make the social spaces more public and shield the private spaces, making them more remote.
• Preserve the special parts. Build to enjoy them without destroying them.
• Knit the structures strongly to the land.
• Orient dwellings to the best views.
• Make each part to be a positive contribution to the larger surroundings and the neighborhood.

Applied to the Kingdom. David said that God inhabits the praises of His people (Psalm 22). We must begin with this, that the site of human/angel habitation is first the acknowledgement of God. Only inside of that acknowledgement does heaven-earth exist as it is.

The “heart” of the site is the Covenant that connects us with God and one another, and the special places include the fellowship of Father and Son inside of which our fellowship together is included by the Spirit. Then this – the full union of heaven and earth, of physic and spirit, is restored. For that reason, the enjoyment of physical things and spiritual things is intertwined. In all things there is a balance, social and personal, respect and belonging, beauty and abundant productivity.

The Entire Ecosystem. When we say the “site” of the Kingdom, we are including all inhabited parts of heaven-earth. And “inhabited” means the dwelling place of life forms, every life form.

Our care then includes the oceans and the life forms even in their depths. It includes the atmosphere as high as birds soar. It includes the soil and the teeming trillions of life forms in every small portion. It includes all plants and animals, and all living humans, resurrected or not. But that’s only half, for the site of the Kingdom also includes all inhabited realms of earth’s heaven, and all the creatures and life forms found inside that sphere. This includes all heavenly relationship with earth forms as well as those humans remaining in a state of lostness in the heavens, that is, hades.

The Ruling Verse. The ruling verse is big. Let’s look at its layout. Lovers of God – synergeo with God – together making all good. Called and callers. Out from Pro-Knowing, by Pro-Determination – symmorphosed, God and man sharing the same forms together – the image of Jesus as the revelation of the Father. Family – brothers and sisters together, Jesus within and upon each face. – Already glorified, the fabric of Victory and fully expressed Value.

Here is a definition of the Kingdom – God and man sharing the same spaces together. Death is the exclusion of God. Life is God and man sharing all things together, form, space, energeia, movement, purpose, Hheart, Joy, expression, care.

Key Companion Verses. Here we bring in all verses pertaining to the Covenant, and now including 1 Peter 4:19. Indeed, the companion verses amplify the heart of Jerusalem and it’s special places. The Heart is the Covenant, this Bond that exists between God our Father and each one of us and between God and us together. The “special places” are all manner of fellowship.

You see, it is the Heart, the Covenant, that sends the Life Blood out into the entire Body, the entire dwelling of God, humans, and angels, inside heaven-earth. The Heart and Covenant, then, is the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lamb who gives Himself for all.

Words & Phrases Related to the Pattern. From “Considering the Patterns.” – Place, Location, Topography, Setting, Heart of Fellowship. The land, heaven-earth, the inhabited world. Continents and oceans. All ecosystems, heavenly, earthly, and together. Heart, center, fellowship, most valued. Rooted and grounded inside of Love. Fire, water, earth, and air. Privacy; community. Solitary peace; celebration together.

INHERITANCE. Our inheritance. Dwelling inside of God; accessing all that is God. Treasure; treasuring all things. Value, the placing of value on all. Covenant; symmorphosed with the image of His Son. Made just like Jesus. Many brethren. The Church, His body. Jerusalem, the City of God.

How Word Shapes Power. The “magic system” of the Age of Tabernacles is all Gospel Word fulfilled and all Spirit Life out-poured. It consists of every action of loving one another with pure hearts fervently. Word and authority go together; Spirit and power go together. Spirit goes before to shape the spaces wherein Word might dwell. Then, Spirit takes on the shape and meaning of the Word as it goes forth as the power of Life. God’s power is Life power, the springing up of life.

Notice that the Ruling verse layout begins with “Love – God” and ends with “already – Glorified.” Those who value God are God’s greatest Value. Value is established only by the one who buys. I value God because God first values me. It means we share Life together.

In the Old Creation. The present habitation of humans and angels is broken, filled with good and evil, with the destructive aspects greater than what is constructive. Here is the entire problem. – Having known God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were they thankful (Romans 1).

The truth is that every space inhabited presently by humans and angels is stolen, not by the ownership of “property,” but by the exclusion of God. There is inside the spaces presently occupied by the entrance of unthankfulness a taste and shadow of what is true and good, but on the whole, all human society is WRONG. It is wrong because of what people want, what they value. They do not glorify/value God. They do not value their world.

The Unveiling. Out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name (Genesis 2:19).

God was inside of Christ reconciling the world-cosmos to Himself, not counting to them their false steps, and now this same God has set forth and placed inside of us the Word of reconciliation with God (2 Corinthians 5:19). “I have made you [Abraham] a father of many ethnic families (Gentiles)” (Genesis 17:5). Besides that, the God whom he believed is the One continuously giving life to the dead and calling into existence things not existing (Romans 4:17).

The VALUE of anything, including other people, is what you call it to be, and the price you are willing to pay to obtain it.

Our Story of Victory. Lord, how I LOVE the habitation of Your house, and the place where Your glory dwells (Psalm 26:8). To LOVE God is to desire above all things to share Life with Him, and to share Life with God is to want what He desires, the place where His glory dwells – our Jerusalem.

Look at the Church of Jesus Christ right now upon this earth. – There is nothing we would desire. As Isaiah said, “He has no form or comeliness; and when we see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him” (Isaiah 53:2). Our bodies changed is the obvious end result. But real Victory is valuing Christians on this earth as God does, that is, more than life itself, calling them “friends,” and so they become.

Our Story of Love. We seek what we love. We obtain what we value. When we value God’s people, they become valuable to us. Their value to us then becomes their value to all. This is the law of Love; this is the operation of God. Knit the structures to the land; orient towards the best views; contribute to the surroundings. The operations of love.

Because we love God, returning His Valuation of us back to Him in return, we love and value His entire creation, all things coming out from His thoughts, especially our brethren. Sharing Hheart with God is the center of everything, the cause of all action, the making of all things good, the winning of the entire inheritance. This is Love. All will sing our story forever.

Prayer – God In. We acknowledge the Father in everything; we bring Him into our picture constantly, both personally and together. This is what prayer means. The flow, out from God’s Pro-Knowing by the good-speaking of Jesus into every next step we take with God, is inscribed upon and within every Kingdom structure. GLORY, the Value placed upon being together and the fabric of all things – Victory, that which Jesus has done for all. I don’t know what these mean, but they are ALREADY.

To “pray without ceasing” is not the burdensome toil we once imagined when we were hostile to God. It is the continuous acknowledgement of Joy. I LOVE knowing that I am inside of my Father, and that He is always saving me. I do not take myself into such thinking anymore; rather, every time I look, I see that I am only there. God – IN.

Provision – God Out. Provision, abundance of blessing, earthly and heavenly together. These things are given their time and space in such a way that they don’t intrude upon fellowship. Planting the garden and speaking Christ, hoeing the weeds and singing in the Spirit. When heaven and earth are married in the knowing of humans, abundance becomes hyper, as Paul said. Abundance is the normality of God.

In a very real sense, then, to build the Kingdom throughout all ecosystems in heaven-earth, is to direct the flows of abundance. However, God’s abundance does not lead to purposeless lives, as present human wealth does. This is because the core humans influencing everything are those who are like God, placing others above themselves.

The Person and the People at the Center. The Kingdom of God is about people – filled with God. I will be God inside of them, and they will be a people inside of Me. Yet we do not exclude angels. They are different from humans and have their own particular needs and contributions. We have almost no idea of how they will interact with us, but they will. The Kingdom also includes all physical animals and life forms, and all other spiritual life forms as well.

But it is a people who are at the center of everything, for it is among such a people that God shows Himself as Love. Human fulfillment is not found in “having everything,” but in sharing with others, giving and receiving, valuing and being valued. Ensuring each a HOME, personally and together, is our RULE, the purpose of the Kingdom that we build.

Property – Stand upon Firm. Plenty for all happens out from the security of property. Societies that do not secure property rights must be poor. Those that make, “my word is my bond,” become wealthy. Rooted and grounded inside of Love. Build upon the right foundation. Take possession of all that is God as our own.

Respect for others and what is theirs is the foundation of all liberty and peace.

Community is NOT socialism; it is an enlargement of marriage, of family, and of business partnership. A community, like a marriage partnership, is secure in its property and not subject to the whims of others. It is in this same secure confidence that we partake of all that is Christ, knowing that nothing can be taken from us.

Participation – A Shared Life. It is not good for man (God) to be alone; I will make him a companion of his same kind (Genesis 2).

God’s thoughts concerning all are part of God. We are those thoughts before we ever come into being through Jesus. We have no capacity to comprehend the depths of God’s DESIRE to be known inside His creation, to share joy and belonging with every created thing, for each tiny thing in every brief moment, was found first inside God Himself. When we participate in a shared life together as the Church, as God’s dwelling place, we have no idea of the depths of Joy and Contentment we cause inside of God. Those who love God love the gathering together of His House.

Governance. This first pattern of the Kingdom gives us the scope and focus of our watch-care over all things belonging to us forever. Heart is at the center, for all things come out from a shared Hheart with God, and thus we value the hearts of others, of each one, above our own. This is the source of our authority. Fellowship, a shared life together, is the treasure that we protect in all “construction plans,” to ensure that place is fully given for all levels of fellowship to flow freely.

The rule of the beast, that is, of politics, uses money and violence to separate, to manipulate, and to make subservient. The rule of Love, that is, the Kingdom, uses respect and reciprocity to join, to cause to belong, and to set free. This is our rule over our entire inheritance.

Designing the Kingdom. I saw as if a sea of glass mixed with fire, and those overcoming out of the beast…, standing firm upon the glass sea, having harps of God. And they sang… the song of the Lamb… (Revelation 15:2-3).

This visionary picture contains the two qualities by which we design the Kingdom coming out from the authority of Christ which we possess, nucleation and harmonic resonance. Everything comes out from firstfruits. What they establish together becomes the “crystalline structure,” the sea of glass, upon which all things stand, by adding it’s own likeness to itself, that is, “nucleation.” And every reality that comes into their song together then is free to become the song of all, that is, “harmonic resonance.”

Conclusion. Two powerful things have come into our understanding. First, only as we value other people can they become our treasure, only as we call all things good can they become good. And second, what we build together as firstfruits, as the cornerstone, the “seed,” of God’s house, then becomes the reality of life for all things inside heaven-earth.

It is our love for our entire inheritance, our Jerusalem, all things living together inside heaven-earth, that causes this earth to become beautiful. And that love begins with people. By valuing all peoples in every land on earth, our inheritance becomes our treasure. They become “connected to God” only by first being connected to us, as our Song, the Song of the Lamb.
 
Reading for Next Time. The next lesson in this study is titled, “Spaces for All.” It is the pattern, “rooms inside and out,” and the second ruling verse of the Bible, “Christ in our hearts – filled with all of God.” To prepare for that lesson, you might want to peruse Chapter 9: “Creating Rooms Inside and Out,” in Symmorphy V: Life.

I think that this is my favorite pattern. I love spaces, a room of my own, a room with secret places, a room with a view. Yet I love inhabiting quite a number of different rooms, a garden, a blueberry patch, a wood shop, a fig orchard, a series of ponds, my office, the place where I sit and read or enjoy a show. (I am describing my present dwelling). We are this way BECAUSE God is this way, first.

Let’s Pray Together. “God, our Father, we marvel at the place of Your habitation, the entire living world, our inheritance, our Jerusalem. Father we know that we share Hheart with You because we know that Your Love is shed abroad inside our hearts by the Spirit You have given so freely to us.

“And Father, our hearts go out with Yours over the whole earth, over the longing cry of every created thing, and especially over the hearts of each one whom You have given to Jesus in this hour. The only price we can pay, Father, is to give ourselves to You inside of and as the Lord Jesus Christ for the sake of our brethren. As we value them, so they become our great treasure.

“God, our Father, let the giving of our souls to You, for Your pleasure and desire, become the cause of many, many rushing into You with all Joy. Let our love for one another become the Love flowing among Your entire Church. Father, we know that evil disappears from this earth and from all creation only as Your Kingdom arises from beneath of all. We know that Your Kingdom is everything first before that which opposes vanishes away.

“Oh God, together with You, we call all things GOOD, every moment and circumstance of our lives. Together with You, we call our brethren into Your fulness, into the celebration of Tabernacles, right here and now inside this world. Father, we know that the Word we speak with You prevails over all. We know that Your Kingdom is come.”