Now, that's trembling at the Word. That's the first thing that happened with Moses. He suddenly realized the power that was in his rod and he ran from it.
He was overawed. The second thing that he did was to take hold of the rod. By faith he gripped it and it became a rod again in his hand.
So when we've trembled, then we need to take hold of God's Word. We need to take a firm grasp on the Word of God. And there's a Scripture near the end of the book of Psalms which to me is really impressive.
Psalm 149 the last few verses. Psalm 149 beginning at verse 5: Let the saints be joyful in glory; let them sing aloud on their beds. The saints, I believe, is all true dedicated believers.
The word saint, Hebrew word hasid. How many of you have ever heard of Hasidic Judaism? Very ultra Orthodox.
It means somebody who trembles at the word of God who's totally committed to it. Let the saints be joyful in glory; let them sing aloud on their beds. Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a two-edged sword in their hand, to execute vengeance on the nations and punishments on the peoples; to bind their kings with chains and their nobles with fetters of iron to execute on them the written judgment.
This honor have all his saints. It's an amazing series of statements if you can identify yourself as belonging to the saints. It says that we have to have the two-edged sword which is the Word of God, in our hands, the high praises of God in our mouth and with it we can execute vengeance on the nations, punishment on the peoples - are you seeing yourself in this scenario?
Do you realize that this is something God has for you? To bind their kings with chains, their nobles with fetters of iron. I do believe that means in part the satanic principalities that rule the nations but not exclusively.
And then it says in the closing verse to execute on the nations the judgment written. And it says this honor or this privilege have all his saints. Have you ever pondered on that?
God has given us the privilege of executing judgment on the nations. The prayer life of many would be different if we began to see ourselves in that light. Now it says to execute the judgment written, or the written judgment.
Where is the judgment written, where do we find the written judgment? That's right, hold it up. That's right, it's in here.
We are not the ones to make the judgments. God has made the judgments. But we have the privilege of executing the judgments on the nations, on their rulers.
In other words, we have a unique and decisive part to play in history. See how important this is? And I'd have to say how far away many, many Christians are from even beginning to understand all that God has made available to us and all that God expects from us.
But I want to emphasize we don't make the judgments. We find the judgments in the written Word of God, but we execute them. How do we execute God's judgments?
By what one word? Proclaiming, that's right. We release the judgments of God that are already written in the Scripture.
We proclaim them, we are the heralds. We stand in the marketplace of the world and we say, Oyez, Oyez, and then we announce the decree of God. Now I think I'm going to try to be very practical and down to earth.
We come to the next stage after he grasped the rod. What did he do next when he got back to Egypt? He stretched it out.
He exercised the authority that was in the rod. Now I want to suggest to you that we need to do the same. We need to take the written Word of God and we need to stretch it out in any situation where the authority of God is needed.
One of the ways - I'm not saying it's the only way but I think in many ways the most effective way to release the authority of God into a situation is by proclaiming in faith and under the anointing of the Holy Spirit because remember, the word must go with the breath. But when the two go together, when the breath of God, the Spirit of God propels the Word of God out of our mouths we can release it into a situation and it has all the authority of Almighty God in that situation. God didn't step down off the throne, take the rod out of Moses' hand and say, Moses, I'll do it.
That's what most of us, I think, expect to happen. God says, You've got the rod. You do it.
But it is called the rod of God in the book of Exodus. It was God's rod but Moses held it. Moses stretched it out.
Moses and Aaron together. It didn't make any difference. It was the rod that did the job.
