Each of us was born in rebellion against God. The world in which we are attempting to serve God is in rebellion against God. Our own personality and the world about us counsel us continually to disobey God.

Obedience to God begins in Christ. Obedience to God will spread from Christ to the victorious saints—the hundredfold, victorious saints. From the hundredfold it will spread to the sixtyfold, and finally to every saved person on the earth. This is how the Kingdom of God will come to the earth.

The Kingdom of God is the rule of God in Christ in the saints over the nations of the earth. The Kingdom of God is an actual Kingdom with a king, a nobility, an army, and various officers, priests, judges, teachers, and ministers and helpers of all kinds.

God's will shall be done in earth as it is in Heaven.

The Kingdom of God begins to come to the earth as the Throne of God is established in the victorious saints. They will sit with Jesus in the throne of their own heart. They will rule all the works of God's hands.

The highest calling of man is to become a son of God and to rule the works of God's hands. Such authority and power have been given to no other creature of God.

Apart from Christ, man is the dust of the ground. Joined to Christ, as a branch coming out from Him, man becomes part of God and a lord over the creation. But it is only as Christ rules in us that we will rule the nations of the earth.

The holy city, the new Jerusalem is the highest expression of the law of God. The Lord Jesus is the beginning of the new creation. As He enters us we die to our first personality and become a new creation in Christ. Now we not only adhere to the necessary commandments that are written in the Scriptures but in fact actually become the Word of God, the holy city.

Through the Lord Jesus we are the flesh becoming the word, the law, of God. Christ—Head and Body—is the living expression of the eternal law of God.

It is in the heart of Jesus to rule all the works of God's hands. This is why Satan, understanding the commission of Christ to rule, tempted Christ to take a short cut to His inheritance by worshiping Satan. "If you will worship me, all the kingdoms of the world shall be yours."

The church of the Laodiceans falls into the temptation of Satan and seeks to place man at the center of the creation apart from union with God and His Christ. The spirit of Antichrist, man making himself God, abounds among the Laodicean believers.

The closer religious man draws to God the greater are the opportunities for power and glory and the greater is the danger of falling into the pride of the devil. The only manner in which we can escape falling into the pride of the devil is by taking up our personal cross and following the Master, Jesus. Those who seek to avoid the sufferings of the cross are exposing themselves to deception.

To be continued.