Step 3 – Spiritual Retribution
God says He will visit the Leviathan with His sword. In other words, He will bring this Leviathan system to account with the very expectations He has for the people, place, and generation being held captive by this systematic spiritual delusion. This serpent inserted itself into God’s designs and twisted them into perversions, piercing weaving itself into the fabric of His designed purpose and using God’s people, places, and generations to produce an unholy result. Upon arrival for an accounting of His expectations, Jehovah sees that Leviathan has usurped His purposes and influenced and controlled His people by systematic deception.
So, He will lift and wield His Sword, His Word, the rhema of the Spirit, a revelation of His expectations. He will again speak His expectations and purposes over that people, place, and generation with the authority of the Originator. When we look at Isaiah 28, we will hear the phrasing, “precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little.”
The Message version says, “He said before, ‘This is the time and place to rest, to give rest to the weary. This is the place to lay down your burden.’ But they won’t listen. So God will start over with the simple basics and address them in baby talk, one syllable at a time – “Da, da, da, da, blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s a good little girl, that’s a good little boy.”
In other words, the revelation that visits Leviathan will be an empowered Word of restoration. All transformation is restoration because God is restoring His expectations during a season of visitation.
Three specific characteristics of God’s Sword against Leviathan: unrelenting (qasheh), massive (gadowl), and sharp (chazaq). The Word that will “visit to bring to account” the Leviathan will have these characteristics, and it will also slay or ruin the dragon in the sea. God’s Word will strategically deal with the interwoven serpent and will strike so hard that the source of this systematic spiritual delusion will be ruined or destroyed among the population.
To understand the Leviathan and God’s Sword, we must understand the contrast between what God is doing to establish His kingdom purposes and what the enemy is doing to frustrate that establishing. God invested His expectations in people, place, and generation: He expects grapes so He plants a vineyard; He comes for an accounting of the vineyard to see if His expectations have been met. This is the sense of God walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day. This is the sense of God’s leadership strategies throughout history. This is the sense of the Incarnation. This is the sense of the New Testament kingdom leadership strategy of discipling. This is how God deals with men, nations, and generations. This is one of “the ways of God.”
When God invests purpose, hell invests perversion of purpose. To understand transformation and the process through which it arrives, we must comprehend purpose because all transformation is restoration. God removes the delusion in order to establish the authentic. In other words, to speak of city transformation, we must have a very clear picture of what our city would look like in full restoration because the transformation will return the city to God’s original expectations. No matter how perverted the work of hell, how far afield the wandering of culture, or how deep the stain of blood on the ground, God maintains His insistence upon original purpose and empowers that Word to be spoken with authority!
God’s purpose cannot be destroyed because the power of the Cross, the Life of the Resurrection, the Authority of the Ascension, and the Intercession of Jesus guarantees that full restoration of purpose is possible so fulfill of that purpose can be realized!
Once the Leviathan is engaged with the restorative Word, the effort must be unrelenting. We cannot pierce this monster without finishing the job! The systematic spiritual delusion, like overlapping scales, protects the serpent from piercing. Once God reveals the fatal flaws of that system, we must engage the monster with the idea that we will not stop until he is dead!
The indigenous people of North Florida killed alligators by driving a long, slender tree into its open mouth. They would cut down a tall tree, trim off its branches and sharpen one end to form a long pole. Several young men would hold onto it in pairs, and approach a gator. When the gator would open its mouth, they would thrust the pole into the gator and continue thrusting until they had driven it to the tail!
The most powerful part of Leviathan, his mouth, is the place of his vulnerability. His boasting is his fatal flaw. While the scales do not allow for piercing, the mouth does! The terror of facing that open mouth certainly makes gator hunters think twice, but God’s Sword must be thrust completely through the vitals of the beast. We do not want to wound it! We want to remove it! So, once God’s visitation starts, the Sword must be unrelenting.
In this same way, the Leviathan response must be massive. It cannot be piecemeal or patchwork in terms of dealing with the systematic spiritual delusion. Efforts to win “moral victories” that merely scratch at the scales or play games with the beast only stir the monster to greater delusion. Harassing the Leviathan will cause the system to rise up in defense, lead with its strengths, and increase its level of intimidation.
Efforts of this kind will bring discouragement to the warriors of God, and we have experienced this weariness for a decade. The monster cannot be tamed or domesticated! The Leviathan can be appeased or educated. God has allowed it to remain in place simply because any human effort to remove it would destroy the whole. The system is so entrenched that only God can unravel it. It is wrapped around the vital so this region but must be destroyed in a way that does not sacrifice the vitals.
God introduces Job to His strategy of Leviathan hunting: “Can you hook a Leviathan with a fly rod or put a noose around his neck? Can you put a ring in his nose and lead him or secure him on a spike? Will he beg you for mercy and ask you for pity? Will he become your workhorse? Do you put Leviathan in a cage like a songbird or give him to your daughters like a kitten for play? Do you throw spears at his hide or harpoons at his head? If you attempt to wrestle him, you will always remember that struggle! It is useless to attempt his capture, and the hunter who tries will hit the ground hard!” God concludes by saying, “Of all creatures, Leviathan is the most proud, the king of pride.” Or, “Leviathan is the king of the children of pride.”
Leviathan is a system but the piercing Sword will deactivate the system at the source of its power and the resulting restoration will be massive. It is a territorial principality, entrenched and interwoven into the seven mountains. The Word of the Lord that brings it to account will be massive.
Then, Isaiah says that the Sword of the Lord will be sharp. This speaks of specific, strategic revelation: Not a blunt instrument to batter down the outside shell. This is scalpel-like precision. The sharpness of this rhema Sword of the Spirit speaks of a specific revelation of strategic words that punch holes in the occult veil blinding people’s minds. The holes will be punched at places in the veil that allow the inserted Word to penetrate to the source of spiritual power supporting and guiding the Leviathan’s spiritual structure.
Here, we must return in humility to wisdom; wisdom is strategy or the strategic use of revelation. Here, we must have a revitalization and maturation of our intercession and warfare. Here, we must have some mighty men and women like David developed in the wilderness. Here, we must immediately remove ourselves from the silly and supercilious intercession left when the intercessors went home bruised and discouraged from Leviathan wrestling.
Move away from the “internet conspiracy wonders” wishing to do intercession and warfare from a vantage point of “inside information.” This represents a Leviathan insertion into our regional intercession, people believing themselves to be more than they are, a product of illegitimate leadership and warfare malpractice. Out of place. Out of mind. Out of order. This kind of intercession must be marginalized from the strategy of God that will release a sharp sword with surgical strike capabilities.
The word, chazaq, speaks to the concept of the strengths of something reaches its greatest use or design, and with respect to a sword, it refers to its tensile strength and sharpness, or ability to hold an edge. Only the strongest steel can maintain sharpness in use. The best scalpels are made with hardened and tempered steel, or even high carbon steel. Modern scalpels made are coated with Zirconium Nitride to improve and retain sharpness.
So, whatever condition our warfare readiness may have been, or whatever strategy we have employed in the past, dealing with Leviathan requires us to run into the refuge of God’s visitation. It is time for new weaponing and training. It is time, perhaps most of all, for a deeper level of humility and surrender, submission and obedience, agreement and alignment with apostolic assignment. Any holes in our armor or pride in our souls will make us vulnerable to the same fatal flaw we intend to exploit to defeat Leviathan.
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“Leviathan is a system but the piercing Sword will deactivate the system at the source of its power and the resulting restoration will be massive. It is a territorial principality, entrenched and interwoven into the seven mountains. The Word of the Lord that brings it to account will be massive.” AMEN!