Excerpt from Keys, Gates and Prison Doors
Amidst torrid tribulation and heartless persecution, city after city was set alight by the gospel. A river of fire, a torrent of transforming power, made its way across the centre of civilisation. The apostles, having received the ‘keys of the kingdom’, proclaimed these keys, opened prison doors, and the joyful captives streamed through the gates of salvation.
From the cities where Paul’s gospel was established, we turn our attention to the keys that opened the gates and loosed the prison doors which bound the hearts in darkness.
The apostles carried with them the keys to ‘bind’ and ‘loose’ – to bind the strongholds of reason, argument and imagination, and to loose the prisoners into the kingdom realm of identity and relationship. From what unyielding dungeons were they loosed? From the strongholds of culture, reason and unbelief, in which ‘understanding [was] darkened’, where the prisoners were ‘alienated from the life of God’, because of the ignorance in them, and because of the ‘blindness of their heart’. As a result, men and women were chained in every kind of bondage – emotional, spiritual, relational and cultural imprisonment.
The prevailing prisons were blindness and lack of understanding, not just idolatry and depravity. The hearers were alienated and enemies in [their] mind by wicked works. The imprisonment was in the mind. The strongholds were those of argument, assessment, reason and imagination. These strongholds had to be ‘pulled down’, and ‘every thought’ had to be brought into ‘captivity to the obedience of Christ’.
These apostles (originally twelve in number) were an embodiment of the twelve gates of the heavenly city, as well as having their names written on the foundation stones. They themselves were the gates and their words were the keys. They were able to pierce the blindness, bind the darkness, and deliver to the hearers the keys of trust and faith, keys that would grant them an abundant entry into an abundant experience of the abundant life of the kingdom. ‘For so an entrance will be supplied to you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.’
The apostles delivered keys such as ‘hearing’, ‘receiving’, calling on the name, and ‘imputation’. We will now take time to develop these crucial elements more thoroughly. With these keys, the saints were able to actually appropriate the life of God. They were able to hear and receive, then ‘impute’ real substance to the life of Christ within. They were able to apprehend, appropriate, and genuinely enter the promised land of their destiny.6 They were able to ‘produce’ character, ‘add’ to their faith, virtue, knowledge, godliness and love’. They were not barren or unfruitful (cf. ‘sower’ parable), but brought forth the life of Christ in abundance.
The apostles’ words gave them the keys, for the spoken words of the messengers were the words of the Holy Spirit in the candlestick, the church. ‘He that has an ear let Him hear what the Spirit is saying.’ Anyone with natural ears (‘he who has an ear’), who was able to hear the physical voice, was challenged to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit sounding through the ‘holy men who spoke from God as they were moved by the Holy Spirit’.
This is amazing. This is the greatest key of all, opening the most impenetrable prisons of all. What key is that? It is the key of trust in the spoken word. This is the key that looses captives from the darkness of ignorance, darkness and unbelief.