Today I want to talk to you about the altar of Christ. Is it the place of death where pride dies, or is it the place of life where the Christ-likeness is born in us? We often hear ministers say that the altar represents sacrifice and therefore the altar represents self-sacrifice, but that’s wrong and that misconception has hung over the church for a very long time.

Let’s do a quick rewind to find out why ministers are still confused about the altar of Christ and what it means to God and how God designed the new covenant altar to function for you.

• First of all, the altar does NOT represent sacrifice, it represents Jesus.

This first point is pivotal and it’s very simple. Never forget that everything that God placed in His new covenant for us represents Jesus and never represents us or self. Jesus is God’s starting point for us to reason with Him.

So, say it with me, “Everything that God placed in His new covenant represents Jesus and never represents me.”

A minister who is confused about Jesus’ covenant often believes that the altar represents self-sacrifice because he expects to sacrifice his pride to God. He expects that God is waiting for him to sacrifice… or surrender… his life, his envy, jealousy, suspicion, doubt, his time, money, etc.

Thankfully, in this new apostolic season, as God returns the church to the lost foundation of His covenant in Jesus, His is also returning the church to the lost altar of Christ to reverse Satan’s self-referencing gospel.

Go with me to Hebrews 13:10 where God talks about His new covenant altar. The Apostle Paul gives this instruction.

Hebrews 13:10
We have an altar, whereof they have no right to EAT which serve the tabernacle.

The first thing God points out is that the altar is the place where we EAT. This has to do with partaking of Christ by working with the knowledge that describes His work in us. And just to mention here, when we talk about partaking of Christ, we’re not talking about setting up communion tables where the physical bread and wine are shared. We’re talking about partaking of Christ through His knowledge.

Why knowledge? God is a God of knowledge and that’s how He weighs our faith to Christ.

1 Samuel 2:3
The Lord is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed.

If you want to change your faith so that it is no longer focused on you and the kingdom of the flesh, you can’t get away from the fact that God builds our understanding with His knowledge.

And that’s why building the altar of Christ in your heart is the first thing that happens when you say yes to Jesus’ covenant. Building His spiritual altar in your heart is the first step of discipleship in order to begin partaking of Him.

Jesus’ altar is constructed with the 12 spiritual stones of His knowledge which are as follows:

1) grace, 2) faith, 3) righteousness, 4) justification, 5) sanctification, 6) holiness, 7) peace, 8) rest, 9) charity, 10) truth, 11) regeneration, and 12) the renewing of the mind. God designed our faith around these stones of His knowledge. You may recognize these as the elements of the gospel.

God defined each element for us through His real apostles to define Christ to us and define our reciprocation to Him. God defines the Christ-likeness in the stones of His altar to tell us that Jesus is our living altar by His living work in us.

Why 12 spiritual stones of knowledge?

Go with me to 1 Kings 18:30-31
³⁰ And Elijah said unto all the people, Come near unto me. And all the people came near unto him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down.

³¹ And Elijah took 𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐥𝐯𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬, according to the number of the tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto whom the word of the Lord came, saying, Israel shall be thy name.

All the people were beckoned by the steward that God appointed to receive instruction. Elijah was sent by God to repair the altar of the Lord that was broken down. And the church is in the same situation now, whereas the altar of Christ has been abandoned and broken down. God sent the apostles of the Second 8th Week to repair Jesus’ altar.

The 12 stones represented Israel. That brings us to ask WHO is God’s altar today, and by now, I think you know the answer. Jesus is God’s new altar. We now build our faith according to His name to work with His knowledge and God effects change within. This is God’s Intelligent Design for Christ-Centered Spiritual Transformation.

We looked at these stones of knowledge earlier. Again, they are the 12 elements of the gospel that define Christ in our faith: grace, faith, righteousness, justification, sanctification, holiness, peace, rest, charity, truth, regeneration, and the renewing of the mind… each spiritual stone of knowledge bears His likeness, so God placed His name on them to empower this knowledge.

You get a chance to study how God defines each element in Apostle Eric vonAnderseck’s IDCCST Course. You will learn how the Holy Spirit is active with the DNA design of Jesus’ blueprint of knowledge to build His likeness in you and how that happens every day.

• By asking WHO is the altar, God fixes our eyes upon Jesus. That’s so simple, isn’t it?

Jesus is the altar and Jesus is God’s gift to us. Jesus was sacrificed once and for all on God’s altar to set the pattern for our reciprocation to Him in the true spiritual sacrifices of prophecy. True prophecy returns to God the knowledge of His Son and that’s why your presence at Jesus’ living altar is daily required.

Romans 12:1
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

Apostle Paul’s instruction to the saints here was that they present themselves at the living altar of Christ to build with Him there, offering to God the living spiritual sacrifices of prophecy that testify of His Son. Notice that Apostle Paul did not direct their faith to a dead altar, nor to dead sacrifices. Death is not present in Jesus’ altar.

Jesus’ new living altar and His new living priesthood are irrevocably connected, just as Apostle Peter also confirmed when he connected your priesthood to Jesus’ living altar, showing that our spiritual sacrifices testify of God’s divine work in us, “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy”. (Rev. 19:10)

1 Peter 2:5
Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.

In covenant, we also are living stones that contribute to the building of God’s house through the spiritual sacrifices we offer to God at Jesus’ new spiritual altar. These living spiritual sacrifices of knowledge reflect Jesus perfectly, so they are acceptable to God. These living sacrifices are the charity of His anointing and the true light of prophecy. Our affections are molded by the Spirit as we accept the pattern from above that defines Christ in the fulness of His work.

As God sets order to the living spiritual sacrifices that we offer to Him, we see yet another vital distinction in Christ and a significant break away point. We are not confessing scripture (false light), nor making declarations based on scripture (false light), nor prophesying scripture (false light), nor prophesying about life’s ups and downs (false light). You can thankfully get that out of your mind once and for all.

The minister who believes that the altar of Christ is a place of death… death to self… is teaching Satan’s gospel. The devil builds false altars to build sightlines to yourself, and God is tearing down these false altars.

In truth, Jesus’ altar is a place of life. Look again at the spiritual stones that God uses to build His altar in your heart. As I said earlier, each one describes the design of the life of Christ that you now live in Him. God’s altar stones are designed to reciprocate the life of Christ.

So, what is God teaching us… to sacrifice self… or to reciprocate to Him?

Faith reciprocates God’s gift… It’s that simple. Jesus is the altar and the sacrifice we reciprocate to God. He is God’s gift to us. Now we understand how the altar is a place of service to God.

Going back to the point about self-sacrifice and sacrificing our pride to God, that’s not the simple gospel. Satan complicated the gospel by making it point to self which develops a mind that is SIN conscious and the gospel is forever changed to focus on your struggles with yourself.

In truth, God doesn’t want our pride, or anything of self for that matter. He already designed the gospel in such a way that we are empowered to die to self, or put off the old man as we pick up Jesus’ spiritual tools and agree to follow the new rhythm of the Spirit that God placed in our growth cycles for fruit bearing. This new work of the Holy Spirit requires a new covenant altar and priesthood.

The old covenant altar was a place of death because the sacrifices of the temple addressed sin. The bodies of those brute beasts offered on the altar was burned to ashes to show the people the cycle of sin unto death would not be broken until their true redemption and hope would come to offer Himself to God to remove sin and introduce a new spiritual cycle of life unto life.

Hebrews 10:3
But in those sacrifices, there is a remembrance again made of sins every year.

Jesus introduced a new spiritual cycle of life unto life. His sacrifice does not bring sin to remembrance, but rather His altar brings all the fullness of God’s work that we see represented in each altar stone. Jesus is grace… Jesus is faith… Jesus is righteousness… Jesus is justification… Jesus is sanctification, holiness, peace, rest, charity, truth, regeneration, and the renewing of the mind.

I want to build your understanding out a little further to show you the safeguards God set into His altar that will protect your faith. We’ll take a sneak peek at Apostle Eric’s soon to be released lesson, “Apostles Restore the Lost Foundation”, where he gets into the restoration of the lost altar of Christ. That lesson will complete his series on “The Second 8th Week”. Let’s dig into that section now:

God’s design for the yielding of our will to Him is not found in trending messages about surrender. God designed the yielding of our will to Him in the elements of the gospel. As I said earlier, if you said yes to Jesus, but no to His covenant, then the elements of the gospel did not come online, and your faith struggles to work without them. Your priesthood never came online, and your faith struggles with a defiled conscience. That’s not part of God’s process – that’s part of Satan’s process.

Submission without obedience to build the spiritual altar in our heart with Jesus’ WHOLE stones is not submission at all. Notice in God’s commandment to Moses, how He defines a surrendered heart by setting a distinction between “whole stones” and “hewn stones”. It’s a very simple commandment that fallen ministers overlook. So, what is the difference between the two? Let’s find out.

Joshua 8:31
Moses the servant of the Lord commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of the law of Moses, an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift up any iron: and they offered thereon burnt offerings unto the Lord, and sacrificed peace offerings.

Exodus 20:25
And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.

• God’s commandment was clear: the children of Israel were to build the altar with whole stones.
• God’s commandment was simple: don’t lift an iron tool upon my altar stones.

We follow that same commandment today. The person with the “tool”, ready to reshape Jesus’ altar stones with the hammer and chisel of his imagination is the one who disrespects God’s whole foundation stones, which are also the stones of our new spiritual altar. We have a new spiritual altar in Jesus, but the commandment is the same – don’t pollute my altar.

Yes, there is a new spiritual altar in Christ that needs to be built in your heart. That is part of God’s process that ministers skip. Think for a minute about how Jesus’ altar is polluted every day by the hammer and chisel of one’s imagination.

It’s human nature to redefine the 12 stones of Jesus’ new spiritual altar our own way, from our own beginnings and struggles that speak of our own origin stories. We see this take place in Christian circles as believers take turns defining what they think grace means to them, what they think faith means to them, what they think righteousness means to them, what they think sanctification and holiness means to them.

• God says, “if you lift up YOUR tool upon it, you have polluted it.”

The man-made tool is lifted up upon the stones of God’s new spiritual altar all the time. The imagination of man uses the hammer of tradition to introduce many mixed philosophies and traditions to pollute God’s new altar in Christ. The natural inclination is to shape our faith into our own image and likeness, adding a scripture here or there to make it look spiritual. But doing this has disastrous results: ministers continue to feed into the problem while wanting to do better.

The problem is that shaping the stones of Christ’s altar to fit your aspiration, principle, and imagination will change your faith to reflect self rather than Jesus. Learning that the stones of the altar had to remain whole in order for the altar to be accepted by God is important to this generation as God restores the lost spiritual altar of Jesus Christ.

God cements in our understanding that Jesus is our new living altar and in Him we have a new living priesthood. The new spiritual priesthood of your faith matters because it is part of God’s process. Forget about what you know about physical altars erected in churches, or altar calls, or prayer vigils, or calls to fasting. These are not the new spiritual altar we have in Christ.

Jesus is Our Living Altar

God shows us the significance of Jesus’ baptism taking place in the Jordan river, the same river in which Joshua (so named as a prototype of Jesus) had constructed an altar of 12 stones. When Jesus rose up from the water in the sight of all the people present at His baptism, He showed that He is the living altar of our faith and the beginning of a new priesthood. He came to give us a baptism of knowledge for our washing and an adoption by the Spirit. (Jos. 4:1-9)

Joshua, God’s sanctified steward, erected two altars and both are an allegory of Jesus the true and living altar of our faith. One altar was erected on land and the other altar was erected in the midst of the Jordan river. That altar would remain unseen when the water returned and covered it. God had dried up the Jordan just as he did the Red Sea, allowing the children of Israel passage into the promised land.

The visible altar that was constructed on land corresponded to the unseen altar that was covered when the river again flowed. The unseen altar was constructed on the very spot where the priest’s feet stood as a sign that Jesus’ priesthood would give us safe passage into the kingdom of God.

• We experience the reality of this now in the new Christian priesthood.

The unseen altar is constructed in our hearts with the stones of Jesus’ knowledge for us to function in a new priesthood. God designed our new spiritual priesthood as our passage from death to life, from the kingdom of the flesh to the kingdom of the Spirit. It is upon this unseen, spiritual altar built in the heart with the whole stones of His knowledge that we daily offer spiritual sacrifices of prophecy to God that are constructed of the anointing.

As God instructs our faith through the elements of the gospel, Jesus begins to emerge from this blueprint, or DNA of truth, and we learn something very important: our faith cannot labor with what He is without the power of His knowledge that expresses who He is.

That’s the end of that quote. We can see how God has renewed the lost altar of Christ through the apostolic stewardship. Jesus purchased the covenant for us to build with Him. Our new spiritual cycle begins with Him and is completed in Him, and that’s why He is the living altar.