What plagued God’s children in the days of the kings plagues us still. But Christ has given us what they never had: real freedom from sin, from the fear of death, from the power of the Enemy, from the whole bondage of this World—and weapons of warfare that strike harder and truer than any sword or spear in the natural. We have been handed a strength the old kings could not have fathomed. And most of us let it sit. We tell ourselves the work is done—and it is. The true work of Jesus on the cross is finished. But finished for what? To what end? Because what comes next is not pacifism, and it is not curating our best life now, and it is not surviving in Babylon until the Lord sees fit to take us home. It is not escape from the world. And it is most certainly not tolerance, coexistence, and the slow assimilation that always follows.
There is real work still to be done. Hard work. Destructive work, like breaking up fallow ground or removing an invasive species. Then the work can be restorative—reconciliation and renewal, possible only after the lie has been exposed and canceled, serpents beheaded and crushed, giants slain and dispossessed, the Dragon defeated. It is an aggressive peacemaking that never mistakes flesh and blood for the Enemy and never recreates the Crusades, but that knows it is in a war all the same, and that the only two options are to stand and fight or get off the field. It tears down every high place that has exalted itself against the knowledge of Christ—institutionally and individually—under the discernment of the Holy Spirit: a “rhema” living word proceeding from the written Word, mediated by His hovering Presence, the Covering.
And the war is urgent. When the Spirit reveals a thing of the Enemy, or of my own flesh, or of the cares of this world that would choke me like thorns, my response cannot be—must not be—calculated, budgeted, negotiated, or stewarded well. I have to let Him be ruthless, not tolerant, with my flesh and with every Thing of Darkness that has made camp inside or near my home. Now. Alert. Awake. Not an emptied mind, but a mind filled with Christ. This is what the road of repentance actually looks like once a man sets his feet on it—metanoia, which is not a feeling of sorrow but a reversal of the feet, the body coming around to follow where the heart has already turned. And a man who turns to follow Christ in earnest learns quickly that the road is lined on both sides with high places—altars of false worship, idolatry, deception—and that he has been handed an axe, and knows what must be done.
This fifth essay following Breaking the Jar (parts one and two) is about the axe. And about the most dangerous thing that can happen to a man who learns to swing it.
The Cut Must Be True. The Cut Must Be Quick.
When Israel’s God commanded the destruction of the high places, He did not command an investigation. No committee. No season of discernment. No market study and business plan for an orderly transition. Ye shall destroy their altars, and break their images, and cut down their groves (Exod 34:13). The verbs are violent and fast and non-negotiable. Break. Cut. Burn. Nowhere in the sentence is there a verb that means to consider.
The urgency, the speed is the point. The high place does not fall when it is examined. It falls when it is struck. And the gap between seeing it and striking it is the gap in which it makes its case. Refuse the temptation to negotiate.
I have learned this in my own battles, over a long obedience in the same direction. The Spirit shows me a high place—a lie I have lived under, an idol I have been feeding, a familiar voice I mistook for my own—and in the half-second of clean sight the thing is finished, if I strike now. Because if I pause. If I turn it over in my mind, attempt to negotiate a partial surrender. If I allow one round of well, but — then the oldest sentence in the world arrives, the first the serpent ever spoke: Yea, hath God said? (Gen 3:1). The moment I answer that question, the moment I sit down to negotiate the terms of my own deliverance, I lose. Negotiate with darkness, and you are recaptured by it. Debate the high place, and it will remain.
And the cost of the spared idol is not abstract. Nadab and Abihu brought fire before the LORD—worship, real worship, the actions of priests—but it was strange fire, fire God had not commanded. And the fire that should have honored Yahweh devoured the men where they stood (Lev 10:1–2). Ananias and Sapphira sold their land and laid most of the price at the apostles’ feet, keeping back only a portion and lying about the rest, and they fell dead from that compromise (Acts 5:1–10). Lot’s wife walked out of Sodom—she obeyed, left the city, she was nearly clear—but looked back, and the one glance left her a pillar of salt on the plain (Gen 19:26). None of these was a rebel per se. Each obeyed almost entirely but died on the fraction held back. That is the terror of the high place you compromise with: it does not matter that you tore down the other ninety-nine. The evil you spared is the evil you answer for. There is no parley with it. You cannot rationalize it, negotiate a coexistence with it, or leave it standing while you attend to weightier things. It must come down, and it must come down now.
So the cut must be quick, and it must be true. One stroke. The samurai warrior does not saw; the surgeon does not saw. Light does not wrestle the dark—you flip the switch and the darkness is gone. It never had standing to contend. And these serpents do not coexist with you. The python coils, the Leviathan surfaces, and both of them strangle if given the chance. Give them an inch of territory and they take the whole. You do not treat with them. The head comes off and goes into the fire, and you do not stand over the body admiring your work. Tolerance is not a word in this trade. To tolerate a high place is not to be neutral toward it. It is to preserve it. And a root of sin preserved will, in its season, reclaim the whole garden.
Begin With the Beam. Then the Mote.
Before any of us lifts the axe toward the culture, toward our professions, or another man’s life, we lift it toward our own. Jesus said it plainly: First cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye (Matt 7:5). The man who has not let the Spirit do the painful work in him is not anointed to name it in anyone else. So, I start by confessing the lies I have agreed to.
Because that is what they are. Lies of this kind are not vague moods or stray thoughts. They are binding agreements. The heart enters them the way a party enters a contract—sometimes deliberately, more often by long course of dealing, sometimes inherited from a prior generation and ratified by my own conduct before I ever read the terms. Once the agreement is in place, it governs. It assigns obligations and intent, allocates risk. It defines performance and sets the default rule for how I live. A Christian lawyer should be the last man confused about what to do with such an instrument. It must be terminated.
The first agreement I signed—the one I keep having to break—is that my productivity, my efficiency, my profitability define my worth. I often face the fiery dart that I am worth more dead than alive. Or that I am only worth what I do next, because what I did yesterday is now past. I want to be a good provider, a faithful husband, a present father, a productive partner, a generous leader, a good steward of what I am given. None of those desires is wrong. They are good. But a good desire slips its place and becomes the thing I serve instead of fruit the Spirit grows in me while I abide. The desire is good. My grip on it is the idol.
This one runs in my family line—a familiar spirit, in the old sense, something that knew my father before I adopted it. My father believed God was the provider; he would have said so without flinching. He also knew, with equal and opposite certainty, that unless he rose every day and did the work, his children would starve. He must provide. He held both beliefs at once. The first was his theology. The second was his agreement with a lie, and the second is the one that often governed his work. He wrestled with it, to be sure. My point is not to diminish the memory of my beloved earthly Papa. But he struggled in daily life to let God break the five loaves and two fishes of his existence and multiply them exponentially. I struggle with the same thought. The lie that drove his admirable work ethic is in my bones as well. I feel its pull every morning—often it wakes me up before the early alarm. Most mornings, praise Yahweh, I break the agreement before I allow myself to begin work. But it stays there, that familiar lie, crouching at my door, looking for any opening I might permit. This is a daily crucifixion of my Old Man. (no pun intended!)
The second agreement I wrestle with is the cultural twin of the first, more dangerous because it sounds (and has been represented as) biblical: God helps those who help themselves. That sentence is not in the Bible. It is in Franklin and children’s stories. And it is antichrist, because the whole weight of the gospel falls the other way: apart from me ye can do nothing (John 15:5). Not little. Not some things. Nothing. The man who believes God helps the self-helping has built a works-based economy inside his own heart, and he will run that economy in his marriage, his practice, his church, his prayer closet, until everything is a transaction and grace has nowhere to land.
The third lie is more subtle, and I find it everywhere in myself: the good will not last, so brace for the loss that is surely coming. It dresses as humility—I’m only being realistic, pragmatic—but it is fear, and it is doubt and unbelief, and it slanders a Father who giveth us richly all things to enjoy (1 Tim 6:17). The man under this lie takes every gift with one hand already on the door. He is never present in the blessing, never able to trust the Giver, and in the end arranges his whole life around dodging a loss he has imagined over and over. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear (1 John 4:18). He has not yet been mastered by perfect love. Something else still masters him.
There are more. There are always more. But these I know from personal experience and heredity, and they are thorns in my flesh that I battle regularly.
The Pattern of the Kings
Scripture keeps a record of this, and it is merciless. Israel’s history is, in large part, the story of what its kings did with the bamot—the high places. The historical books grade king after king on one line: did he tear them down? Asa was a faithful king, but the high places were not removed (1 Kings 15:14). Jehoshaphat was a faithful king, howbeit the high places were not taken away (1 Kings 22:43). Jehoash. Amaziah. Azariah. Jotham. The same notation, generation after generation, a refrain of reform left incomplete. The work of consecration left to coexist with desecration. Good men. They worshiped Yahweh. But they tolerated high places. And those high places did what high places always do—theological drift, syncretism, the slow conversion of true worship into something pagan, until the people were burning their own children on altars their grandfathers built and could no longer discern how far from their God they had fallen.
Only two kings broke the pattern. Hezekiah removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan (2 Kings 18:4)—he named a relic of genuine revelation a mere piece of brass the instant he recognized it had become an idol. Josiah went further, the most thorough reform in the nation’s history: defiling the altars, breaking the pillars, burning the bones of the false priests on their own shrines (2 Kings 23). The text honors these two above the rest because they were ruthless with evil where the others practiced tolerance. An age-old lie.
But there is a king worse than the ones who left the high places standing, and his story should frighten us most, because he was truly anointed, truly called, truly reformed before allowing himself to be caught in compromise. And he tricked himself into thinking, believing he was practicing obedience.
Saul is sent to utterly destroy Amalek (a horrible, polluted race of cannibals)—spare them not (1 Sam 15:3). And he nearly does. He strikes down almost all of it. He keeps only the best: Agag the king, alive as a trophy, and the choicest of the sheep and oxen—to sacrifice unto the LORD (1 Sam 15:15). That is the detail that should alarm us. He honestly did not keep the plunder for himself. He kept it for worship—the wrong kind of worship, but worship, nonetheless. He left one altar standing and called it devotion—and this is what all the high places represent: false, confused, compromised devotion. Samuel’s verdict is the whole doctrine of this essay in a line: obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Sam 15:22). Partial obedience does not receive partial credit. It is disobedience wearing the cloak of worship. The thing you spare because it seems too good to cut—the Agag you save as a trophy, the choice sheep you mean to lay on the altar later—is the very thing the command was about. And, of course, the spared king does not stay spared. Agag is hewn in pieces by the prophet of God anyway (1 Sam 15:33), because what you will not cut willingly must still be cut in the end, at greater cost—the cost of kingship—after it has done its damage. So when the Spirit names the high place in your life, do not negotiate an exception for it. Do not hold the best of it back for any reason. Do not rationalize a different use to prevent waste. Cut it now, cut it immediately, while the command is fresh, without presumption or self-deception, and without guile.
The lesson is frightening. The men who kept a high place were not the wicked kings. They were the good ones—the ones who looked good to the people, who seemed to grant compassion and mercy. But their sincerity did not save the altar. The hand of mercy and compassion was extended toward evil. They offered a partial obedience, in the form of sacrifice. The Almighty God requires complete obedience.
The High Places of a Christian Man
So what are my high places? Not only the obvious cultural idols I recited above, though those are real—career as identity (what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul — Mark 8:36); mammon, the wealth I intend to steward but will grow into the rival lord the heart cannot serve alongside Yahweh (ye cannot serve God and mammon — Matt 6:24, where he says cannot, not ought not); politics as salvation (put not your trust in princes — Ps 146:3); the sentimental Jesus refashioned for a therapeutic age, gentle without the consuming fire of holiness, divorced from the One whose eyes are as a flame of fire (Rev 1:14); the sovereign self of the moment, the my truth that bows to no claim from outside itself (ye are not your own; for ye are bought with a price — 1 Cor 6:19–20).
Those are real, insidiously deceptive, lingering exalted in the upper echelons of society and our hearts. And all must come down. But, they are sort of obvious—or surface level at best. Today, I have grown more suspicious of the high places, the thoughts that exalt themselves against the knowledge of Christ that do not announce themselves so boldly, so obviously—the ones built into the structure of being a good Christian in the modern age, the ones that decorate the institution of organized Christianity. The high place of my own self-image—a true man of God. A gift to my family and others. The cherished picture of what it is to be a godly Christian man, a serious believer, a man of the Word. That thought which exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ (2 Cor 10:5) is very often one about how well I am following the LORD. These high places are hardest to see, because they are shades of gray, slight deviations, minimal compromises, built of what appear to be right materials. These are consecrated brass. A Nehushtan—a true gift from God, a genuine deliverance from torment—that has slowly, secretly become the thing I burn incense to.
Which brings me to the trap the rest of this essay is aimed at. One waiting for those passionate to swing the axe of deliverance.
The High Place Built on the Grave of the Last One
I have two buddies over coffee to thank for this one—
The really insidious thing about self-satisfaction is, the moment you tear down a high place, that idol-factory of your heart begins—immediately, instinctively, almost lovingly—to build a new high place on the grave of the old.
You break the idol of mammon, and within a week you are privately proud of how little money means to you now—now you are the man who has defeated that old demon. You break the idol of reputation and find yourself guarding your reputation out of a new desire to project humility. You tear down the high place of career and raise, on the smoldering rubble, an altar to the man who has escaped the pull of the World. The hunt for high places becomes a new high place. Being delivered becomes the subtlest idol of all, worse than the ones it replaced, because it is camouflaged as obedience, religious devotion, and chastity. You cannot see the deadliest predators. And these predators wear your face, speak with your voice. They look the part. And seem so close to holiness. They glimmer like the Nahash. And the voice offers sound logic, reason, and understanding. A form of godliness that denies the true power of God.
The heart’s habit of raising new idols on old graves is more insidious than I can say. It is the seven worse spirits coming back to the house that was swept and garnished (Matt 12:43–45) — and this is the hinge of it: the house was clean, and the house was empty, and empty is exactly what let them back in. Sweeping is not dispossession. Tidying the room is not the same as evicting its occupant. A man can reform every visible behavior and never once sit down and receive a new tenant—and the old strong one walks back in with seven worse, and the last state is worse than the first. The idols come back dressed as virtues now, fluent in theology. And the once-delivered person walks into a cell of self-righteousness, so trapped in the upside down of Babylon that he can’t even recognize when the Son of God is standing before him.
This is what Nicodemus could not grasp. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit (John 3:8). You cannot summon the wind or bottle it. You cannot turn the sound of it into a formula and sell it. To be a child of the Spirit is to be unshackled, unformulated, unable to live off yesterday’s manna—and most of us, most of the time, do not want that sort of vulnerability and utter dependence. We want assurances, safety, procedure, the barns filled with grain. We would rather be experts in appearances and certainty—holding back just enough to be sure we are safe—than children of a God who requires complete faith, the sort of faith that abandons all forms of safety, that abandons all forms of self . . . reliance, satisfaction, control, esteem. And that wanting to be in control is the highest place contending with true worship.
So here is where I must disappoint. I have no clear answer. There is no formula, no self-help trick to living your best life now. Tearing down high places cannot be a program, a discipline I master and then administer. The instant I treat it as a skill—(1) identify the idol, (2) engage in self-deliverance, (3) move to the next—I have built the master high place, the altar to my own competence at controlling outcomes and delivering myself. Something has to break in and rescue me from all forms of self. And I have begun to experience the one thing Who does it.
How a Man Lives in the Spirit
When the Spirit exposes a high place—a tormenting thought that has invaded my peace, an accusation of the Accuser I have started to believe, a lie I brought my life into agreement with, an old familiar spirit I have lived with so long it feels like a limb—I do the plain things first, and fast. I name it aloud. The lie that lives in the dark feeds there; named in the light it starts to die. I expose it. I cancel it. I rebuke it. I renounce the agreement out loud and purpose in my heart to turn. On the hard ones, the ones grown so deep into me I cannot tell where they end and I begin, I cry the two oldest prayers of a divided man: Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief (Mark 9:24), and God be merciful to me a sinner (Luke 18:13).
All of that is right. All of it is necessary. But if I stop there I am still on the rubble, head down, taking my own spiritual pulse—and that posture, eyes on self, is the soil the next high place grows in (or where the old one keeps its root). Naming and renouncing, done alone, curves back on the self and becomes navel-gazing in the dress of repentance. So the moment the renouncing is done, I break the curve.
I get my eyes off myself, and I spend the high place as fuel to pray — hard — for someone else.
Every tormenting thought, every exposed lie, every demon the Spirit drags into the light in my heart, I turn at once into intercession for another. For the ones I love who I know are in the same fire—the same serpents, the same traps, the same familiar spirits I have just been shown in myself. And most of all—this is the part the flesh cannot stomach and the part that seems to work best—for my enemies. Not my spiritual enemies. With those there is no treaty; they made their choice, and I have no mercy and no tolerance and no kind word for the powers of darkness (neither do I bring any railing accusation against them, but simply state, “The LORD rebuke you”). No, I mean my human enemies. The men who lied to and about me, who deceived and took advantage of me, betrayed me, decided to be my enemy—decided not just to let me offer to wash their feet but that I should be down there washing their feet. (Imagine Jesus washing the feet of one He knew already betrayed Him to be tortured, publicly humiliated, and executed! I long for such grace, to be like Him.)
For my enemies and adversaries, my opponents and the ones waging warfare viciously against me and those like me, I get on my knees. Like David, who prayed for the men hunting his life. Like Daniel, who interceded for the empire that dragged him off in chains. I supplicate for them. I cry out for them. I take up their cause. I forgive them and plead for them even though my own flesh hates doing it, accuses me of betraying myself, and the stuff that comes out of me seems more like an infected wound than any fragrant precious oil. Our true selves really do not want to die!
And here the lawyer in me is not a figure of speech. It is actually how I pray. I bring an action on their behalf before the only Court that truly matters. I plead the cause of the poor and the needy, the orphan and the widow, and the enemy, before the Judge of all the earth. I file an action of ejectment against the powers squatting on ground that belongs to Christ, and I demand the trespasser be removed and lawful possession restored. I sue for restitution of what the thief has stolen from the man who wronged me, and I ask that what was taken be given back, with increase. I bring every petition on statutes already enacted and relief already secured, because every promise of God is a vested right and every word of Christ a cause of action, and the instrument I am pleading was signed in blood and cannot be revoked.
This is what Jesus does for all of us: He advocates on behalf of those who betrayed Him.
I want to be like my Savior. So, I do not pray vaguely. I quote the Word. I worship the way David worshiped, reciting the Psalms back to their Author. I speak Jesus most of all—and the sharpest blade that I have found is the words of Christ Himself, as He takes up the law and the wisdom and the prophets, His own citations of Moses and David and Isaiah and Jeremiah. Those cut quickest and with the most lethal effect. Those take the heads off giants and Leviathans in one stroke. It is written (Matt 4:4) — three words, and the wilderness tempter has no answer. So I write my petitions out of the Words of the Son. I pray His promises as binding statutes. I file my causes of action on the relief He has already made available. And I ask the Almighty to tear the high place down and to establish His kingdom—by the finger of God (Luke 11:20)—in the freedom of a man delivered from the dark.
This is what keeps the work from ever becoming a method. You cannot professionalize intercession for your enemies (plus, people will think you are crazy). There is no technique for loving the man who betrayed you; it has to be drawn out of you fresh every time, by the Spirit, against the full force of the flesh. The work cannot harden into a formula, because the formula does not exist. Every high place, the instant it is exposed, becomes not a trophy on a shelf but fuel to be burned in the holy fire of intercession—a reason to get off the ground, off myself, onto my knees for someone else. The eyes come off the broken altar. The eyes come off me. They go onto Jesus, and onto the ones He is serving and bleeding and interceding for at the right hand of the Father this very minute—because that is what He is doing now: he ever liveth to make intercession for them (Heb 7:25). To pray for my enemies is only to do, in my small prayer closet, what the Great High Priest is doing before the Throne. This is what Jesus is doing for each of us: advocating on behalf of those who [still] slay Him.
I pray like this with my body when I can—on my knees, on my face, in the quiet of my time with Abba. I take actual steps, actual work, and ask for actual restitution to the man I wronged or who wronged me. I do it in the prayer closet or the drive back to the office when I am alone. And I do it corporately with my wife or close friends. But I take the step. I do not merely hold the lofty thought and the good idea. I do not pontificate. I do not curate my deliverance for an audience. I get on the floor and pray hard for someone who does not deserve it (because I don’t deserve it either!), and in the praying the high place I just tore down has no material left to be rebuilt on—because I am no longer standing victorious over it. I am on my knees somewhere else, with my hands full of someone else’s cause.
The Turn
That is the turn. That is what Tearing Down the High Places actually is—not a demolition a man completes and then admires, but a permanent reorientation of the eyes, off the self and onto the Father and the ones He loves. The jar was broken in worship; the worship has become movement in a different direction from self; the direction is outward and upward—out toward the family-member, friend, and enemy being prayed for, up toward the Judge who hears the cause.
And see what the man has become, kneeling there. He has stopped being a litigant for himself. He pleads another’s cause before the throne, on the authority of a covenant signed in blood, asking that the trespasser be ejected and the captive set free. He stands in the gap. He offers the one sacrifice the New Covenant still asks—the sacrifice of praise to God continually (Heb 13:15)—on behalf of people who cannot or will not offer it for themselves.
That is a priest. That is the whole of what a priest is: a man who stands between, who carries the names of others into the Holy of Holies, who pleads. The lawyer who learns to tear down his own high places by interceding for his enemies has, without marking the moment, become the thing the last essay of this series will be about. He has become a priest. And a prophet, who names the high place in the light and will not call brass anything but brass. And a king—a small king, a lower-king under the only High King there is, who holds real authority over real darkness only because he has surrendered entirely to the authority above him.
But notice what is not yet finished. The high place is broken. The house is swept. But it is not yet filled. To tear an idol down is to empty a room, and an empty room is an invitation. There is a strong one who held that house, who will not vacate because the furniture has been rearranged, who waits at the threshold for the room to stay empty long enough to walk back in. Tearing down is real, and necessary, and not enough. The office is meant to be recovered, not merely vacated — received, not seized. What binds the strong one, and what fills the cleared and waiting house, is the next thing. That is where we go from here.
The axe is in your hand. The first high place is in your own heart. It has your face, and it is most likely the cherished image of how well you are following Christ. Strike it quick. Do not negotiate. Do not let yea, hath God said get a word in. And the instant it falls—before your heart can pour a footing for the next one on its grave—get up off the rubble, get on your knees, and pray, hard, for the man or woman who wronged you.
That is how a delivered man lives in the Spirit. That is how the high places stay down. And that, it turns out, is how a lawyer begins to become a priest.
— — —
Michael C. Kelley is a Florida attorney and shareholder at Lawson Huck Gonzalez, PLLC. He writes at Turris Fortis on faith, justice, and the practice of law as peacemaking — not the kind that confuses peace with avoidance, but the kind that contends for it with the weapons God supplies. Turris fortis mihi Deus — Prov. 18:10.
This is the fifth essay in a continuing series, best read in order — Start Here has the full map.