The Five Levels of Holiness. Arthur Burk

On this episode I had Arthur Burk back on Discovering the Truth for the second time. Arthur is the founder of the Sapphire Leadership Group, a pioneer in inner healing and deliverance, and the man who brought a language to the human spirit that a lot of us are still catching up to. He has books like "Blessing Your Spirit" and "Pure Joy," and he is one of the most original Christian teachers I have ever sat with.

We came together to talk about something he calls the five levels of holiness, and let me tell you, this conversation flipped a lot of what I thought I knew. Most people hear the word holiness and assume it means do not sin, do not dance, do not have fun. Arthur reframed the whole thing. Holiness is not the absence of sin. That is zero. Holiness is the weaving together of compatible principles to create the rich substance of God's life in a place. Like an airplane that needs thousands of laws of science woven together to fly, holiness is the skillful weaving that produces real spiritual weight.

Arthur did word studies through Genesis and Exodus and found that scripture sanctifies things in a sequence. The order matters. Here it is.

Time. On the seventh day God sanctified time itself (Genesis 2:3). That was the first thing made holy.

Land. At the burning bush God told Moses, "Take off your sandals, this is holy ground" (Exodus 3). Land was the second.

Community. On Passover night God sanctified the entire nation of Israel in preparation for the Exodus. Community came third.

Birthright. Israel's birthright was to be a kingdom of priests to the nations.

Office. Every piece of the tabernacle had to be touched with anointing oil before its first use, and every priest and high priest was sanctified into office.

Most of us live almost entirely at level three. We know about people, we know about sins of our forefathers, we know about our bloodlines. But while we are sweating in the middle of community work, we still have ropes around our legs from defiled time and defiled land pulling us backward.

Arthur believes God took the timelines of every one of us, written in His book before one of our days came to be (Psalm 139), and imprinted them onto human time on the seventh day. Each of us has a cadence. A rhythm. Psalm 1:3 says the righteous man bears fruit in season, and Arthur asked God what fruit-bearing season actually means. Different trees have different cycles.

His daughter ended up in the back of an ambulance when she was twenty two and a half. Arthur asked the Lord about it and discovered his family carries a twenty-two-and-a-half-year cycle where something bad devours their finances and nearly kills them. He cleaned it up. He looked at age forty five (twenty-two-and-a-half times two) and saw the same pattern. He is now ready for sixty seven and a half, looking for the blessing that should have been there all along.

Then there is what he calls the Midianite curse, where comfort gets chosen over calling. Abraham knew it was wrong to take Keturah but he wanted comfort after Sarah died. Six sons came out of that and gave Israel trouble for the next thousand years. When a believer (or their forefathers) puts comfort ahead of calling, the cadence of time gets cursed. Arthur had this curse on his own life through the months of May and June every year. Income would tank, his stuff would break. He went after it, applied the life and death of Jesus Christ over the time, broke the curse, and the very next May had more income in one month than he had had in six.

There is more in scripture about land than about heaven and hell combined. Land gets defiled by three things primarily: bloodshed, immorality, and idolatry. When trauma happens to a person on a piece of land, a spiritual tie gets created. Soldiers come home from war with PTSD and cognitive therapy alone cannot reach them because they are still tied to the land where they were blown up.

Arthur once flew to a woman who had been ritually conceived in ceremony and walked her through cleansing the land where her abuse had happened. He drove her through her hometown, stopped at each location she remembered, and applied the blood of Christ to the defilement. Then he largely exited her life. She took off after that, healed faster under other ministers, and is now an international leader. He did not deal with the trauma. He cut the ties to the land.

Israel's promise was a land flowing with milk and honey. The wealth was tied to the land from the beginning. Which is exactly why the enemy populated it with Canaanite evil before Israel arrived. Land matters. It carries weight.

Arthur teaches that birthright is the biggest problem a person ever has to solve. It uses everything you are. And the enemy steals birthrights through illegal covenants. Isaiah 28 says the wicked have "made a covenant with death" and an "agreement with Sheol." Arthur asks people, have you ever woken up at night as a child and seen a hooded figure with arms crossed standing in the room, no face, no menace, just terror? That is the property manager of the covenant coming to inspect his goods. He uses the language of Isaiah 28:17 to bring God's plumb line and measuring line against the terms of the covenant, ask for it to be annulled, and unleash the overwhelming flood against the enemies that claimed his birthright.

Office is the level most people have never even considered. When you take a job with a title, you enter into covenant with the history of that office. A new pastor inherits everything the last one left behind. A police chief inherits what every chief before him built or broke. Arthur had a woman who took over an office from a Jezebel and could get nothing done until she went back, sat in the chair, and cleansed the defilement her predecessor left.

He even applies this to marriage. A man marries a second wife and puts her in the office of his first wife. She is now marinated in everything the first wife left behind. No wonder things are hard. Office has to be cleansed.

The five levels are a real climb, and the sequence matters. Time first. Then land. Then community. Then birthright. Then office. Most of us have been trying to live at level four while ropes from level one and two pull us under. Untie those ropes and the climb opens up.