(#3 5981) God's Concept of Time - Shalom & Shabbat

FIRST POSTED ON 1 & 15 AUGUST 2018.

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my Shabbat blog!

In this session, I want to talk a bit about how what God wants to say to us today - His Rhema for us in this Kairos moment - can be discerned from His Word when we approach it through the perspective of the 7 Days of Creation.

Now, in order to understand why God used the 7 Days of Creation to speak His Rhema to us from the Bible in His Kairos, we first need to understand how God sees Time.

In the spiritual realm, there is no time. What we see happening on earth - whether in the past, present or future - have all reached completion and are finished. There is no beginning and no end - you could say that all is one and done. Moreover, everything is perfect and at rest. Only God can bring about this perfect unity, because it is an expression of His perfect, complete and finished will.

The Hebrew word that describes this perfect finished state is Shalom. Now, many of us probably associate Shalom with the word “peace.” While Shalom does mean peace, it carries a much greater connotation and speaks also of completeness or wholeness, health and welfare, safety and soundness, tranquility, prosperity, perfectness, fullness, rest, harmony, the absence of agitation or discord. In short, Shalom is the one word that sums up what it means to be in heaven.

I want to mention two other Hebrew words that are related to the word Shalom. The first is Shelem, which means to pay for, while the other is Shulam, which means to be fully paid. Through these words, God reveals to us that the Shalom of heaven comes with a price. Someone had to pay for our peace, and this was none other than God’s only Son and the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ.

God gave us Time when He created the Heavens and the Earth. Time is always moving forwards and never stops. It is also temporary - we “run out of time” when we die, and time itself will finally run out when the world ends.

Now, since we live in time, how are we to visualise what eternity and God’s eternal will is like? This spiritual realm where time does not exist and where everything has already reached the state of Shalom completion, perfection and rest? We are like fish trying to imagine what it is like to live on land.

The answer is that we must view eternity - this “forever and ever” - not like an endless straight line but as a cycle, reflecting the nature of eternity which is more like a circle where there is no beginning and no end, where everything is one and done in God and at rest.

This was why God gave us the 7 Days of Creation, this weekly cycle that ends on the Seventh - or Sabbath - Day when God rested. He also gave us the monthly and annual cycles, and what we call the Sabbatical and Jubilee year cycles.

You will notice that each of these cycles follow a pattern of 7 and is connected to the idea of Sabbath - denoting completion, perfection, and rest. The Hebrew word for Sabbath, Shabbat comes from the root word Shin-Beit-Tav, which means “to cease, to end, to rest,” because in Genesis 2:1-3, we were told that after God completed or perfected His work of Creation on the sixth day, He ceased or ended from His work of creating and rested on the seventh [or Sabbath] day.

So besides this weekly Sabbath or Seventh day, we have what we call the 7 annual High Sabbaths - connected to 7 Jewish festivals that God commands Israel to celebrate over 7 months every year - the 7th or Sabbatical year, and 7th by 7th or Jubilee or Sabbatical of Sabbaticals year. We will learn more about their significance next time.

The Jews greet one another Shabbat Shalom, which means wishing you Sabbath peace, when they meet on the Sabbath. This simple greeting actually carries a very profound message, now that we realise that the 7 Days of Creation is God’s means for us to see His eternal will at work on this side of time and history. It tells us that, just as in the original Creation Account, there is a future Sabbath or Shabbat when this world will enter into God’s eternal Shalom. We will talk more about this next time but for now, Shabbat Shalom until we meet again here!

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(#2 5981) Like the Men of Issachar

FIRST POSTED ON 15 JULY 2018.

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to my Shabbat blog!

In our last session, we spoke about how God has an urgent Word for His people today, and explained it in terms of the concepts Rhema and Kairos. I then gave examples of how God’s Rhema and Kairos apply in our personal lives.

However, what we want to discuss here is not about how God speaks to us personally but collectively as His people. In fact, the Bible is primarily His message to Israel, the Church and the world. His purpose is so that we, as one Body of Christ, understand the times we live in and know what we together as one people of God should do.

There is an example of this in the Old Testament. In 1 Chron 12:32, when King David was rallying for support from the people to bring Israel under his rule following the death of King Saul, the men of the tribe of Issachar acted decisively to join him because they understood the times - meaning, God’s will for the nation then - and knew what Israel should do. Similarly, we believe that God is speaking to His people today and we, like the men of Issachar, need to hear, understand and act decisively as one people of God in light of His Rhema and will.

I cannot overemphasise this point, especially in this day and age when we tend to focus only on ourselves and God’s calling for us as individuals. Yes, God may have different callings for different people, but there is also a general calling for all of us as believers together as part of the one Body of Christ. Just like the men of Issachar - I am quite sure not everyone was called to support David as warriors; some would have contributed financially or helped in other ways. The point is that they united as a tribe behind the nation of God in alignment to His will.

It therefore also means looking beyond our church, which is the local congregation of the Body of Christ, and even our denomination and indeed the worldwide Church itself, to recognise that God’s Word is for all of His people today. Now, who are His people? We shall consider this question again later. At this point, I just want to emphasise the need to have this global perspective that is more than us individually, local church denomination etc to see who are God’s people as God sees it. Let us be like the men of Issachar, who not only saw things from their individual point of view, not even as a tribe, but as the entire nation of Israel.

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(#1 5981) From Now to Eternity - Rhema & Kairos

NOTE: I WILL BE UPLOADING MY BLOG POSTS ON A WEEKLY BASIS EVERY SHABBAT (FRIDAY 7PM). FIRST POSTED ON 1 JULY 2018.

Shalom Aleichem and welcome to the Issachar B7D Fellowship!

This is the first of my Shabbat YouTube blog posts and I am so happy to be with you here today. I have named my YouTube blog “From Now to Eternity,” because I believe that the time has come to proclaim God’s living word, His Rhema, in this, His Kairos or appointed time. I pray that this will be an ongoing journal to equip and encourage all of you who are tuning in, all whom the Lord calls, to keep the faith until He returns to bring us all back to eternity.

Now, in my welcome video, I said that God has an urgent word for His people today so that, like the men of Issachar, we understand the times and know what we should do. What He wants to speak to us is apparent in the Bible when we consider it through the perspective of the 7 Days of Creation.

Let us now try and unpack this a bit more, starting with the words, God has an urgent word for His people today.

Here, we need to understand the concept of Rhema and Kairos.

Rhema literally means an “utterance”, God speaking to us. This is different from Logos, which refers to God’s written word that became flesh in Jesus. So whereas Logos is in a sense eternal, Rhema is very specific, at a particular point in time. Often, we experience God’s Rhema when the Holy Spirit prompts or convicts our hearts during our Quiet Times. So for instance, we may have read a Bible passage many times before, but one day the words from the passage suddenly “jumps” at us. That is Rhema, God speaking to us at that particular point in time. When God speaks, we are always touched and transformed in some way, because we know that God’s word never returns to Him empty (Isa 55:11).

Kairos meanwhile refers to that opportune time, usually for some form of action to take place. As we will see in our later sessions, it is that appointed or we could even use sacred (set apart) time. This is very different from Chronos or linear, historical time. So for instance, when God released His Rhema to you, that particular time was His Kairos - His opportune, appointed and even sacred or set apart - time for Him to release His word to you. In a sense, we could say that God acted at that point in time to speak to you, because we know that God’s word brings about change and transformation in our lives. Often, it also leads us into action as we respond to His Rhema.

So, let us summarise this - first, we are talking about God’s word, not my word, not my theories, theology, doctrine or perspective. It is not one among many. We are talking about what God is saying. Next, it is what God is saying to us today, not at any particular point in time, not the eternal word of God but what He wants to speak to us today.

So the key message here is that God wants to speak, to say something that is specific to us, at this particular point in history. That is what Rhema and Kairos is all about.

The Question is - do we believe?

Link to presentation.

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