Quite a while back, I blogged about something that completely changed my life and the way I look at the entity that we call God. The basis on which I wrote was that we need to look at the Ten commandments for the time that they were written and WHO they were written to. When you look from a slaves point of view and you read this, "Six days you shall work, but one is for the Lord and on that day you shall do no work." God is telling a group of people that have been in slavery for over FOUR CENTURIES and have had to work every single day to take a day off. Yeah, kinda got my attention too. So I am gonna go through and teach to others through this medium what has been taught to me, and of course God will probably add some stuff in as he normally does. ...And here we GO!
To recap, all of this starts with one man, Abraham. He had one child (legitimately), that child had a child that had twelve children and they continued to multiply. Through a series of unfortunate events, this family ends up in Egypt in slavery and bondage. If you didnt make enough bricks they got beaten. If you didn't make enough bricks long enough you got killed, you were of no use to them. Sounds kinda like us in the present times when we can do good enough for other people to put the proper value on us, but I digress. The egyptians could come and take anything of the Hebrews' property that they wanted. Wives, children, livestock, it didn't matter. Jews had no value to the egyptians and therefore had their dignity stripped away from them.
Exodus 20:2 "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." This is an interesting statement looking at it from our new perspective. The Hebrews were made to serve the Egyptian gods while they were there. They even had to give their children up as sacrifices to Egyptian gods because of course the Egyptians would not give up their own as one might imagine. Essentially, God is saying, "I know you had to worship a whole lot of gods in Egypt, but we are not gonna do that anymore." If you go and look at some of the Egyptian gods and their roles in their lives, the ten plagues that God sent to Egypt were in direct confrontation to those deities.
The second thing about this simple sentence is held in the first word in Hebrew. Every letter in Hebrew is a picture, every word is a comic strip. The letters the word that starts the TC in Hebrew is ANOCHY A, N, CH (yes, that is one letter in Hebrew), and Y. The letter "O" is added so that we know how to pronounce it. A or aleph is authority, N or nun (pronounced noon) is the picture of fish multiplying, CH or Chet (pronounced ket) is a hedge or fence surrounding something, and Y or Yod is an upraised hand. Now if you put those four pictures together, you can get the following phrase, "Your authority is going to multiply inside the hedge of praise and submission." or "All of you and your stuff is about to get bigger if you just trust me." So God is asking them the same question that He is asking all of us, "Do you trust Me." He wants to be on a journey with us. While we are alive on this earth, we are to journey, or walk, with Him. He set up all of this so that we could be with Him and live the best kind of life.
We have been given this wonderful opportunity to be free! It's like Nehemiah the prophet, he went to the king and asked for some stuff so that he could go and rebuild the walls in Jerusalem. When he got there, he let nothing stand in the way of getting everything out of this opportunity that he was given. Our authority will be increased if we put ALL of our trust in God. I can say that is true from personal experience. Our lives have to be in response to ANOCHY, or we have to live our lives so that we are living for something worth dying for. The name Jesus ring a bell? The apostles were all killed except for John. They knew first hand what was at stake. They lived in a way that made other people see love, compassion, grace, etc., people followed and other's got mad. Peter got crucified UPSIDE DOWN! He didnt have a problem with dying for what he was doing, neither did Paul. Both of them knew that they were going to be killed and kept seeking the Kingdom of God being fulfilled on earth. God has saved us all from one thing or another. Some got saved from more than others, now it is our responsibility to live that out in the world that is hurting, hungry and dying.
Grace and Peace be with you ALWAYS!!!
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