Last night I wrote on a Jewish discussion forum about reality of communication with the living God. Lord, you know how many times this week I have said with David, “my soul longs for your courts; my heart and my flesh cry out to the living God.” It is an almost palpable longing for you – for real, not imagined, encounter.

Earlier this morning I looked up 2Corinthians 3 and 4 to remind myself what it says about Moses’ face shining when he received the “covenant that brought death” (the very event being celebrated by Jews this week of Shavuot.) We, allegedly, have a glory which surpasses that one. We have unveiled faces beholding or reflecting the glory of the only begotten son of God. We are being changed from glory to glory. Even we who have this treasure in earthen vessels.

This is the word of God. But what is the reality in my life? Why does a man yet hope for what he already has? There is a disconnect between what I confess to believe and what I experience. That is a very dangerous place to be. When one professes to believe the supernatural but does not experience it, there comes a discouragement over time. It leads to doubt and unbelief. Or if one perceives that others do indeed experience the realities of the glory of God but I do not, there come great openings for the accuser of the brethren, because the fault must lie in me – “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves that we are underlings.” (Shakespeare)

Such thoughts I was having when I came to my regular daily Bible reading in 2 Chronicles 6 and 7. I had been struck the other day by the account at the end of chapter 5 of bringing the ark into the new temple, and God coming down in a cloud of glory so the priests could not minister. So today, after reading again chapter 6, which is Solomon’s prayer of dedication, and plea for God to always listen to his people who humble themselves and pray toward that place, I came to chapter 7:1-3, “When Solomon finished praying, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the LORD filled the temple. The priests could not enter the temple of the LORD because the glory of the LORD filled it. When all the people saw the fire coming down and the glory of the LORD above the temple, they knelt on the pavement with their faces to the ground, and they worshipped and gave thanks to the LORD…”

What do people see now? Why do they run after New Age in order to try to find the supernatural, “seeking the living among the dead?” Does anybody look at my unveiled face and see the glory of God? Maybe the fire of God does not fall, because I am making no sacrifice? His fire only falls on the sacrifice, not on the empty altar.

A couple of days ago, "David79" posted this on the forum of http://www.myjewishlearning.com/forums

A local rabbi sent a discussion about Shavuot. In it he states "One of the reasons Shavuot is not widely observed among modern Jews is because revelation is a deeply controversial topic in modernity." He goes on to pose the following questions which I in turn pose to all of us, "Why does God communicate to human beings? If God does communicate, how can He be heard? How can we be sure that what we understand to be God's message is not a projection or a misconstrual? How do we account for profound disagreement among human beings about which revelation is true and certain?" Some of these questions I have posed previously, though not in the same context. The rabbi goes on to discuss briefly The End of Faith, by Sam Harris, in which "the author attacks the claims of religion and argues about the dangers of faith." And he then poses another couple questions. He asks, "How then can we relate to the traditions of revelation in an era of religious fanaticism? How do we filter the wisdom of religious tradition while eschewing its more difficult and even dangerous teachings?"I often ask myself these questions though not quite so clearly or succinctly, and I wonder if any of you have asked these questions of yourselves or others, and what if any answers or partial answers you've found.

David

I responded as follows last night:

Wow, I am so interested in this topic. In fact if you go to my last 4 posts on another thread in this forum entitled “Israel support worldwide”, you will see I just went to a conference called “When God Speaks.” I ponder these very questions David79 has raised. I ponder them because I find them profound and not readily answered for the enquiring mind.

Can we explore them together?

One day this week these questions just welled up within me, not as an intellectual pursuit, but as a deep, deep inner longing – so strong it was almost physical. Like David expressed in Psalm 83:2 “My soul yearns, yes, pines for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.” Here is someone I identified with in the yearning of his whole being for the presence and reality of the only living God.

"Why does God communicate to human beings?” In the very beginning of the Torah, in Bereishit (Genesis) chapter 1, we see that God has a desire and carries it out. He says, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” I doubt I can ever grasp what that all means, but one thing is for sure, God is a communicator and created us for communication with him. The first thing he does is bless the man and woman and speak to them! It is as though we are his offspring. What parent does not speak to his child before ever that child has a clue what is being said? Yet there is, even in cooing, and (to the baby) unintelligible sounds, communication of love and protection. So we may as well ask why a mother speaks to her child as to ask why God communicates to humans. When David expressed his deep longing for communion with God, he was expressing the image and likeness of his creator who likewise longs for communion with us. And God is never the one who breaks that communion – always it is the humans. Sometimes there is profound truth in bumper stickers – like the one which says, “Feel far from God? Who moved?"

God spoke to Adam and Eve, apparently enjoying their company, until they disobeyed. Then, in their shame, they hid from him. He was still seeking them out. It is Shavuot and we think bout Sinai. At Sinai, God appears in the cloud and his glory as a consuming fire. He wanted to speak with the people he has chosen out from all the nations to be his own, but they said, “No. Do not speak to us. Speak to Moses and let him tell us.” I thought about that this week. I thought, if I asked my daughter to come up on my knee and talk to me, and she were to say, “No. I am afraid. Just write a letter to the Rabbi and have him read it to me in the synagogue on Shabbat. I may or may not write back.” How would I feel? Hurt, misunderstood, angry, sad, broken-hearted?

When Moses is on Sinai for 40 days, the people become impatient. They are the ones who told God “no,” but now they are in a hurry. So they take off their gold (a sign of purity) earrings (which speaks of hearing) and make a “god” which can neither hear nor speak. They refused the living God who both speaks and hears, and in direct violations of his words, they do this. No wonder he wanted to wipe them out. Oh, but his mercy and love are great, or who of us would be alive?So, in Exodus 33, the Lord says he will not go in the midst of Israel as they go into the promised land, lest he kill those stiff-necked people in an instant. Instead, he lets himself be put in a box, in a manner of speaking, and hides it in the back part of a tent of meeting. This is a very sad chapter for me to read. I see the longing and disappointment of God. I see the fear and distancing by the people. It says in verse 7 that “anyone” or “everyone” seeking the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting. But as you read on, you find nobody is seeking him except Moses and Joshua. Whenever they go to the tent of meeting, the people stay at their own tents and worship from afar.

Have not we become distant? Though our heart and our flesh yearn for the living God, we look for him in texts, in rituals, in traditions. What about a vital and living communication? Where can that be found?

This is too weird

In my last post, I mentioned that I have begun to participate in a Jewish online discussion forum. The following is a post I put up there last week.

This is too weird…

I live in Canada. My wife signed us up to go to some kind of a Christian conference in south Seattle entitled “When God Speaks.” After 41 years of marriage I am finally getting a clue that when my wife thinks we should do a thing, I should cooperate. Anyway, because of traffic and getting lost, we got to this modest little meeting room in a non-descript Best Western hotel with a meeting already in progress. The music and atmosphere felt strange to us. We didn’t know if these were “our kind of people.”

Anyway, the speaker for that first session was a Steve Schultz, who operates a widely subscribed email list called the Elijah List which apparently exists for the purpose of distributing “prophetic words.” After he started speaking, I relaxed because he had a very low-key, even humorous way of talking. It was quite anecdotal and poked holes in pomposity and religious uptightness.

None of this would be of any particular interest to readers of this post if it were not that, as he was running out of allotted time, he said something like, “There were so many more things I planned to say and I had many more stories to share, but I will just share one to encourage you to submit yourself to God and then obey what inner promptings come to you. Obedience is so important.” He then went on to say that he had promoted on the Elijah List a day of prayer for Jerusalem last October, and a particular prayer gathering on that day, but he himself had kind of forgotten about the date. He had gone to New York to take his daughter to a dog training event or some such unspiritual pursuit and was staying in Queens, I think he said. (I might not get this all right because I was not listening as carefully as I would have had I known what was coming – and I have never been to New York, so I don’t know its boroughs.)

Anyway, he was staying at a place that was near a very large cemetery and someone sent him a “prophetic word” in which they said they had envisioned him praying in a place of death and something about bones. Now, all kinds of people send him all kinds of stuff. But for whatever reason, he felt God wanted him to go and pray in this cemetery. He emphasized that he had forgotten that this was the very day of prayer for the peace of Jerusalem which he had promoted on Elijah List. But he went into the cemetery. It seemed to be a Jewish cemetery. Now Steve Schulz is a fairly unconventional guy, but even he was apparently feeling a little conspicuous about kneeling to pray in this cemetery, so he walked about 15 minutes until he found a place where some tall headstones formed a kind of square enclosure. He went inside it that space and knelt down and prayed. He prayed all kinds of his “usual” prayers for his family, etc. He also prayed for Israel and for the peace of Jerusalem. This also was not unusual. But given his setting and the recollection which had brought him there, he was prompted to also pray, like Ezekiel, for the dry bones of Israel to have life and to stand up as a mighty army. As he knelt, he looked up at the headstone before him and saw the name “Finkelstein,” so he prayed for all living persons of that name to be blessed.

Later, he wrote about this experience and the importance of obedience to what you perceive God is prompting, and sent it out on the Elijah List. In response, one of his subscribers contacted him and said, “Do you realize what you did? The day you prayed in the cemetery was the world-wide day of prayer for the peace of Jerusalem. The main event arranged by the (mainly Christian) organizers was in Germany. As usual, an Israeli dignitary was invited to participate. In this case, it was a member of the Knesset named Finkelstein. She said she had made two vows earlier in her life and broke both of them to attend. One was to never enter Germany and the other to never enter a church. With tears streaming down, she had said how healing it was for her to be there for that prayer event.”

As Mr. Schultz was again pointing out to us that we do not know how our obedience to what we believe God is prompting will be of significance, and that we could “stumble” unknowingly into things for which we are destined. I could not keep silent any more. I stood up at the back of the room and waved my hand until the speaker noticed me. Then I asked, “Do you know what day it is today?” He responded, “No, what day is it?” (This was about 9:30 pm Pacific Daylight Time on May 25th – already Friday in Jerusalem.) I said, “It is Yom Yerushalayim.” He asked what that meant, and I responded that it is a day to remember and celebrate Jerusalem and that, once again, he seemed to have “stumbled” into significance. He agreed. He said there were 10 stories he could have chosen to tell to get his point over, but he chose the one about the day of prayer for Jerusalem.

He ended the session by leading us in prayer for Israel and for Jerusalem. He again prayed for all Finkelsteins and urged those with Jewish heritage to pray for the family names in their own family lineage.

Just to check out the basis for the story a little, I went on the internet this morning and confirmed that there is, indeed, a member of the Knesset named Gila Finkelstein. And I did find stories of a day of prayer for the peace of Jerusalem October 2, 2005 with the main event in Karlsruhe, Germany.

I am so excited. I feel like, for no reason known to me, I am being privileged to have a kind of front seat to watch God blessing the chosen people and land of Israel. It was April 16th when I “stumbled” across this website. It was May 13th when I “stumbled” across the little Mexican church I wrote of at the beginning of this thread. Now this event last night. What is going on? Why is God using people who are not even being intentional to pray for and bless Israel at this time? Why is he prompting them to do things in this regard that they do not understand? Why is he letting me, a gentile, “stumble” upon these “coincidences?”

Perhaps “why” is a useless, futile question. But to me it seems obvious that these experiences of mine point me to the truth the words of ancient Jewish prophets, that men of many nations will cling to the Jews, will want to help, support and be with them and, in turn, be blessed by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Things Jewish

Lately, I have been drawn to exploring the Jewish roots of my "Christian" faith. I think it is pretty clear from the gospels that Jesus did not come to start a new religion, but to fufil his Father's plan and desire for reconciliation with all his creation. In mid-April I discovered the website http://www.myjewishlearning.com/ and after reading a few things, began to participate in the discussion forum. The responses to me as a gentile, especially as a christian, have been interesting. There is a fair amount of suspicion that I am there to "convert" Jews, especially from those ex-christians who are in the process of converting to Judaism. The following is from a post I did there on May 25th. How would you respond?

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I have been reading the articles posted on this website for Yom Yerushalyim. One of them is "The Heavenly Jerusalem" by Rabbi Art Vernon. Have you read it? The first paragraph reads:
The concept of an ideal or heavenly Jerusalem appears to emerge in Jewish tradition in the third century of the Common Era. There is a midrash, a rabbinic homily, in the name of Rabbi Yochanan, a leading rabbinic figure in Tiberias in the early third century, who asserts, in part, that in the future the earthly and the heavenly Jerusalem will be reunited as one. This teaching is based on an exposition of Psalms 122:3, "Jerusalem built up, a city knit together." According to the midrash, 'knit together' means the uniting of the earthly Jerusalem with the heavenly Jerusalem as one. However, the roots of this idea are found in earlier Jewish thinking.//

Yes, one place we see that "the roots of this idea are found in earlier Jewish thinking" is in a writing of a Jewish writer, John, a follower of Yeshua, who wrote in the first century CE something known to us as the Apocalypse or the Revelation. It claims to be his record of a heavenly vision. There are two passages in it- one near the beginning and one near the end, which refer to a heavenly Jerusalem.

"Him who overcomes I will make a pillar in the temple of my God. Never again will he leave it. I will write on him the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem, which is coming down out of heaven from my God...." (Revelation 3:12)

"I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.' " (Revelation 21:2,3)

And it seems to me the idea that something in the physical realm represents something in the spiritual realm is found in the Torah, long before Greek philosophy could have influenced Jewish thinking. God told Moses to be sure he made the temple and all its furnishings exactly like the heavenly pattern he was given. David told Solomon that he had received and written down the instructions for the temple by the spirit of God. To me these are instances of a heavenly pattern represented in an earthly form.