Okay well I’m going to turn this on I’m going to continue from last week we looking at ketubah and we are going to have to continue it to next week sorry so we’re at looking intimacy and
God is leading us into intimacy which goes at a deeper level with him so that we cannot just engage God in a book or in a imagination in a sense, but in reality and just as Mick was just testifying heaven is real we can engage there in a real way and
God wants heaven to manifest on earth through us so it is really important that we learn to go deeper and deeper on this pathway. Because there’s so much more we get to discover and there is so much more of God than we can imagine or think so there’s a whole eternity to engage that.
The kingdom of God being on the inside of us: we have to open that first love gate. Jesus says behold I stand at the door and knock so if anyone opens that door, I will come in. So, it is up to us to open, he is knocking, it is up to us to let him come in. once we let him in, the river of life starts flowing and then it’s supposed to flow through us and not get stuck.
So, we are going to look at various aspects of where that river flows and look at the four chambers of the heart. And one of them mick talked about as well in terms of the bridal chamber but before that we need to understand the principles of marriage and how that marriage with us and God in our relationship forms.
So, that having dealt with the familiar spirits that operate in our lives we have this process of engaging the garden of our heart, the dance floor, the soaking room, the bridal chamber and they all have places of engagement. So, each of those has multiple levels of intimacy where deep is calling to deep.
And we use that Scripture deep calling to deep at the sound of his waterfall because it’s just an awesome sound all the frequencies from lowest to highest are contained within that amazing waterfall I don’t know if you ever stood by really powerful waterfall but there is an amazing sense of power and awesomeness.
The garden encounter is where our desire is produced and our testimony grows
Dance floor is where a pursuit takes place and we have places of revelation where the things that are hidden in darkness come into the light.
Soaking room where residents and preparation and transformation take place.
Bridal chamber consummation is where the fulfillment of the desire is out worked and a deeper desire is there to go to the next level.
Now Hebrew thinking is not like Greek thinking, Greek thinking is linear Hebrew thinking is circular so in Greek A+ B plus C equals D as a formula whereas in Hebrew A+ B+ C equals D equals C plus B plus A so the end always means the beginning, which means you start again and go deeper, so nothing ever ends it always just re-begins.
God wants us to continually grow in our relationship with him not just get to a point and get stuck. So when we engage in this process it is not a one off. It is an ongoing circular relationship where more and more gets revealed.
So, these four chambers are really about the 4 Most Intimate Places you can engage in your own spirit and in your own heart but there are deeper corresponding places in the realms of heaven that we will look at in the future.
So, God desires a deeper and more intimate relationship with every single person that he has created he has created us with a need, a hole that only he can fill, and he wants to fill that hole.
So, the marriage is a relationship with his bride and each of us is part of that overall corporate bride but each of us individually can enter into a deep relationship with God that’s equated to marriage.
We looked last week at five aspects of marriage.
lakah- I want you, the garden.
Segullah- you are my treasured possession, dance floor.
Micvah- the soaking room. preparation.
Ketubah which is what we have been focusing on- the terms of the relationship- the marriage contract.
Huppah-bridal chamber- is the consummation and that takes place in two dimensions.
So, 1 Corinthians 6:17 the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him that is the- I guess the description of us coming into intimacy and becoming one.
1 Corinthians 6:17But he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit. The Present Passive/Middle Participle (ppmp): continuous repeated action. The Middle Voice represents the subject as acting in some way upon himself or concerning himself The Passive Voice represents the subject as receiving the action of the verb joined. To glue together, to make cohere. When kollao is used in reference to marriage or to God’s activity, the relationship is one of intimacy. Join together, cleave to, cement. In the NT it is used only in the Passive Voice, with reflexive force, in the sense of “cleaving unto,” as of cleaving to one’s wife, unto the Lord is one. To indicate the singularity of something, thus emphasizing that there is but one only. One and the same” (not at variance with, in accord with oneself, spirit.
Our joining is not really just a one-off day- the wedding. Our joining is a continual deeper relationship within a marriage. So, God reveals himself progressively. There’s so much more that he wants to reveal to us and enable us to experience in reality. Now an example of this is in Exodus 3:2 the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a blazing fire from the midst of the Bush and he looked and behold the Bush was burning with fire yet the Bush was not consumed and he said I am the God of your father the God of Abraham Isaac and the God of Jacob and then Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at God so in this way God revealed himself. Moses was afraid and we see the children of Israel became afraid so God revealed himself in that bush, in that voice in fire which is what the thunder and lightning is all about. As the God of Abraham he was El Shaddai that was the name of the God of Abraham how he described himself. El Shaddai which means God Almighty and powerful if you engage God Almighty and powerful you could be afraid. It’s like I’ve engaged God Almighty powerful, and I was quaking and yet God because he wants us not to be in fear in that way, he calls us into a different type of relationship.
Moses couldn’t look because of his understanding of God at that period. Then God revealed himself and called him into a totally different relationship. So, in exodus 3:14 God said to Moses I am who I am and he said you shall say to the sons of Israel I am has sent you- this is my name forever and this is my Memorial name to all generations. So, God was now revealing himself not just as this mighty powerful God- that you really need to be careful of, but actually I am-YHVH, Jehovah Yahweh different names, to sort of give us something to say,( But they weren’t allowed to say it) because it was such a holy name but they were able to experience it. So God took them deeper to a new level of intimacy. So, Moses went from I can’t look at God to looking at him face-to-face and that is the amazing transformation that comes from engaging God in an old covenant way to engaging God in a New Covenant Way, God has continued to reveal himself it didn’t stop there so he revealed himself as:
I am healing- Jehovah Rapha,
I am provision- Jehovah Jireh,
I am righteousness- Jehovah Tsidkenu,
I am sanctification- Jehovah Mikadesh,
I am peace- Jehovah shalom,
I am your shepherd- Jehovah Rohi,
I am the ever present one- Jehovah Shammah,
I am your victory Jehovah Nissi.
God is still progressively revealing of himself beyond our boxes. So, there are instances in the Bible and stories where God encountered people and it unveiled that understanding of who God was.
One was to Abraham when he was about to sacrifice his son God shows up with a lamb and he was called I am the Lord who provides, Jehovah Jireh- his provision shall be seen.
And each time that type of relationship took place it unveiled something deeper of God. So, God is still progressively revealing himself beyond our boxes because all of us have put God in a box generally. And he can’t be placed in a box, and he will always break out of the box, and he will always become more than he has been before and is calling us into that depth of relationship with him.
So, God establishes the ketubah, the marriage contract and this is what we looked at last week. I am the Lord your God have no other gods before me, we call it the 10 Commandments because that has been so misinterpreted. We see it in an Old Covenant light which were now in a New Covenant which has a revelation of that.
So, the first letter-Anochi- your authority is going to increase inside a hedge of praise and submission that was the first part this is what he was declaring to them your authority is going to increase, inside a hedge of praise and submission in relationship .
so the first commandment was God in effect saying- I want a relationship with you more than anything in the world, but I’m not going to be number 2, I want to be your number one, I want to be your first love.
And that is not an unreasonable thing to expect in a marriage is it. And God expects that in a relationship with us he gives us himself and he expects us to give him ourselves.
So the 10 Commandments was not 10 proofs that God would love us or 10 conditions for God to love us. do this or don’t do that and i will love you.
The 10 Commandments was10 proofs that god already does love us and it was God’s attempt to make us free to enjoy an intimacy of relationship with him. free from the things and the mindsets that come from our past so Genesis 24 is another statement in these Commandments you shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on earth beneath or in the water under the earth .now actually don’t make statues of other gods and bow down to them. Well that seems to be fairly irrelevant to us today or does it because there is an understanding of this. Every Scripture in a Hebrew tradition and for us every experience I believe personally is interpretable at least four different levels.
And they had four Hebrew words that I am not going to go into but they meant, plain, hint, seek and secret.
So there always four levels that you can go to. You can see the plain meaning but there was always something deeper so what is the deeper meaning here. What they saw was every Scripture is like a diamond depending on how you turn it in the light has 70 different facets of truth. So four different levels of experience but 70 different facets of truth that just shows how much there is for us to engage in our relationship with God. and he wants to reveal those facets. It talks about in the New Testament knowing the manifold or multifaceted wisdom and grace of God. So there is so much more always. so we can never get our heads around God he is always more. The problem is we tried to get our heads around him and religion tries to get their heads around him and put him in boxes (Idols). So the deeper meaning behind making God to be an idol goes something like this- how big is God, where exactly is he. An idol is something we can get our heads around and we bring it down to our level. So we can look at something to see and it is in a place somewhere limited to one place at one particular time. Unless I suppose you put it in your pocket and carry it around with you. But that is not generally what they did with idols. So once God becomes an idol then you can organize your life around God being with you in some circumstances not with you in others. If God is in heaven or in a temple somewhere where we can become disconnected from him then we connect with God only on Sundays and feel disconnected for the rest of the week and that has been peoples experience for years and years and years. God wants us not to see him as an idol somewhere. But way beyond that God is actually as close to you as the air that you are breathing now and that was the Hebrew concept of God. When rabbi’s prayed for people they breathed on them. Now people get criticized for doing that sort of thing Benny hinn actually mike bryon did that he here and was soundly criticized on the internet but the reality is that jesus did that to the disciples.
John 20:22 when he had said this he breathed on them and said to them receive the Holy Spirit. God is as close to you as the air that you breathe. So breathe in and be conscious of God. So we need to walk in a constant awareness, that awesome all-knowing all seeing all-powerful and omnipresent God is with us and in us right this second. That makes it- everything possible. Because nothing is impossible with a God who knows everything who is all-powerful and is everywhere and we’re in him and he is in us so it totally changes the thing of an idol. God can do mighty things through us right now because he is that close .he could reveal amazing things at any moment because he is that close, and he wants us to be aware of it. So prayer- talking to God communicating with him having constant communication is not to an idol somewhere but to someone who is with us and in us.
So Jesus said don’t make your prayer life about words or needs. Jesus teaches and demonstrates that we need to organize our lives to be continually consciously aware that we are living in his presence.
There is a great book practicing the presence of God by a guy called Brother Lawrence who in this book shared his testimony of going from God being somewhere else to God being with him and him being aware of it all the time. So we need to practice and be consciously aware of God’s presence.
In what we tend to call the lord prayer Jesus was saying my father who is as close to as the air I’m breathing hallowed be your name hallowed just means to render, acknowledge or become aware of.
So we could read it the supply of everything I need which is as close to me as the air I’m breathing I stop and become aware of that. And that’s what the Hebrew people called God awareness.
If we walk in an awareness of God all the time then prayer is not something we do. Prayer is a relationship of intimacy and continual communication.
So what would our lives look like if we felt and experienced that truth all the time? I think very different from probably what they do. So how much of this is our experience how much of this is the truth or the reality that is operating in our lives today? Because God wants us to go deeper he doesn’t want us to stay where we are no matter how amazing that might be. He wants us to go deeper because he is amazing and more than ever we can imagine or think. So the Hebrew people feel thoughts Greek people think thoughts and that’s our Western versus a more Eastern worldview. We think so we tend to think that we know things because we think about them. That is not the concept that you get in the Bible or of God. You can’t know God unless you’ve met him. See we have a concept that you can know things by reading them and have an intellectual understanding that is not the concept of God.
So you can read the Bible and have a theology degree and know everything about it and not know the person who wrote it. So we need to engage and know by experience. God wants us to have an intimate experience of God not just intellectual understanding or knowledge of him.
John 8:32 the truth will set you free well actually it doesn’t say that. it actually says you will know the truth and the truth will set you free so truth in and of itself doesn’t make you free at all you need to know the truth which means having a deep experience of knowing that brings us freedom because we know God by personal experience and that brings us freedom that’s why Christianity cannot be brought down to a religion that separates us from God where we only engage with him on certain special days or certain special times or Sundays it must be everything and the ketubah that God wrote what we call the 10 Commandments reveals that truth. It may not do so on the surface but if you look at the meaning underneath it so much more than we can imagine or think Genesis 4:26 men began to call on the name of the Lord, that is the first mention of prayer in the Bible. Call-is three letters in Hebrew ,three heads, first letter is a picture of the front of the head. second letter is a picture of the back of the head. and the third picture is an ox head going through a yoke. because were not used to understanding or interpreting comic strips or pictures, we don’t understand what that means. but primarily prayer then at the root meaning is a turning of the head in order to face the one who can bear the burden. Now think of that. we can turn and look to the one who can meet all our needs, bear all our burdens, heal all of our diseases forgive all our sins, deal with everything there is to deal with, and is as close as the air that we breath. We just have to turn. But often were turning to an idol, something that we pray to God to be, which is not the reality of who he is. So get your head of yourself ,off you words, off your needs and get it onto your father, who is close to you as the air that your breathing that’s the reality of prayer. so my name is Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei; that is what God said my name is actually breath. the name of God actually was like breathing, actually sounds like breathing. When you actually breathe you can actually breathe Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei; and that’s how God intended it to be. We are conscious even as we breathe bringing that oxygen into our body but actually it’s God who is the source of life, who sustains our life so God is not limited to an idol we put in a box how could he ever be. But we try to do that. God is basically saying don’t try and make me manageable don’t try and manage me you can’t manage me I’m things like spirit, light, word mercy love wind you can’t manage that so don’t try and restrict me to a location and put in a box don’t try and make me live here and not here that’s not me. so God says I’m so much bigger than you can think you can’t even imagine it. Even if you were to try so don’t put me in a box where I am limited by your knowledge I am your life I want you to be continually and consciously aware of my presence so that I can be all you need. but when we turn to look to other things to meet our needs he can’t be our supply. so we end up looking for other things to meet our needs in the world and in people, and in other things which always damage us, hurt us and let us down, because we’re looking in the wrong place were not turning to the one who is there to meet all our needs. Notice needs not wants. Because we might want a whole of the things that are not the things that we need and he knows exactly what we need before we ever need them and he wants us to turn to him and have that relationship where he releases those wonderful things to us because he loves us so. when we make our Ketubah we need to be aware of the truth that God has revealed in his Ketubah understanding that. so our Ketubah needs to be written from those amazing freeing perspectives of who God is. don’t write your Ketubah from your own limited religious mindsets otherwise it will be limited in what you put in there and it will be determined by the box that you put God in. so what boxes do I have for God might think – I don’t have any I guess we all do and God is wanting to break out of those boxes and reveal himself for who he really is. so have I made boxes to fit God in my life.
Here are some of the boxes that people put God in. God is in heaven God is in a temple God’s in a book God cannot be contained God says if you’re thinking it up, I’m not that. God wants us to experience him and get to know him progressively in relationship. So if God were in the center of your life going through the other things we see as Commandments you would not steal why? because you know and trust God to be your provider. you would not need to get it from anywhere else. You would not murder because you know and believe that God will deal with that, as your shepherd, he is protecting you and keeping you safe. You wouldn’t covet because you know God will meet all your needs.
He’s revealing himself as the God who wants intimacy so taking God out of the center of our lives ruins everything else, because we have to try and look to somewhere else.
in God’s Ketubah God is saying if we’re going to be married, I have got to be the most important person in your life well that is what tends to be the truth in every marriage or should be. Husband has got to be the most important person for the wife. The wife has to be the most treasured possession of the husband, we are working at that i guess, because we’re not that because of self.
We struggle with self, which was the pathway of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was all about you can do this on your own. Now God has not intended us to do things on our own. he wants us to do them with him so what we do in our natural lives reflect what comes out of our intimacy with God .so don’t make idols if we going to be married, that is what God is saying. You can carry pictures of your old boyfriends around with you. Now that would be really strange wouldn’t it? If you got married but in your wallet you had a picture of your boyfriend, girlfriend, what would that be saying. If you put something before God whatever it is that becomes the source of your supply that you turn too, to meet our needs and none of those idols or any other thing has any chance of meeting our needs. When we make God manageable, our concept of God becomes an idol. we have to blow up those concepts and get a true relationship with God which reveal who he really is.
John 4:23 hour is coming now is when true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and truth. the woman at the well said, can’t God meet us on our mountain in Samaria, your saying that he has to be on Jerusalem and Jesus was saying actually, it is neither of those places. God is not going to be in a place, it is no longer being one nation, in one city, in one temple, in one tabernacle. Within our Temple God is going to be everywhere in us. because we are now going to become the temple of the Holy Spirit. We’re going to become the city of God. God wants to unveil a new way of operating where God is spirit and we worship him in spirit and truth. so we can’t control God. to worship a God who is spirit means you just have to give up control and trust him, because he is not something in front of you like a piece of wood or a piece of stone , he is a spirit , that is everywhere, but has chosen not just to be transcendent but imminent in us. God with us Emmanuelle. We sing Emmanuelle a lot. This sort of time of the year, it is actually God with us in intimacy, you can’t get your head around him. We need to give up trying to get our head around him and experience him. let him reveal who he is to us by experience. God does not expect us to be right all the time. That’s the problem with the interpretation of the 10 Commandments as a set of rules. If you not right you can have a relationship and that’s not the truth. in Hebrew expectation and the rabbis would say- if we were to spend two hours tonight talking about God and 95% what we said was wrong God would still be pleased just because we gave up a night to talk about him. God has a totally different understanding than we do. We have been taught by religion because it’s about you don’t get right, god is going to punish you. He won’t. He’s already created a way that we can be forgiven and cleansed and brought into a relationship with him no matter what we do. It is not about rules it is about relationship. Another one that we look at remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy .if we are going to be married then one day in seven it is going to be just me and you. In marriage we call that date night I guess God says you’re going to have a date day and this is what God did to keep his marriage together to keep relationship to focus.
So he said one day in seven and seven times a year. Because there were seven special festivals that they had that they remembered. Leave everything we are going to be focused just on us. Now God has meaningful work. Some people would not like to think that but actually God wants us to do things. Even before sin they had a purpose they named all the animals they cultivated the garden, so that it could be fruitful, so it could fill the earth. Those were all things that God called them to do . So work in itself is not a wrong thing.
Sabbath in the Hebrew meant to cease from work and to rest just like God did when he created everything he instituted a one day and seven rest. What was that about the command was not about keeping a special day that’s where it became religious the command is essentially be like me be like God because I’ve had one day which was different from all the rest, so you can have the same, so we can hang out together.
Sabbath like all religion has evolved from relationship into a list of things that you do or you don’t do. we got to get away from that into a relationship with a person that you want to be in love with that was never the point of anything it was to give time for intimacy a date day with God .so the point was stop working to have a day that remind you that your worth more than what you produce. because if you keep doing things every day that is how you think God says no there is actually a different way that is behind this is going to be something that enables you to think differently. so Sabbath is not about what you don’t do, it is more about what you do. do you enter into something six days you are laboring the seventh day, now enter into rest. so Sabbath day is where we’re free from the boundaries of time and space, we don’t have to be considering time and space.
God wants us to go beyond and have some time with him. It is a day of the week to remind yourself that were not machines. Because if you think about all that you’re doing all the time, you can get caught up in being all that.
If we want to be whole we need that focus in God. so it is a day to know that we matter to God not because of what we do. we matter to God just because God loves us. so Sabbath day was a day for complete honesty with God that’s what God intends us to have.
Now of course we are in the new covenant, and it is every day. I understand that this is just understanding the what was in the katubah to help us get perspective on it. So the Sabbath day was a day for God to heal and restore and put everything back together that was broken.
See a Sabbath was about rest, rest was about peace, peace is about shalom, wholeness, nothing missing, nothing broken. God wants us to have time where we draw from him, to be restored and made whole. Sabbath was day one day seven, therefore hit a reset button in your brain to start over. sometimes we just have to stop and we can reflect and then restart. because everything new beginnings every day, it is a new morning every morning new mercies every day, there is a circle and a cycle that God wants to put us in thats not just enables get stuck. So every day now of course we have a relationship with God which is seven days a week he’s in us he’s with us so he is there all the time .so we can constantly live in rest.
So when God is on the throne of our life on the seat of rest in government we can live in rest we can live in peace we can live in his provision and blessing. But we still actually need a day a week to focus refocus because God is built into creation that because he honors us and wants us to see ourselves from his perspective.
so summing up this I am the Lord your God who is choosing to bless you with freedom from slavery not because of anything you’ve done, but because I love you and want all the people of the world to know that I’m a loving God and that’s the aspect of where were supposed to be a testimony, a living testimony so that the world can see what it’s like to have a relationship with this wonderful loving God. that sums up the katubah from God’s perspective.
So the katubah is a marriage contract made under a Hupa or a covering of cloud covering. So on Mount Sinai it was all about marriage. So Jesus went to the cross to prepare a place for us, a marriage chamber for us to have relationship with him. He was resurrected and came back for us so that we can have a wedding. a wedding is where step five the Hupa took place and Hupa means under the presence.
So there were two huppahs in this tradition the first was the marriage altar where you came and made your declarations to one another and you still see people doing that today. They get married under arches which is a representation of that so when we get married, we are going to do so under the presence of God. The second was the bridal chamber consummation of the marriage under a canopy. They had a canopy over a bed which was representing that God was with them, even in the most intimate things of their personal lives. God was still there and God wants to bring us into those experiences ourselves.
God marries Israel and he institutes an anniversary feast, every year to celebrate the fact that they were married, the feast of Pentecost.
Unless you understand what the feast of Pentecost was you won’t understand the significance of when the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost.
Throughout the feast of Pentecost everybody had to bring leavened loaves of bread that’s the only place in the whole Bible that they were commanded to bring loaves made with yeast.
Everywhere else it was no yeast because yeast represented negative things. So the priests would waive before God and say thank you God that your unleavened life is willing to become one with our leavened life.
The priest would bring the leavened loaves of bread he would break in half and you’d fill the leavened loans with oil, Which is again very symbolic of what happened at Pentecost.
So God did everything he could to make his marriage work with national Israel. But it didn’t.
It didn’t work because they kept breaking the terms so in the book of Ezra, the book of Jeremiah it says God had to divorce Israel because of their continual marital unfaithfulness. They kept breaking their deal under the old covenant. So he had to divorce them. then he made an opportunity for both Jews and Gentiles to come back into relationship as one new man together in Christ and become the church or the ecclesia.
so now on the day of Pentecost in the upper room exactly the same thing exactly the same day years before the same happens again preparing the wedding chamber under a second Hooper in the presence of God.
He told them to wait until they were clothed with power from on high.
Acts 2:1 when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. The Hupa the covering of the presence of God and they appeared to them tongues of fire distributing themselves and they rested on each one of them, the glorified voice in fire and they were filled with the Holy Spirit.
The oil poured into the bread leavened and they began to speak with other tongues. Guess what they were saying we will marry you. The whole place covers them with that presence of God. The sound of God’s presence, the wind or the breath they look up and they see those tongues and they hear God saying, will you marry me. Only difference this time is they spoke that we will marry you. That was the birth of the ecclesia the bride of Christ.
See all these things tied together and help us understand what God is actually looking to do. So God wants to marry you leavened and all. The whole point of Pentecost is the oil of the Holy Spirit flows through the leaven and what does it do when it flows through the leaven? It makes it unleavened, it restores, it purifies, it refines, it transforms, it makes it whole.
God uses leavened beings which is amazing to think, we imperfect people, but he loves us. God is not choosing us on the basis of our good works, our past history but in spite of it. Romans 5:10 for if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son much more having been reconciled shall be saved by his life. We were enemies of God and God loves us and gave his son to die for us. Now were his friends, now were married to him. Just imagine how much more there is to come.
2 Corinthians 1:27 God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, God is chosen the weak things of the world to shame that’s the strong and the base things of the world and the despised. God is chosen the things that are not so he may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God. So, there’s nobody who’s done everything you could possibly think of the worst things in the world who is not beyond salvation and forgiveness and reconciliation and restoration because God does not look at us and think they are good so I will choose them. He actually looks and thinks look at all the terrible things that they have done. Now we may need to admit were foolish weak base and have nothing. To receive everything from God who wants to give us it because we don’t create it ourselves and God chooses people on the basis of his love for them not on the basis what we’ve done, and God loves all of us and wants us to know him in intimacy.
Leave it there and encourage you over the next few weeks to spend some time with God in intimacy and begin to seek him about what you should put in your Ketubah on the basis of relationship and the things he’s revealed how we can then establish that I’m going to look at some more details this next week so encourage you just to spend some time with God and engage with it.