Pathway of relationship that leads to deeper intimacy with God. Flowing from inside out – heaven to our gateways of spirit, soul, body to the world around us. There are depths of relationship on this pathway yet to discover.
4 chambers of the heart help us engage at multiple levels and depths of intimacy where deep is calling us to deep. Garden encounter where desire is produced, and testimony grows. The dance floor where pursuit takes places where revelation and mysteries hidden in darkness are brought out into the light.
The soaking room is where resonance, preparation and transformation take place. The bridal chamber of consummation is where fulfilment of the desire is outworked and a deeper desire to go the next. Circular not linear Greek a+b+c = d. Hebrew a+b+c =d = c+b+a.
4 chambers of the heart are the four most intimate places you can engage God within yourself but they have corresponding deeper levels in the heavenly realms. God is wanting a deeper more intimate relationship. A marriage relationship with His bride.
5 aspects of marriage. Lakah – Garden. Segullah – Dance Floor. Micvah – Soaking Room. Ketubah terms of relationship. Huppah – Bridal Chamber.
1 Cor 6:17 But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him. Our joining is not a one-off day, the wedding, but a continual deeper daily relationship within a marriage. God revealed Himself progressively.
Gen 3:2 The angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. 6 He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
God reveals Himself to Moses in the burning bush “voice in fire” as the God of Abraham. The God of Abraham was El Shaddai – God almighty and powerful. Moses could not look – awe fear. God called Moses and that call required a different relationship.
Exod 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 me to you.’” 15 ….. This is My name forever, and this is My memorial-name to all generations.
God was now revealing Himself as: I am, YHVH, Jehovah or Yahweh. This is a new level of intimacy. God continued to reveal Himself. I Am Healing (Rapha). I Am Provision (Jireh). I Am Righteousness (Tsidkenu).
I Am Sanctification (Mikadesh). I Am Peace (Shalom). I Am Your Shepherd (Rohi). I Am the Ever Present One (Shammah). I Am your victory (Nissi). God’s is still progressively revealing of Himself beyond our boxes.
God establishes the Ketubah. I am the Lord your God. Have no other Gods before Me. Anochi. Your authority is going to increase inside the hedge of praise and submission.
In the first commandment God’s was saying in in effect: I want a relationship with you, more than anything in the world – but I’m not going to be number 2. I just want to be your number 1. I want to be your first love.
The Ten Commandments was not: 10 proofs that God would love us. 10 conditions for God to love us. You do this or don’t do that and I’ll love you. The Ten Commandments was: 10 proofs God already does love us. It was God’s attempt to make us free to enjoy Him in the intimacy of relationship.
Gen 20:4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. Don’t make statues of other Gods and bow down to them”. This seems to be fairly irrelevant to us today, or does it?
Every scripture and experience is interpretable to at least four levels. Plain; Hint; Seek; Secret. Every scripture is like a diamond, that depending on how you turn it in the light, has 70 different facets of truth. So, we can never get our heads around God He is always more.
What is the deeper meaning behind making God to be an idol. How big is God? Where, exactly, is He? An idol is something we can get our heads around on our level. It is limited to once place at one time.
Once God becomes an idol then you can organize your life around God being with you in some circumstances; and God not being with you in others. If God is in heaven or in a temple somewhere we can become disconnected from Him. Connect with God on Sunday but feel disconnected the rest of week.
God is actually as close to you as the air that you’re breathing. When rabbi’s prayed for people, they breathed into them. Jesus did this to the disciples. John 20:22 And when He had said this, He breathed into them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
We need to walk in a constant awareness that: the awesome, all knowing, all seeing, all powerful and omnipresent God is with us and in us right now. He could do mighty things through us now. He could reveal amazing things at any moment.
Prayer is not to God as an idol somewhere but to someone with us an in us. Jesus said don’t make your prayer life about words or about needs. Jesus teaches and demonstrates to us that we need to organize our lives to be continually and consciously aware that we are living in His presence. Practicing a conscious awareness of God’s presence.
In what we call the Lord’s prayer. Jesus was saying: my Father (who is as close to me as the air that I’m breathing) – hallowed be thy name. The word ‘hallowed’ just means to ‘render’, ‘acknowledge’, or ‘become aware of’.
We can read it: “the supply of everything I need – which is as close to me as the air that I’m breathing – I stop and become aware of that”. The Hebrew people called it ‘God awareness’; that we walk in an awareness of God all the time that is prayer, a relationship of intimacy.
What would our lives look like, if we felt and experienced that truth all the time. How much is this our experience and the truth or reality in our lives? Hebrew people ‘feel’ thoughts; Greek people ‘think’ thoughts. To know means by experience.
John 8:32 “the truth will set you free”. Actually, it says: “You will know the truth – and the truth will set you free”. Truth, in and of itself, doesn’t make you free at all. It’s about knowing the truth – a deep experience of knowing that brings us freedom – Ketubah reveals this.
Genesis 4:26 “men began to call on the name of the Lord”. First mention of prayer. Call is three letters in Hebrew – three heads. The first letter is the picture of: ‘front of the head’; The second letter is the picture of: ‘back of the head’; The third picture is: an ‘ox head going into a yoke’.
Prayer at is root meant: “a turning of the head, in order to face the one, who can bear the burden”. Get your head off yourself, off your words, off your needs – and you get it onto your Father – who’s as close to you, as the air that you’re breathing.
My name is Yod-Hei-Vav-Hei; My name is breath. The name of God was like breathing; it actually sounds like breathing. The name of God sustains life. God is not a limited idol that we can put in a box.
God’s saying don’t try to make me manageable. don’t try to ‘manage’ me – you can’t manage me. I’m things like: spirit, light, word, mercy and wind. Don’t try to restrict me to a location. Don’t try to make me live here, and not here – that’s not Me.
God says: I’m so much bigger than you think you can’t even imagine it. Don’t put Me in a box where I am limited to your knowledge. I am your life and I want you to be continually and consciously aware of My presence so I can be all you need.
When we make our Ketubah we need to be aware of the truths that God has revealed in His Ketubah. Our Ketubah should be written from these amazing freeing perspectives. We must not write our Ketubah’s from our own limited religious mind-sets.
What boxes do I have for God? What boxes do I make God fit in? Here are some boxes people put God in. God’s in heaven, God’s is in a temple. God is in a book. God says If you can think it up – I’m not that. God wants us to experience Him and get to know Him progressively.
If God is the center of your life: you wouldn’t steal – because you trust God. You wouldn’t murder – because you believe God will deal with it. You won’t covet – because you know God will meet your needs. Taking God out of the center – it ruins everything else.
In His Ketubah God is saying if we’re going to be married, I’ve got to be the most important person in your life. For a marriage to work: the husband has got to be the most important person to the wife; and the wife has to be the most treasured possession of the husband. We struggle because of SELF.
“Don’t make idols” – if we’re going to be married. You can’t carry pictures of your old boyfriends around with you. If we put anything before God then whatever it is, that becomes the source of supply that we will turn to meet our needs. When we make God manageable, our concept of God becomes an idol.
John 4:23 But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; We can’t control God. To worship a God, who is spirit, means: we have to give up control, and choose to just trust. You can’t get your head around Him.
God does not expect us to be right all the time because He knows we are on a journey of discovery. The rabbis said If we spend two hours tonight talking about God, if 95 per cent of what we said was wrong, God would still be pleased – just because we gave up a night to talk about Him. It is not about rules it is about relationship.
“Remember the Sabbath Day, and keep it holy” – if we’re going to be married, then: one day in seven, it’s going to be just me and you. This is what God did to keep His marriage together; He said: one day in seven; and seven times a year, we’re going to leave everything and just be together.
God has meaningful work. Even before sin, they had purpose: name all the animals tend and cultivate the garden so it can be fruitful and fill the earth. Sabbath in Hebrew meant: to cease work, or to rest. The command is not to keep a day.
The command essentially is: to be like God and have one day that is different from every other day. Sabbath like all religion has evolved from relationship into a list of things you do and don’t do: That was never the point it was to give time for intimacy – date day.
The point was to stop working, to have a day that reminds you that you are worth more than what you produce. Sabbath is not about what you don’t do, it is about something you do, something you enter into; that for six days you’re laboring, and then that seventh day, you enter into rest.
Sabbath is a day where we are free from the bounds of time and space. It’s a day of the week to remind ourselves that: we are not machines. If we want to be whole, we need that. It’s a day we need to know that we matter to God – not because of what we do; we matter to God – just because God loves us.
Sabbath was a day for complete honesty with God. Sabbath was a day for God to heal restore and put back together again anything that was broken. Rest, peace, shalom, wholeness where nothing is missing nothing is broken.
The Sabbath was one day in seven, therefore hitting a reset button in your brain, to let you start over. Of course, we can have a Sabbath rest relationship 7 days a week. We can live in the wonderful rest of God being on the throne of our lives. But we still need a day to rest
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 am a loving God. This sums up the Ketubah from God’s perspective.
A Ketubah is a marriage contract made under a huppah or covering cloud. This was all about a marriage. Jesus went to the cross to prepare a place for us, a marriage chamber in us. He was resurrected and came back for us so we could a have a wedding. At a wedding, there was step five: the Huppah.
Huppah means ‘under the presence’. There were two huppahs: the first huppah was the marriage altar. You still see people get married under archways. When you get married, you’re doing so ‘under the presence of God’. The second was the bridal chamber consummation under a canopy.
God marries Israel and He institutes an anniversary feast every year to celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. At the Feast of Pentecost, everybody had to bring leavened loaves of bread. It’s the only place, in the whole Bible, that they were commanded to bring loaves made with yeast.
The priest would wave it before God, and say: “I thank You my God, that Your unleavened life, is willing to become one, with our leavened life”. The priest would bring the leavened loaf down, and he would break it in half; then he’d fill the leavened loaves with oil.
“God did everything He could do to make His marriage with the national of Israel work – but it just didn’t. In the Book of Ezra and in 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. He had to divorce them.
Now on the day of Pentecost in the upper room the exact same thing on the exact same day, years before, happens again. Preparing the wedding chamber under second huppah in the presence of God. He told them to wait until they were clothed with power from on high.
Act 2:1 When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly there came from heaven a noise like a violent rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 And there appeared to them tongues as of fire distributing themselves, and they rested on each one of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues,
The whole place covers them in the huppah – and they hear the sound of God’s presence – wind or breath. They look up and they see: tongues inside fire –just like mount Sinai. The only difference is this time they spoke back – we will marry you. This is the birth of the Ekklesia, the bride of Christ.
God wants to marry you, leaven and all. The whole point of Pentecost: is the oil of the Holy Spirit flows through leaven. God uses ‘leavened’ beings? Weak imperfect people but people He loves.
God does not choose us on the basis of our good works, past or history but in spite of it. Rom 5:10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
1 Cor 1:27 but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, 28 and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, 29 so that no man may boast before God.
So spend some time over the next few weeks engaging with God about your Ketubah. I will share some examples next week. I will share how a Ketubah enables you to frame your life and not be subject to the circumstances around you.