Dare to Believe Inc.

History Repeats Itself

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Running in circles doesn't sound that great unless you need to learn the terrain well, so here’s a concept.  I’ve heard people say that our Western way of thinking comes from the Greek and Roman way of thinking.  We think in a line.  Sounds boring, but hang with me for a minute.  If you have a study Bible maybe you have a timeline in the front.  B.C. is on the left and A.D. is on the right.  All these events happen in a row and the past is the past, over and done and the future is a mystery.  If something happened in the past the likelihood of it happening again is slim.  Is there another way to look at this though?  Well, even though we may look at a Jewish person as totally missing it when it comes to Jesus, there are many things we can learn from them about the way God thinks and works.  It's not that God does things their way, but that they have been doing things God's way for a very long time.  For instance, Jewish people see the Bible in circles or cycles, not lines.  The same concepts repeat themselves over and over.  In other words, historically speaking deja vu is a way of life.  Their calendar and festivals all revolve around this concept.  The Bible is not a big history book that has a new meaning to each story.  In other words, we’re not going into each chapter cold, as in starting over with zero information.  As we read we should be saying, “Haven’t I heard something like this before?”  So look at the Bible this way.  The same themes keep coming around like it was all planned from the beginning, which makes it even more amazing.  The big one of course is that Jesus was there and active from the beginning.  He didn’t just show up a couple thousand years ago.  The entire Bible points to Him.  God asking Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice*, the yearly sacrifices for the nation, the last plague/passover, Jesus dying on a cross, it's all pointing to the same message, which is, we are separated from God by sin and need a savior to restore that relationship.  The mind blowing part is that God arranges for this stuff to happen ON THE SAME DAY OF THE YEAR hundreds or thousands of years apart, then plants the festival on that same day to celebrate it.  Did you hear that?  It's like He's waving a huge flag and saying "Look here!"  God proves this stuff is true by doing what only He can.  There is so much of this.  So if you are wondering what the message is check out what day it happened.  Maybe He doesn't always do things the way we would want or wipe away all the struggle yet, but this proves that He's certainly in control.  So were Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and so on just there to tell a genealogy or was God telling the same story over and over all along (even today*) so we get it … or get Him.  Look for the patterns.

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* Why did God ask them to travel so far to do something they could have done in their backyard?  Check out where Mt. Moriah is.  God took them to where the very event this foreshadowed would happen a couple thousand years later.

 

**He's not done yet!: Look for the future to follow the same cycles and patterns.

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