JL 224 - Cycles of Life and Work - PPP111

Today I started over a cycle of reading the Bible in a year. 

https://hoshanarabbah.org/pdfs/read-bible-in-a-year-2024-2025.pdf

Wikipedia on Rosh Hashanah https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosh_Hashanah

In the first reading of the yearly Bible reading in Genesis it’s shows how God seems to have built this concept of cycles into the fabric of His creation.

Day

Week

Month

Year - disputes around the proper calendar - 12 months

Shmita - 7 years - let land rest

Jubilee - 50 years

From Revival Ministries International

Publish date: 03/30/2003

 The Lord began dealing with me recently about the Year of Jubilee. I believe that this is our Year of Jubilee! In Nazareth, at His local Synagogue, Jesus was handed the book of Isaiah and He read from chapter 61:

 The Spirit of the Lord [is] upon Me, because He has anointed Me [the Anointed one, the Messiah] to preach the good news (the Gospel) to the poor; He has sent Me to announce release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to send forth as delivered those who are oppressed [who are downtrodden, bruised, crushed, and broken down by calamity], 19 To proclaim the accepted and acceptable year of the Lord [the day when salvation and the free favors of God profusely abound.] Luke 4:18-19 AMP

 Jesus preached that the acceptable year of the Lord was here—the Year of Jubilee, which took place every 50th year—the day when salvation and the free favors of God profusely abound (Leviticus 25). What Jesus was really saying was, "I am your Year of Jubilee!" 

 THE LORD said to Moses on Mount Sinai, 2 Say to the Israelites, When you come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath to the Lord. 3 For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its fruits. 4 But in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath to the Lord; you shall neither sow your field nor prune your vineyard. 5 What grows of itself in your harvest you shall not reap and the grapes on your uncultivated vine you shall not gather, for it is a year of rest to the land. 6 And the sabbath rest of the [untilled] land shall [in its increase] furnish food for you, for your male and female slaves, your hired servant, and the temporary resident who lives with you, 7 For your domestic animals also and for the [wild] beasts in your land; all its yield shall be for food.8 And you shall number seven sabbaths or weeks of years for you, seven times seven years, so the total time of the seven weeks of years shall be forty-nine years. 9 Then you shall sound abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month [almost October]; on the Day of Atonement blow the trumpet in all your land. 10 And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; and each of you shall return to his ancestral possession [which through poverty he was compelled to sell], and each of you shall return to his family [from whom he was separated in bond service]. 11 That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; in it you shall not sow, or reap and store what grows of itself, or gather the grapes of the uncultivated vines. 12 For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat the [sufficient] increase of it out of the field. 13 In this Year of Jubilee each of you shall return to his ancestral property. 14 And if you sell anything to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. Leviticus 25:1-14 AMP

Under the Old Covenant every seventh year was a time to let the ground rest so that it could recover and come back stronger, producing a stronger, healthier, more abundant harvest. But the fiftieth year—Jubilee—was an extra special year. It was a Holy year. In the last year, before the year of rest, God caused the ground to produce three times as much fruit so that His people could eat and be satisfied whilst the ground rested and whilst they rested in His goodness. 

 Jubilee is a year of faith—where you rest from your own labors and your own efforts—allowing God's goodness to lead you and feed you. God wants us to remember that it is He Who watches over us, feeding us, guiding us, and providing for us. If we forget this, we will wear ourselves out with our own efforts, but if we remember that He is the source of our life and every good thing in our life, then we can relax in Him and focus on worshipping Him and yielding to Him.

 Jubilee is a time to let slaves go free, to redeem what has been lost and to reach out and help both family and neighbors and those who cannot help themselves. In the year of Jubilee, even though you do not plow or prune or sow, you are still able to eat of the fruit that the ground produces.

 You cannot reap from a field that you have never sown, but when you have faithfully sown and sown and sown and then God calls a Jubilee year for you, then you know that it is a year of rest for you, a year of extra blessings, a year of eating from the abundance of the provision that your Father has provided for you as you rest in Him.

 When Jesus said, "Today is this scripture fulfilled in your ears," the people of Nazareth were very angry with Him and did not receive Him, but I declare to you today that Jesus is YOUR Jubilee—if you receive Him you will go free! Jesus has come to restore your joy, your family, your property and your inheritance. Every promise that God has made you in His Word is yours. 

 So receive Him as your Jubilee—rest in Him and enjoy His blessings.

 https://www.revival.com/a/287-jesus-our-jubilee#:~:text=Jesus%20preached%20that%20the%20acceptable,profusely%20abound%20(Leviticus%2025).

Continuing on with cycles:

Beyond Jubilee?

1 day is as a thousand years.

Plan for His creation built into the first week of Creation

Why the Jubilee? Freedom, pointing to Yeshua

Messiah 2030

https://youtu.be/4AG_nJNcTjM?si=4ONS-wbC3oOqQM3A

Uses many prophesies and the concept of the Jubilee

Entering into year 5785

What is purpose of cycles?

Virtuous vs vicious cycles

Do not just a mindless pattern but an opportunity to repeat and through our choices either improve or get worse, evolve or devolve, become more like God or less like God, more holy or more wicked, more wise or more foolish

How does our culture generally and Christianity specifically treat cycles

Main difference is degree to which they are specifically tied to God and His ways as defined by God Himself

With time, our week begins on Monday and ends on Friday defined by our work, followed by a 2-day weekend, defined by our priorities (fun or home projects), if you’re church goer that weekend also includes church on Sunday.  What do we ask Monday morning and how do we answer?

Our months vary in length of days, are named after Greek Gods. The year is mostly defined by a mix of civil and religious holidays, none if which were prescribed in the Bible and none of which significantly improve our understanding of God, His ways, and His grand plan for all time including His future plans, second coming of Christ and how we will spend eternity.  Some other ways, depending on our interests, our cycles are defined are by sports or politics.

There is no concept or even awareness of a Shmita or Jubilee year and there is no recognition of the moedim or appointed times throughout the year, namely the Lords Feasts of Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Shavuot, Feast of Trumpets, Day of Atonement, and Feast of Tabernacles. One exception is the Christian church celebrates Pentecost or Shavuot but because there is no attempt to understand how it was originally practiced much of its richness and meaning is lost.

Why is this important? 

Virtuous cycle. By our definition? Improving financially? More educated (know more of what we think is important to know)?  More loving?

Love is the common agreed upon worthy goal, but how should love be defined, by us? By the creation or the Creator?

One of Gods desires for us, as stated by Yeshua, is for us to worship Him in Spirit and Truth.

The New Covenant as described in prophesies like Jeremiah as well as by Yeshua and writers of the New Testament is for the law to be written on our hearts. 

My limited understanding of this is that God wants us to love Him and others, and to do it in the way He wants us to do it. 

I’ve only been participating in and practicing the Lord’s Feasts and observing His Sabbath on day 7 for a handful of years.  I’m certainly no expert.

But with my limited exposure and understanding I can see how following His law and His cycles of life, to the extent that I’m doing so, puts me into a virtuous cycle. Each day, week, month, year I’m learning more about the Fathers ways and how wonderful, and simultaneously complex and simple they are. I also am learning more about His great plan for all time including what to expect in the future.  This is incredibly important at a time when the future of our nation and the world, as well as the future of our own personal lives, can seem on the surface to be so uncertain.

We may at times feel like we’ve made no “progress” in our lives, especially if we’re going a difficult season.  With the proper perspective, though, we can see how God works what appear to us to be tragedies and “bad” events for our good, helping shape us to be more like Him, understand His character better, and be more dependent on Him.

Praise:

Malachi 3:6 "I am the LORD, I change not"

James 1:17 "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning."

Hebrews 13:8: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever."

Thank You Abba that You do not change.  We're not trying to figure out how You changed, but rather than how WE need to change to be more like You, and more like the person You made us to become.

Help us to understand how Your cycles which You built into the fabric of Creation are important, and why You asked us to follow them as You have commanded.  And when we don't understand the why, Father help us to obey even without the full understanding and trust You that Your ways are best, best for us individually as well as best for all of mankind.

 

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• Psalm 110:4: "The LORD has s