The Power of His Hand Is In The Sacrifice of The Lamb
“A MASKIL of ASAPH: “Give ear, O my people, to mine instruction. Bend your ear to the sayings of my mouth; I will open, in a parable, my mouth, I will pour forth enigmas [, puzzles, (things hidden) from] out of antiquity”
a;dkfjal;kdfjalskdfjlaksjdflakjsdfasdfdffa Psalms 78:1-2 (REB)
“Our fathers, IN MIZRAIM (Egypt), DID NOT UNDERSTAND (Heb. denotes, ” gained no Sakal – Wisdom from“) Your Wonders;” Psalms 106:7a (lit. frm Mssrtc text)
Sitting for weeks, in Exodus, in the immediate chapters following the release out of slavery of the Hebrews by the LORD’s mighty hand, my heart cannot turn away from reading them over and over, digging deeper for something from the heart of God the Father I know is there. Turning to two different Psalms, which reference these early days after what took place at the very first Passover, it seems that the Holy Spirit is unveiling something that He’d set into the very fiber of Paul the apostle, having had him to write to the church:
“For I determined to know NOTHING among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.” (I Cor. 2:2). Paul would go on to tell them, “we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden (wisdom), which God predestined before the ages to our glory; ” (v. 7 NASB).
If you read only the raw accounting of the hundreds of Egyptian chariots, along with a large following army, heading, with destructive intent, straight towards their helpless ex-captives at the Red Sea, the Hebrews, God’ s chosen people, who are suddenly being gripped with utter terror at the sight of their former taskmasters, you might wonder why the LORD would later say, in the Psalms, that they’d rebelled against Him, with this clamoring fear, at the Red Sea, why He was asking Moses in that moment of his trying to speak faith into his people, “Why are you crying out to Me.?” (Ex. 14:15). Was the LORD God being so heartless towards His own unarmed people – men , women, children, their herds?
“Our fathers, IN MIZRAIM (Egypt) , did not understand Your Wonders;
They did not remember the abundant lovingkindnessess of You, but provoked [lit. denotes, “caused bitterness (to enter their hearts and then out of their mouths by reason of forgetting and so not believing Your Mighty power; that You had, it seemed to them, led them out to be slaughtered by their former taskmasters)“] at the sea, by the red sea.” Psalms 106:7 (lit. frm Mssrtc text)
The opening text at the beginning of this blog reveals that the Musician of King David’s day, Asaph, wrote that Psalm. He opens with the word, “MASKIL”, which is rooted in the Hebrew word for “Wisdom” – “Sakal”. A Maskil psalm is a song containing instructive Wisdom. Asaph, whose name is rooted in a word meaning, “to gather”, has gathered wisdom from the LORD, Whom he is always worshiping, in order to unveil what appears to be puzzling, a mystery, it seems, answering the question as to why it looks as if the LORD was hard on his forefathers, at the Red Sea, and then later in the wilderness at every single place to which YHVH would lead them, which all appeared to be nothing but desert places of total lack, instead of abundance and supply.
It is imperative, Beloved, to gain understanding from that generation’s mistakes, ( 1 Cor. 10:11), because wisdom learned from what seems to be a puzzling mystery is actually a setting of our hearts to hear, increasingly, from our Awesome Savior and LORD, Jesus, from His Spirit inside of us (Jhn. 16:13-15; Pro. 1:23; 2:2-7 et al). God our Father’s heart towards us in this is that we might gain understanding, from His Word, in our forward walk of faith – for this life, in this life – from the revelation of wisdom that seems not so apparent in the text of these situations. The wisdom that generation did not set their hearts to learn from all God’s wonders in Egypt, most especially from the Passover night, the sacrifice of a lamb, brought about, thereafter, a complaining – a lifestyle of griping and murmuring – that stopped their forward progress, literally, of faith into a prophetically/Divinely promised inheritance of beyond-abundance in a land flowing with Milk and Honey. They unwittingly stopped themselves in the desert (but blamed the LORD the whole time, in their blaming of Moses and Aaron), and lodged there for 40 long, and lean, years.
The writer of Hebrews, in the opening words of ch. 4, tells us to fear for this one thing – coming short of entering into a Promise of God, a promise under a better covenant than what they’d had in Exodus. The “not mixing with faith” (with ongoing & augmenting Believing) of the promises of God in Christ is a slamming shut of the door to wisdom, of continued hearing towards His Holy Spirit’s leading into the inheritance of those promises.
Let the eyes and ears of your heart, Beloved, be opened wide, attentive to the wisdom of our Greater Passover
… ask Him for this, right at this moment …
because the cost of Jesus’s flesh and blood gained for us way, way more than what we have seen and/or that for which we have settled. There is an inheritance in this life now, that His heart LONGS to joyfully give to us (Is. 53:12; Lk 12:32; Jhn. 14:12-13: 16:23-24 et al), an inheritance into which He longs to lead us. The glory of this hidden wisdom unveiled, this inheritance to be received, to be walked into, has to have first the heart letting go of the “wisdom” of this age, so as to be able to intentionally take hold of true wisdom, God’s … from of the “foolishness” of the cross.
How often they rebelled [carries the weight of, “believed Your promises, Your words of Good, to be lies, and thus held bitterness“] against Him in the wilderness And grieved [lit. denotes, “caused cutting pain (into)”] Him in the desert! Again and again they tempted God, And pained [causing a limiting of] the Holy One of Israel. They REMEBERED NOT His hand, [nor] THE DAY when HE DELIVERED them from the ENEMY. Psalms 78:40-42 (v40-41 in Blk – NASB/ v42 – KJV)
The very scars that Jesus would bear in His body, to the cross itself, are actually described in the above verses when you dig into the Hebrew. It would take the crucifixion, the sacrifice by God the Father of His Lamb, to show Israel, the seed of that past generation who’d been delivered out of Egypt, exactly what not believing in the LORD as a good good God really looked like before Him.
We have to take a look at the ultimate power of the LORD’s final judgment upon Mizraim (Egypt), the LORD’s hand in causing Pharaoh to finally let God’s people go.
Asaph wrote, in Ps. 78:42, in the last phrase, “They remembered NOT His hand, THE DAY when HE DELIVERED them from the ENEMY.”
The word, “Mizraim” (Mitz-ra-yim), is the plural of “Matsowr” – “a siege enclosure” – and is linked, in its root, back to the word, “Enemy” – “Tsuwr”. This is imperative for you to know, because Israel’s deliverance from this iron hand is a shadow of what the power of God’s hand did, through the Nailed Hands of Jesus, to set us free from the authority of darkness and transfer us into the KINGDOM – the King’s Domain – (authority, power, force, might … and inheritance) of the Son of His love (Col. 1:9-14, esp v 13). You’ve got to see the wisdom in the power of the cross – the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the WORLD – in setting us into the Kingdom of Christ Jesus. If you do not see and understand this, Beloved, you will believe wrongly about your salvation, and not be able to to enter into promised inheritance, promised rest, coming short of a promise that Jesus’s blood was shed to give to you. I cannot stress this enough.
“Tsuwr”, the Heb. word for “Enemy”, has to do with “cramping”, as in a “seige – bondage”. It carries also a second meaning ; “to show hostility towards, to treat as foe”. In the plural form, “Mizraim”, to which Egypt has its Biblical name, is literally, as the famous saying, “being stuck between a rock and a hard place” – because the enemy has a siege enclosure around you – treating you as foe, with hostile, slavish intent against you. Is the picture clear, Beloved?
With each of the 10 judgments against Egypt, God was, in effect, demolishing the strength – the authority and power – of Egypt’s gods, showing, likewise, His own people that the siege enclosure against them was no match for His Strength, especially in setting them free (Ex. 12:12; Num. 33:4). The LORD – Almighty God – was after His own people paying attention – eyes, ears, and heart – to the strength of His Hand, because this cornerstone setting would be the strength of faith they would need in setting their confident trust into Him down the road, even as Caleb would do emphatically! (Num. 13:30; 14:6-9).
Then the LORD said to Moses, Now shall you see what I will do to Pharaoh: for with a strong hand shall he let them go, and with a strong hand shall he drive them out of his land.
Exodus 6:1 (AKJV)
Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, (lit. “I – YHVH”) and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments:
Exodus 6:6 (KJV)
Do you see, Beloved ? “A strong hand… a stretched out arm – great judgments” (The Heb. word order of the last phrase – “an arm outstretched” – the last word is actually an active verb, lit. “an arm [that is} outstretching”). He wanted them giving their attention to this: that His judgments were on their behalf, to utterly break off the chains of bondage, crushing the siege strengths in which their captors trusted! … all by His strong hand … His arm outstretched … through the sacrifice of … a Lamb!
We have SO misunderstood God’s judgments – the very completeness of the judgment of the cross of Christ – that they are not against people; rather they were a complete stripping of principalities and powers and authorities in the heavenlies, in the satisfying of the wrath/judgment of Judicial God, Who was pursuing us in the giving up of His Son to bear our wrath, our deserved eternal judgment – ON BEHALF OF EACH ONE OF US – of all of mankind – every tongue and tribe and people and nation (Rom. 3:24-25; Col. 2:15: Rev. 5:9-10 et al). What we have feared for centuries is a total lack of grace-truth reality in what actually is the accomplishment of the finished work of Jesus’s Cross to set us free – because of the awesome greatness of the lovingkindness of the only true GOD. We have not comprehended, in truth, in our hearts, “God” – that He is good! Really, REALLY good!! – ALL BECAUSE OF JUDGMENT! We have not understand true Divine, NEW COVENANT “Judgment” ! (Romans 11:33) And consequently we have feared – been in dread of – “God” – because of our perception of Him towards us as to final judgment … instead of heart truth knowledge that the cross of Jesus, our faith believing into His redemption of us through His sacrifice, wholly removed us from Divine wrath (Rom. 3:21-26; 4:24-5:2, 6, 9; 1 Thess. 1:10). This wrong heart believing, Dear One, has kept so many of us in the wilderness for the same reason it kept that first delivered generation in the wilderness.
While it is so that Pharaoh reneged on his word time and time again with the ending of virtually each of the first 9 judgments, plunging the hopes of the Hebrews into despair, it was the 10th and final judgment that became the straw that broke the camel’s back. So key was to be this judgement that the LORD actually marked this month as beginning of months of the year (literally, this month, right now, of 2018, beginning the evening of March 16th – see Ex. 12:1-2). Please pay attention, Beloved. We know what hopes are set at the beginning of each year in our hearts. Many pastors and church leaders set themselves apart just before the beginning of each year to hear from the LORD for the coming year, for their congregations, and for the church at large. This precept, if you will, was set by God, here, in Exodus 12, with this judgment about to take place. It becomes, therefore, the precedent, the very cornerstone, for what it is that leaders today, within the body of Christ, are to base the Word they receive for the coming year.
All of this, Dearly Beloved, is based upon Covenant, something God Himself had eternally set with Abraham back in Genesis 22, when He provided a sacrifice in the stead of Isaac (Ref. Ex. 2:24; 6:2, 5). Thus, our “right” to confidence in God, in His word – His promises to us concerning inheritance from Him utterly apart from judgment, or even from sin consciousness – is entirely based upon Covenant … cut by Himself, in and by His own strong hand , His own arm stretched out. (Is. 52:9-10; 53:1ff) . That generation in Mizraim, in their last night in bondage to their Egyptian taskmasters, was to mark into their memory, was to let be marked, upon their hearts and minds (circumcision), this judgment about to take place. For the “scar” in their heart and mind would be the remembrance of graced-authority, leading them farther and farther into the LORD, into His Covenanted inheritance, over every future foe to be faced who was under the same god of darkness as the iron-fisted Pharaoh whom the True God of heaven was about to strip completely of his dominion over His people.
Sadly. however, some generations later, Asaph would write that it was IN Egypt, inside the place where his forefathers were witnessing all this action from heaven to set them free, that they did not gain understanding – Sakal Wisdom. Each successive judgment was to have been to them a “Wonder” of God’s power. These Wonders from Heaven, and most especially the last, were done before their eyes, but not against them, so as to leave marks … heart-engraved “Awe.” Yet they did not let be engraved into the fiber of who they were, into their believing, the very wonder of the simplicity of a Lamb slain, of blood applied to their doorways, that saved them and caused all of the Egyptians, right to the very throne of this stronghold, to wholly drive them out of … Mitzraim – bondage, slavery, 24-7 hostility. The Hebrews, who’d witnessed probably some of THE greatest wonders ever seen by mankind on such a huge scale in the history of this planet, never took to heart, did not mix faith into this gospel demonstration, the goodness of God; and thus, in rejecting this wisdom from the Lamb that was slain for them, shut down hearts to hear by faith in their future walk towards an inheritance into which they would thus never enter . Again and again, before they ever got to Sinai, and then even after, the mystery of the cross would be given, yet they would never hear, never get revelation of it, of YHVH’s power for them … because they did not learn Wisdom from the Lamb that was slain while they were still in Mizraim.
Ask the Father, in simple child-like faith, for a heart to hear. Set yourself apart with the LORD Jesus, open to Ephesians 1:15-23, and make Paul’s prayer your own before Jesus, before Abba Father. It is His great delight, Dear One, to give you the kingdom, to give you HIS wisdom.
You are so Greatly loved, Beloved. Mark Dingemans
P.S. At the end of the previous Kairos I said that I would unveil concerning the cross in the 2nd census of Numbers 26. I felt it necessary to write this one above, because it sets the stage in unveiling the heart of God the Father for His Son and His Son’s cross, HIs Son’s sacrifice – in the mystery of the cross that He would establish within His own people. We will come to what takes place in the 2nd census to reveal what would take place on the real Passover in Gethsemane and on Golgatha’s hill.
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** – Beloved, take the time to go through these scriptures, and let the Holy Spirit write them and bear witness to them in your hearts and minds. Let the Word of God and the Blood of Jesus and the witness of the Holy Spirit who lives inside of you wash through you and renew your mind. These blogs are meant to be Bible studies, so you are free to print up any newsletter of this blog site for your own study. Feel free to copy and reset these Newsletter with lines in them for notes.
For those of you who have believed into Jesus; take communion often (I Cor. 11:23-26; Lk. 24:30-31a). Let communion be a refreshing of the Blood and the Spirit (Heb. 9:14) to cleanse your conscious from sin consciousness to righteousness consciousness, that you are indeed clean, as a gift of His grace. You are no more, Dearly Beloved, under condemnation; rather, you are under justification – eternally! (Rom. 4:25b, 5:21;b; Heb. 9:11-12). You will find the Holy Spirit of Jesus unveiling Jesus to you from the scriptures like you’ve never seen Him before.
If you have never believed into Jesus Christ, you can do so now, from your own heart and words. If you wish to help to pray, pray, “LORD Jesus, I believe You died for me and as me because You love me. I ask You for Your Forgiveness for my sin. Thank You for shedding Your blood to cleanse me, for making me clean, for breaking the power of sin in my life. I ask You to live inside of me. I thank You, Jesus, for giving me eternal life, that I might know You and Your Father, as my God, forever. In Your Name, LORD Jesus. Amen!”
kairos – (Kahee-ros’) – Strong’s concordance defines this word: “an occasion, I.e. set or proper time.” The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible (NASB) defines this word; “season, time, but not merely as a succession of moments, which is chronos,” [from which we derive the English word ‘chronology’]. “Kairos, however, implies not the convenience of the season, but the necessity of the task at hand, whether the time provides a good, convenient opportunity or not.” This must be understood. Strategic times of the Lord do not necessarily imply good or convenient times. We are in Kairos times. Maybe not good or convenient times, but definitely strategic, opportune times because of the season we are in. We must have “ears to hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches,” (Rev. 2:29), so as to respond correctly to the Kairos time.
* Some Scripture for this letter is taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE, (c) 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. Other references translated from Grk. Txt as presented in T. Newberry’s Englishman’s Greek New Testament, Zondervan Publishing – 1982- originally published in London, Eng. 1877 Scripture references not showing a Translation in Brackets are this writer’s translation from the Hebrew Massoretic Text as it appears on the web-site “qbible.com”
REB – Rotherham’s Emphasized Bible – 1902