Faithful Writers

The underlying theme of Genesis is about the overcoming of all odds to achieve ultimate victory through faith in God. Think about it. God chooses one childless and elderly couple way beyond their ability to bear children. And God says to the husband Abraham that not only is he going to have a child but He is going to make him into a great nation, bless him abundantly and grant his descendants the Land of Canaan.

We can see throughout the book of Genesis that God’s interventions are at their most intense during the early stages of mankind’s history and gradually take a backseat as His creation matures.

Here is something a lot of people don’t know. Jesus Himself quoted from the Septuagint. This translation was done in the third century B.C. by Jewish scribes who were experts in Hebrew and Greek.

Unless you are an ancient Middle Easterner who has suddenly been transported to the 21st century via a time machine… You are NOT going to have a hope in heaven of understanding the Bible the way it was meant to be understood unless you grasp the culture of the ancient Middle East.

So have you ever heard this argument? “How could God have created the universe in just six days?” “The Hebrews claim that by counting the generations we find the earth to be approximately six thousand years old.”

There is a logical symmetry behind His actions clearly reflected in His creation. He is a God who draws up boundaries that are NOT to be broken. Let’s take a look at the creation story in Genesis Chapter One.

Since we are talking about the one true God of Israel, why is the plural form of God being used, instead of the singular form, which is EL? The answer is that the IM ending in Hebrew also has another usage. Adding IM to the end of a word can also indicate greatness.

My answer: If you knew the original Hebrew, you wouldn’t have that problem. In verses 3 and 4, the Hebrew word for “light” is OWR.

Today I would like to explore its opposite, the word CHOSEK. The dictionary defines this word as darkness or obscurity and as with owr also has strong spiritual significance but in a very negative sense.

God achieves His purposes through division and separation. This is a fundamental God principle and can be seen in the very first Chapter of Genesis. “God saw that the light was good, and God divided the light from the darkness.”-GENESIS 1:4

The important point that I want you to get from all of this is to keep in mind that there is an underlying spiritual reality and message behind not only physical objects in Scripture but also, many of the events depicted in Scripture that are not evident when first read but become clearer through prayer and as God gives us a deeper understanding.

The problem with this explanation is that it still does not explain how the market days happened to cluster around every “seventh” day, instead of every fifteenth day or nineteenth day or something else.

In some mysterious way, this number has left an indelible impression on the world and mankind. Our planet has seven continents and seven seas. The rainbow only has seven colors. The entire musical scale consists of only 7 notes. In popular culture, we have Snow White and the 7 Dwarves, The 7 Samurai, and James Bond 007.

In the Genesis account, most people assume the first human created was a male. However, the Scripture isn’t so crystal clear on this point. Let’s take a good look at the text.

The word Adam is also the root word for the color “red” and for the word “soil” or “earth." This makes perfect sense since the Scriptures tell us that God created a human (remember not a “man” but a “human”) from the dust of the ground.

But imagine watching a historical piece or a detective movie from the halfway point. Contextually speaking, you would be completely lost. This is the exact problem one encounters when reading the Bible starting from the New Testament.

In more than a hundred languages of the world, the word for “Sabbath” as meaning a day of rest is actually “Sabbath” and refers to Saturday. For example: Arabic=Sabot, Armenian=Shabat, Spanish=Sabado, Italian=Sabato, etcetera.

The middle of the week of 30 A.D. was a Wednesday Passover. Jesus was to be “cut off” in the middle of the week! He was to be cut off in the middle of Daniel’s 70th week, in the middle of God’s 7000 year week and in the middle of the simple seven day week.

Of course God doesn’t have to rest. But He knew we would need one Holy Temple in time where we would need to get away from it all. That is why he rested on the seventh day and separated this day from all other days.

This is fascinating because it tells us that the Sabbath is NOT the result of or a response to sin. Hence, it is part of God’s original plan for all mankind.

This is an issue that the Apostle Paul spent a lifetime trying to break down. How can it be sinful for a Jewish believer to desecrate the Sabbath but not for a Gentile believer? This is nothing less than the creation of two totally different flocks!

Now an interesting thing you need to know is that there were two groups of people in the synagogue right from the start. There were the “men of Israel” and the “God fearers." The term “God-fearers” is widely regarded by scholars as a special designation for Gentiles who didn’t convert to become Jews but loved the Jewish scriptures and loved the teachings of Judaism.

Jesus’s death did not do away with the Sabbath. Second, and this is the main point I want to make. The earliest that the Book of Luke could have been written was about 62AD or about 30-plus years after the events that are being described here.

However, Jesus makes it clear in this chapter that there will be a whole sequence of events. He talks about the generation that would witness the destruction of the temple in 70AD and he speaks about the abomination of desolation standing in the Holy Place.