Consecration, Light and Miracles
Hanukkah Edition #2
Shabbat Shalom and a blessed Hanukkah dearly beloved!
Arise, shine; For your light has come! And the glory of Yahveh is risen upon you. For behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, And deep darkness the people; But Yahveh will arise over you, And His glory will be seen upon you. The Gentiles shall come to your light, And kings to the brightness of your rising. Isaiah 60:1-3
Hanukkah is also called the Feast of Dedication and the Feast of Lights and Miracles. The whole story of Hanukah is connected with the desire of the People of the Covenant (The Jewish People) to pay any price in order to live a consecrated life with the Presence of Yahveh in the CENTER. When we look closely into this historical event called Hanukkah we will see that the main “actors” are a priestly family called the Maccabees that refused to bow down to pagan worship even under death threats! At that time Greece was ruling Israel and they had the power to execute anyone that would not bow down to their gods.
However Mathityahu and his sons led by Yehudah decided to take the risk of perishing rather than betraying The God of Israel and His Commandments! They were only a few against an entire armed and mean army! However they did not keep this a personal issue but decided to carry the battle to the extent of fighting courageously and dangerously for the redemption of the entire Nation of Israel. The rest of the story is recounted extensively in the books of the Apocrypha and it talks of a terrible fight between the Jewish Maccabees and the Greeks. The Maccabees won and they took over the Temple from the hands of the pagans and proceeded to consecrate it, cleanse it and purify it from all vestiges of unholiness and pagan worship.
After cleansing it, they lit up the Menorah, the sign of YAH’S Presence and Revelation the symbol of His Word and the fullness of His illuminating spirit (Seven fold Spirit-Seven branch Menorah)
Your word is a lamp to my feet And a light to my path. Psalms 119:105
However they needed a miracle, they needed more oil in order to keep the Menorah lit. However not any oil would do but only consecrated oil. It took seven days to consecrate Holy Oil and so they had a dilemma. Should we proceed with only ONE little vessel (Kad Katan) of oil or should we wait until more oil is consecrated? They proceeded by faith and YAH followed their trust and zeal for His Word with a miracle of MULTIPLICATION. The little vessel of Holy Oil lasted for 8 days until enough oil was consecrated!
No doubt many know this beautiful Hanukkah story and of course the excitement is always about the Miracle but we need to understand that this miracle was not a random miracle! It was the answer of YAHVEH to a few important factors. I believe that He is always willing to answer with His miracles when these factors are present:
1. Being willing to lose your life for the Truth of His Word and Kingdom.
2. Being willing to fight the “Goliaths” though you are small and seemingly insignificant.
3. Fight until you die or you achieve your goal, never quit!!!
4. After you achieve the desired victory CONSECRATE yourself again, let the Light of His Word dwell in you richly and shine. Then watch Him back you up with His Miracles!
Consecration is always connected with cleansing and purification. Just like the Mishkan ( Temple ) needed to be purified from pagan influence, so do we who are The Mishkan of His Ruach (Spirit). Consecration through repentance from all that defiles us needs to lead to the infilling of the Light of His Word and Spirit and then watch Him do the Miracles needed for you to complete the task of glorifying His dwelling place!
VERY IMPORTANT:
Fight for His cause not for yours. The Maccabees wanted to rededicate the Mishkan ( Temple ) for the Glory of YAH (God) and not because of selfish ambition for fame or for the desire to build a “ministry” for themselves. Too many people are pursuing their own agenda but who is interested in vindicating the Holiness and the Glory of God?
In these End Times things are shifting and we will begin to see a marked difference between those that live for His Glory and those that do not. The distinguishing marks will be upon the Consecrated and Illuminate ones and you will see Miracles following them wherever they go! YAH wants His Mishkan back from all pagan influence and iniquity; He desires a Bride Pure and Holy! The Battle is raging in Israel and for Israel ’s Redemption. Will you stop your own agenda and join the Battle for His Glory? Will you join His End time Messianic Apostolic Prophetic Team? We, like the Maccabees are only a few compared with the millions in organized religion but the zeal of YAHVEH consumes us for the restoration of His House and of Holy Worship.
“and Yahveh said to him, “Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem , and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and cry over all the abominations that are done within it.” To the others He said in my hearing, “Go after him through the city and kill; do not let your eye spare, nor have any pity.” Ezekiel 9:4-5
As we end this Hanukkah and prepare to end this Gregorian calendar year, let us pursue after His Presence and His holiness and pure Word like never before in our lives. The Miracles is only the outcome of the Consecration and the Light of His Word in us. Miracles should be the norm for consecrated believers that are full of His Holy Fire and Word. And remember that the fight can be fierce, dangerous and risky…But if we perish, we perish.
For they indeed for a few days chastened us as seemed best to them, but He for our profit, that we may be partakers of His holiness. Hebrews 12:10 Pursue peace without holiness no
I yearn to see Him, not only in Heaven but right here on earth! And I yearn to see Him in His Mishkan- in You and me!
Happy end of Hanukkah and New Beginnings!
Your friends in Israel
Bishop Dominiquae and Rabbi Baruch Bierman
This is a good read. Will post another good one shortly. jm
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Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: All That Was Ever Ours
Observation and Silence
On a beautiful cool morning last July, Lars and I left behind all our usual work and chugged out of Gloucester harbor in Massachusetts on a fifty-foot fishing boat. There were about twenty of us aboard, all of us in high spirits .... in anticipation of what we were about to see. It was not the cormorants that flocked on the tiny island at the mouth of the harbor, or the reef of Norman's Woe where the Hesperus was wrecked, or the lighthouse on Eastern Point.
We noted all of these things with interest (the oldest paint factory in the country did not rouse us much), but none of them were what we had paid our fifteen dollars apiece to see. Lars had called the week before to inquire about the advertisement. Did they guarantee anything? No, that was impossible, but in the twenty trips made so far that summer they had seen them every time. We decided it was well worth risking the price of tickets if there was even an outside chance of seeing them: whales. Not captive in Marineland, not doing tricks in the zoo, but real live full-sized unbelievable wild whales out in the open Atlantic Ocean, free-swimming, God-glorifying giants of the deep.
Our on-board whale authority turned out to be a man of about twenty wearing a T-shirt and cutoffs, with a baseball cap clamped over his long hair. He stood up in front of us with a chart and proceeded to show us pictures of "the whales we'll be seeing."
Well, I thought, he sounds wonderfully confident. Will we be so fortunate as to see even one spout in the distance? Sometime after half-past nine, he assured us, we might begin to spot them. We would understand the lookout's directions if we imagined the boat as the face of a clock, its bow representing twelve o'clock, its stern six. He then explained that the whales most likely to be in the area were the humpback and the finback, each having a characteristic "blow." Whales, being mammals, breathe air. They surface every few minutes, exhale a great column of vapor (the finback's is twenty feet tall, straight up into the air), inhale in a split second, and then dive.
They do their mating in the area of the Dominican Republic in the wintertime but eat little then. In the summertime they come north and do most of their eating off the coast of Massachusetts, occasionally going as far north as Newfoundland, depending on where the food animals are swarming. Instead of teeth these two species of whale have what is called baleen, a double series of triangular horny plates on each side of the palate (as many as six hundred all together) which fray out into a sort of hairy fringe to form a sieve which filters out of the ocean's soup all the nourishing tidbits such as plankton, krills, copepods, herring, sardines, and copelin.
The most remarkable of the tidbits is a creature called a diatom. These microscopic machines behave in some ways like animals (they swim and dig) and in other ways like plants. Scientists cannot agree on how to classify them, but whales love them and they provide more food than any other living thing, nourishing not only whales but a variety of infinitely smaller creatures like krills (I confess I had never once wondered what krills ate). Diatoms come in several thousand species, in marvelous shapes (pinwheels, spirals, stars, triangles, chandeliers, discs, rods, ovals), and the largest of them measures a mere millimeter. A humpback whale consumes rather large helpings of diatoms, netting several hundred billion every few hours, taking in several tons of water with each gulp and straining these vast torrents through his baleen, as much as a million cubic meters of seawater a day.
Among our fellow passengers was a very large lady wearing a knit tank top and slacks which she filled to bursting. She had a shopping bag on what there was of a lap. We had not left our moorings before she had reached into the bag and switched on a radio, then began foraging for something to eat. Most of her crackers and bananas were gone, she had downed a Pepsi or two and inquired in vain if there was food to be bought, by the time the lookout cried, "Blow at eleven o'clock!'' We rushed to the bow in time to see a distant geyser. The captain made for the spot, and soon we saw the huge glistening back and dorsal fin of a humpback roll to the surface and heard the surprisingly powerful phooh from the blowhole before it vanished.
Within a short time we had sighted other spouts, other fins, and then, to our great excitement, the monstrous tail or fluke splendidly flashed clear of the water so that we could see its markings and the clinging barnacles.
"There's your fluke, now," the captain's assistant remarked laconically.
Our knowledgeable young man had described something he called a "bubble net" which he hoped we might see. A whale goes down about thirty feet, blows a twelve-foot circle of bubbles so that the surface of the sea turns effervescent turquoise. No one is quite sure why or how this works, but it seems to have the effect of confusing the small fish and other creatures so that they are "caught" in this net. About ten seconds elapse (the gulls have time to flock to the scene screaming, the eager watchers also scream and focus their eyes and cameras). Then, suddenly and awesomely, the whale's cavernous mouth explodes from below and swallows the "net" (and sometimes, the man said, an unwary seagull or two). We had seen perhaps three or four whales surface, blow, and disappear some dozens of times before the lookout shouted "Bubble at seven o'clock!" We raced to the stern, found a great green pool not many feet away, and held our breath as the enormous square warted snout of the humpback shot out of the water, the entire pool poured through the billowing mesh of baleen, and before we could blink in disbelief, the ocean was as faceless and empty as ever. I don't think anyone said a word unless it was "Wow. " There would have been complete silence if it hadn't been for the sound of the radio in the shopping bag.
The lookout called our attention some minutes later to what seemed to be a patch of dim, pale-green light moving smoothly alongside the boat, perhaps four or five feet beneath the surface. It was the gray sidepatch of the finwhale. If he had not pointed it out, our uneducated eyes would never have noticed it, for there was not the smallest ripple, there was not the least sign to indicate that a fifty-foot giant weighing some sixty tons was accompanying us.
The fat lady, I think, missed it. She was eating another banana. Not long after we had made this trip I received another of those letters from an aspiring writer. A young woman wrote, "I often yearn to be a writer but after reading books like yours, I feel that all the important things have already been said!''
They have indeed been said, and long before I said them. If a thing is true it is not new, but the truth needs to be said again and again, freshly for each generation. I have often been introduced to some seventeenth-or eighteenth-century writer by a nineteenth-century writer. If I quote what I learn from the ancients, a twentieth-century reader is sometimes helped when he would not by himself have found Crashaw's poem or St. Francis' prayer or St. Paul's Love chapter.
What of the twenty-first century? Which of the young people I know are now laying the groundwork for being the writers or artists or, as I like to think of any who show truth in any form, the prophets for my grandchildren's grandchildren?
I wrote to the young woman:
Don't give up that yearning. During these busy years while you take care of small children and give yourself to being a godly wife and mother, lay the firm footing on which good writing must be built. Read great books if you have time to read anything at all. Get rid of the junk that comes in the mail, eschew all magazines and newspapers if your reading time is limited, and by "hearing" the really great authors, learn the sound and cadence of good English.
There are two other things required of "prophets." Observation ("What do you see?" Ezekiel and John were asked) and silence. ("The word of the Lord came to me.") Obviously we (I, at least, and most others, I suppose) are not anything like the biblical prophets. Ours is a different assignment. But we are charged with the responsibility of telling the truth, and I don't see how this can possibly be done without opening our eyes to see and our ears to hear. There must, there simply must, be time and space allowed for silence and for solitude if what we see and hear is to be "processed."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of Wind, Sand, and Stars, said in a conversation with Anne Morrow Lindbergh, "The great of the earth are those who leave silence and solitude around themselves, their work and their life, and let it ripen of its own accord."
If any of the crowd we saw fishing from a breakwater as our boat entered Gloucester harbor again are among the "great of the earth," it will be against terrible odds. They, like the lady on board, were also listening to a shrieking radio.
ln the cry of gulls, in the blow of a whale, in the very stillness of an early morning, it seems to me, we are more likely to hear the Lord's quiet word.
Speak, Lord, in the stillness,
While I wait on Thee.
Hushed my heart to listen
In expectancy.