I would like to share about new beginnings that cover the first two Bible portions in Genesis. The first words from Gen.1:1 open with, “In the beginning (of time) God created the heavens and the earth.” What came before that (I.e., the beginning of the beginning of infinity before the universe was created) we can only speculate. None of us know the fine details although there are many theories where we have glimpses. (Deut 29:29) What we do know is that God is the infinite first cause and Creator who sustains the universe He spoke into existence. The origins of all things are embedded in Him, the God of new beginnings Who exists eternally. And when He created the universe, everything from the dawn of time until now is entirely determined by Him – He is never taken by surprise and nothing or nobody can ever interfere with this – and when they do attempt to do so, He will weave everything seamlessly from infinite permutations to align with His plans – what man intended for evil, God will turn for good. It is a win-win situation God has never suffered even the smallest defeat and His greatest victory to date was demonstrated with humanity’s redemption through the blood shed for us at Calvary by Yeshua available for the whosoever, 2Cor. 5: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ [that is, grafted in, joined to Him by faith in Him as Savior], he is a new creature [reborn and renewed by the Holy Spirit]; the old things [the previous moral and spiritual condition] have passed away. Behold, new things have come [because spiritual awakening brings a new life].”
There is constant creativity and energy that injects life and newness into everything touched by God’s fingerprints that always overflows with abundance. This is what God does: “I have come that you might have life in abundance…” (John 10:10) When He speaks, His words bring life – nothing can ever remain the same again. We are renewed and transformed, our old lives are wrecked as He begins to put all the pieces together again. It commences when we are saved and continues throughout our mortal lives over and over again into eternity in waves of excruciating glory – the agony of being moulded into His image! “Consider it nothing but joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you fall into various trials. Be assured that the testing of your faith [through experience] produces endurance [leading to spiritual maturity, and inner peace]. And let endurance have its perfect result and do a thorough work, so that you may be perfect and completely developed [in your faith], lacking in nothing.” (James 1:2).
But in all of the creative works of our all-powerful God there remains one thing that He gave humanity which stands alone against everything else, a unique gift which He never interferes with: our free will. Everyone has the choice whether to allow Him to transform them or not. This is true for regenerated man not just those who are unregenerated and something ongoing with our walk with the Lord. Unless we as believers choose Yeshua as Lord of our lives and not just Saviour, we will eventually stagnate and lose our flavour. Yeshua warned His disciples about this in Matt. 5 that “You (believers) are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has lost its taste (purpose), how can it be made salty? It is no longer good for anything, but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
Yeshua was referring to something His audience clearly understood— the hill of salt at the corner of the Dead Sea. This type of salt contained an outer layer of impurities due to chemical changes that caused it to lose its flavour and was discarded as useless. People used salt as a preservative and flavouring so it was symbolic of something that preserved and improved taste. There are many analogies one could draw from this but I would like to focus on what in Bible times was known as the “Salt Covenant” – a covenant of friendship between two people established over a meal. At one stage they would each pour out a pouch of salt and mix the grains into one pile stating: “If anyone can separate each grain of salt and return them to the correct owner, so too will our friendship cease to be.” Therefore, it represented an ancient symbol of unbreakable friendship preserved at any cost that was everlasting. Here we can begin to see the impact of Yeshua’s words to His disciples in John 15:15, “There is no greater love than this—that a man should lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I tell you to do.” Let’s maintain our saltiness and allow nothing to come between ourselves and Yeshua. Our friendship is infinitely more important than anything else in life, and if we take no more than this and apply it in our lives we do well.
So let’s return now to the opening words in Gen.1 which makes a simple but powerful statement: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Contained here is one of the most important declarations in the Bible because it establishes the basis for everything else that follows. When God speaks, the whole of creation must bow the knee.
The 2nd word in the opening sentence in Genesis is, ELOHIM, the name of God in plural form that describes His tri-unity, and this is followed, by the 3rd word, ‘bara’ in the singular (created) which emphasises that God is One not many ‘gods’.
The 4th word in the Hebrew text is one composed of two letters, an aleph and a taph which are the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This word has puzzled rabbis because no-one understood what it meant? Yet, for believers, we see how it perfectly describes Yeshua, the ‘aleph and the Taph’ the beginning and end, the same title given to Yeshua in the Book of Revelation but in the Greek where He is declared to be the Alpha and Omega.
And so, we have the completeness of a statement which is the hallmark that flows throughout the pages of the Bible mirroring Yeshua who is the Aleph and the Taph, the beginning and the end. God is the source of all life and has become for us the ‘Way and the Truth and the Life’.
How can we ever fully grasp this truth – a God who demonstrated His love for us that while we were sinners, Yeshua died for us? As flesh and blood we are limited to finite explanations. Yet, in the spirit we can apprehend the fullness in a manner that is ill-defined in human terms. What an incredible thing that the Creator God made it possible through Yeshua to invade our lives, transforming us into new creations through His precious blood! In Colos.1:15-17,
“He is the exact living image of the unseen God [the visible representation of the invisible], the firstborn [the originator] of all creation. For by Him all things were created in heaven and on earth, [things] visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities; all things were created and exist through Him and for Him. And He Himself existed and is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. [His is the controlling, cohesive force of the universe.”
The Creator spoke forth His creation and everything within it. Yet, with Adam it was different. He formed him with His hands, fashioned him in His likeness and breathed His ‘Neshimah’ (breath) into his nostrils. Adam was created from the dust of the earth (adamah) the crown of God’s creation and the last thing created: Man and woman. Humanity was afforded the highest status above everything else, created in the very image of God in form and given the responsibility to rule over it “to work (or serve) it and protect it”. Within the name of ‘adam’ is also contained the word dam (דָם blood) because life is in the blood. (Gen 9:4; Deut 12:23; Lev 17:11) From this we learn that redemption was on God’s mind from the outset.
Although things went badly wrong with Adam and Eve, God was always in full control. When they sinned, God’s eternal plans continued to unfold undeterred. Satan may win some battles but God always wins the wars! And we should should be encouraged by this, for the promise is that ALL things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purposes!
God could have stopped everything before He had even created humanity. Instead, in His infinite love He chose to redeem us. “God demonstrated His love for us that while we were sinners, Yeshua died for us as a propitiation for our sin!” (Rom. 5:8)
Mankind has suffered terribly since the Fall because of rebellion, but God has provided the possibility of redemption for us through Yeshua. And just as we are at the beginning of a new civil year in the Jewish calendar, so God prophetically offers us day-by-day with new beginnings when we allow Him access in our lives.
In Gen.4 we read an episode when Cain and Abel presented offerings before God. Abel offered a blood sacrifice that was accepted because it mirrored the essence of who he was, ‘adam’ (from the Hebrew root word for blood) because life is in the blood. Abel’s offering was a substitutionary offering, a life for a life, which mirrored a future redemption prophetically through the shed blood of Yeshua. Cain, however, scorned the grace of God and made an offering based solely upon human effort which was why it could never be accepted because it is impossible to be redeemed through good deeds alone.
God’s response to Cain when his offering was not accepted was amazing. In the English text we read: “If you are doing what is good, shouldn’t you hold your head up high? If you don’t do what is good, sin is crouching at the door—it wants you but you can rule over it.” (Gen. 4:11) (If you don’t do what is good, then face the full consequences without hope.”) The Hebrew word for sin used here is (‘Chata-ah’) the same word found in the Lev. 6:17;24 for a sin offering which when translated properly provides us with a very different meaning. What God was telling Cain was this: “If you don’t do what is good, a sin offering is crouching at the door (i.e., is within ready reach).”
In His love and compassion, God was giving Cain a second chance, a new beginning, with the opportunity to present the same type of offering his brother had presented. Instead, Cain refused, which led to the first murder and consequently he became a vagabond for the rest of his life, the mark of Cain, who preferred banishment from the presence of God with the shame and humiliation to accompany. He bore the hallmarks of the pride of life, the “mark of Cain”, a path which countless others have followed throughout history.
When we humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God He will in due time exalt us. But, when we exalt ourselves we play directly into the hands of the Devil. Humility is when we relinquish every thing that takes precedence over God: our time, abilities, energies, material possessions, even our ministries and our families – all these things we lay before the feet of Yeshua. To be humble requires courage and strength; to recognise who we are in God through Yeshua, which defines the overcomer – one who stands firm in Him and having done all to stand!
Yeshua said that when we hate someone, like Cain did, it is the same as committing murder and also John wrote that “…whoever hates his brother is a murderer; and no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.” (1John3) We have a choice: the narrow path of new beginnings or the broad way that leads to death.
And we see how within just a few generations from Adam, things quickly plummeted to a point where we read one of the saddest statements in the Bible where God observed the wickedness of humanity and said, “…’I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” Gen. 6:7-8 There are different levels of evil that Amy be manifested but here we see that things became so totally bad and widespread on a scale unprecedented since creation where “all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth.”
It is an amazing thing that only one person stood between God and humanity’s annihilation. His name was Noah who, “..was a just man, perfect in his generations, and walked with God” in a world filled with evil (Gen. 6:9). Noah could have assimilated to the standards of the world, but, instead he and his family were saved in an ark which took 120 years to build. Throughout this period, he attracted constant ridicule as everyone mocked him for constructing a ship in the Sahara desert! After all, there had never been rain prior to the Flood. When we stand for righteousness we will always be mocked and ridiculed by others, even sometimes those who call themselves ‘Christians.’
God destroyed all humanity except Noah and his family – 8 people who were saved in an ark that God had instructed Noah to build with precise specifications. Noah was saved by obeying God precisely. He was instructed to cover the ark inside and outside with pitch which in Hebrew is ‘kaphar’ meaning ‘covering’, the root word for ‘kippur’ from which is derived the word, ‘Yom Kippur’ the ‘Day of Atonement’ or ‘Day of Covering.’
Trusting God may sometimes seem absurd especially when it contradicts everything that seems rational and logical. These are times most critical for us to stand strong in the Lord. It was because Noah placed his full trust in God that he became a hero of faith: “By faith Noah, being warned by God about things not yet seen, in reverence prepared an ark for the salvation of his household, by which he condemned the world, and became an heir of the righteousness which is according to faith.” (Heb 11:7) Every time we trust God against the flow of conventional wisdom or political correctness, against fierce opposition from both without and within, we too become heroes of faith! God is searching for people like this His kingdom.
One word of recognition and commendation from God is better than receiving a life time of tributes from the world. Paul wrote, “Yet every advantage that I had gained I considered lost for Yeshua’s sake. Yes, and I look upon everything as loss compared with the overwhelming gain of knowing Messiah Yeshua my Lord. For his sake I did in actual fact suffer the loss of everything, but I considered it useless rubbish compared with being able to win Christ. ”
Yeshua described the end times as being just like the ‘Days of Noah’. And He spoke of something which is easily overlooked. In Matt 24 He warned that before the Flood people, “… went on eating and drinking, taking wives and becoming wives, right up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they didn’t know what was happening until the Flood came and swept them all away. It will be just like that when the Son of Man comes………”
From this we are warned by Yeshua to prepare well as Noah did, for just as the Flood came suddenly after 120 years, so it will be when the Son of Man returns, (24:37-44) God has called each one of us to be like “Noah” who stood against the flow of all ungodliness and walked in faith and obedience.
The majority of people in the world today (both non-believers but also many believers) live as though everything will surely get better in time. People are completely unaware of the precarious things that are happening around us in these end times and this is what Yeshua warns about. The sin of the Laodicean Church in Rev 3, was the sin of spiritual apathy. Yeshua told them, “15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. Oh, that you were either cold or hot! So because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spew you out of My mouth. For you say, ‘I am rich, I have made myself wealthy, and I need nothing.’ But you do not know that you are miserable and pitiable and poor and blind and naked. I advise you to buy from Me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white clothes so that you may dress yourself and so the shame of your nakedness will not be revealed, and eye salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. ”
There are those who are ignorant biblically about the times we are living in and totally unprepared for what the world is about to face as we rapidly approach the final countdown before the return of Yeshua. Scripture is clear that there will come a time worse than experienced since the beginning of time and the Lord will shorten these days only for the sake of believers. This is something we need to be aware of because things will yet become worse before we are taken to be with the Lord.
From all the many lessons we learn from this parasha, God urges us in this season to be those who are well prepared for Yeshua’s return.) Yeshua said that the great hallmark of faith in Him — of having the Torah written inside our hearts and minds – has not changed as encapsulated in Deut 6:5 – to love Him with all our hearts, minds and strength and our neighbour as ourselves. When the Divine presence of God resides in our lives, everything else falls into place. His shalom fills us to overflowing despite all the evil around and about that seeks to destroy us So, we rejoice and are glad in these perilous times we are living, in the knowledge that our redemption draws nigh as we live in the fullness of His calling.
