GORDON RAMSAY RECIPES INGREDIENTS: 3031

GOOD MORNING SIBLINGS!

Today’s readings are Deuteronomy 30-31

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🌿I LOVE THIS PART OF DEUTERONOMY! This is one of my favorite speeches. I want to encourage you to read it out loud, as if Moses Himself is saying it to you. Don’t just let it be as if words on a white page but bring it to life in your mind. Visualize the scene in which He shares this ageless wisdom. Put yourself there and really experience it.

🌿Begin in Deuteronomy 30:2 and 30:6 where we see snippets of something else we’ve read.

-Let’s go back to the greatest commandment, which we talked about recently, the “Shema” as it is otherwise known.

YHWH gives it to us in Deuteronomy 6:4 and Messiah responds by quoting it when asked what the greatest commandment is in Mark 12.

📖Here O’ Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might.📖

Today, Moses is reminding of this as our duty again in his speech and then he goes on to tell us what will come about based on whether or not we do this.

🌿I think some of the real depth of meaning of this verse is lost on us today. Maybe it’s because we are used to the verse that we don’t think of it that much, but maybe we need to reframe it and see if there is a deeper Hebrew meaning that we can pull out to help us wrap our heads around what the real intent is.

If we look at Deuteronomy 30:6 on Biblehub it comes up like this:

https://biblehub.com/interlinear/deuteronomy/30-6.htm

Click the word nap̄·še·ḵā above the phrase “your soul” and see how it is used elsewhere in the Bible as “your life” “thy life”, etc.

Please don’t take my word for it but go look for yourself. Search the scriptures, always. You can also do the same for Deuteronomy 30:2

Now let’s look at Deuteronomy 30:6 with this new phrase inserted and see if it means a little more to our 2018 minds.

📖…So that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your LIFE, that you may live.📖

Okay, maybe my brain just needs a little more spelling out but to me, that made a lot more sense and it really changes things. I mean, WOW! That was just a huge lightbulb moment for me.💡

I’m not just to love YHWH with my heart and my free time, on one day of the week or when I have a little time off work and feel in the mood to read my Bible.

I am to love Him with my entire LIFE.

EVERYTHING I have, all that is “mine” is on loan from Him and used to bring Him glory. I am to live, breathe, speak, act, and even think as a child of God at all possible times. What does this look like? To love Him this much? What will I do as a result of this?

I will speak His love language – obedience. I will honor Him, I will listen to Him, I will heed His wisdom. I will hold His words in reverence, and I will realize that I am His representative in all that I do and it is my responsibility to make sure I am not misrepresenting Him or leading people away from His Word.

It is a great honor and responsibility, but He is very clear in today’s readings that He is not leaving us alone in this. When we choose the path of Life, He is with us and within us, watching over and prospering all that we do. (I am not referring to man’s idea of temporary wealth but eternal wealth).

🌿CHOOSE LIFE Deut 30:15-20

📖See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.

But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess.

I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse.

Therefore choose life…📖

Obedience to YHWH is not a burden. Jesus said His yoke is light and His burden is easy. However, We have the free will to choose the road to blessings or the road to curses. Each day we must make that choice anew.

Recently in my life I’ve witnessed the tragedy of someone living a life within God’s parameters only to turn against Him in their final years. It breaks my heart to see what happens as everything they’ve loved dissolves around them as a result. They were on one path and they choose to go on another and what YHWH said would happen is exactly what happened. We can always trust our Father to tell the truth.

🌿With this in mind, it is a tremendous blessing that I am ever thankful for that I must turn to the Father each day for instruction on how to live. He orchestrates our lives so that He is an integral part in them, if we choose to make Him so.

🌿I was talking to a friend this morning about a decision she had to make wherein there is no clear scriptural guidelines on how to respond. We had both diligently searched the scripture and were left to talk it out with one another, pray for wisdom, and make the best decision she could make based on knowing the character of God and His guidelines in other areas of daily living within Scripture.

We talked about, in the end, what a blessing it was that we have decisions like this that require us to continually seek Him in our lives, causing us to depend on Him rather than lean on our own understanding. This is why it is so important to study the Word of God, so that we know His character, His commandments, His patterns, and His responses – and the standard He has set for and expects of His people.

Our precious Messiah even came to show us what it looks like to walk according to the ways of YHWH.

🌿As Moses prepares for the end of his life, he is carefully choosing the wisdom YHWH wants Him to impart to the people. These people that He has led and loved are to be without Him and it is His strongest hope that they will heed the words of YHWH, their God, and remain steadfast in Him. Every syllable of this chapter should be given great weight in our lives as we read it. I encourage you to read it at least a few times, with knowledge that YHWH’s wisdom and words are timeless and always ring true.

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The Father’s Word begins in the beginning, and so should we. Click here to see all of the Genesis notes you may have missed.

GOOD MORNING, SIBLINGS!
Today’s readings are Genesis 30-31

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Have you printed out this month’s reading plan? It has a checklist and is a great way to make sure you haven’t missed anything. Click here.
🌿The twelve sons of Israel are almost all here! We have a surprise mention of a daughter as well. Think about it, we normally only see the births of males recorded. Of course, Dinah plays a key role in part of an upcoming tragedy so that is likely why she is mentioned. It is also likely that Jacob had many other daughters but they were not mentioned as they remained more or less background characters.

🌿LABANS ATTITUDE! Oh my goodness, did you catch Laban’s attitude throughout today’s passages? He is not the type of man I’d like to be related to, that is for sure.

🌿Jacob and the goats

Genesis 30:37-43 Then Jacob took fresh sticks of poplar and almond and plane trees, and peeled white streaks in them, exposing the white of the sticks. He set the sticks that he had peeled in front of the flocks in the troughs, that is, the watering places, where the flocks came to drink. And since they bred when they came to drink, the flocks bred in front of the sticks and so the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and spotted. And Jacob separated the lambs and set the faces of the flocks toward the striped and all the black in the flock of Laban. He put his own droves apart and did not put them with Laban’s flock. Whenever the stronger of the flock were breeding, Jacob would lay the sticks in the troughs before the eyes of the flock, that they might breed among the sticks, but for the feebler of the flock he would not lay them there. So the feebler would be Laban’s, and the stronger Jacob’s. Thus the man increased greatly and had large flocks, female servants and male servants, and camels and donkeys.

What was the purpose of the sticks? I believe this is one of the stories where we might be missing a piece that those familiar with the culture of that time would take for granted, something that is so obvious they felt no need to explain it.
One suggestion I heard, which I feel does carry some weight of possibility, is that you’ll notice these striped sticks were placed inside the water trough. It is thought by some that when the females came to drink, they would linger longer or be focused on these sticks which would allow them to stay longer and the solid males could take advantage of this opportunity and mate with them. We are told that Jacob placed the sticks there only when the ideal stock came to drink so that would enable the best of the flock to reproduce. If you’ve ever been around farm animals or seen some of the things farmers have found that help them in raising them, this doesn’t sound too far fetched to me. But I want to reiterate that it is merely speculation, which is all we can do at this point. Do you have any theories? Talk about them in the discussion thread today if you’d like. Either way, it is important to know the real reason why this happened and that is that the Father made it so, as we learn when Jacob recounts his dream in the next chapter.

Genesis 31:10-12 In the breeding season of the flock I lifted up my eyes and saw in a dream that the goats that mated with the flock were striped, spotted, and mottled. Then the angel of God said to me in the dream, ‘Jacob,’ and I said, ‘Here I am!’ And he said, ‘Lift up your eyes and see, all the goats that mate with the flock are striped, spotted, and mottled, for I have seen all that Laban is doing to you.

🌿Genesis 31:19 Rachel’s theft -There is a significant reason as to why Rachel took her father’s idols. It was tradition in Mesopotamia that whoever had possession of the family gods was the owner or inheritor of the family wealth. Recall how hurt the girls were at their father’s treatment, feeling as if he had sold them. Add to this the disrespect he showed time and again to their husband and it’s not so shocking that Rachel would take steps to ensure her own justice.

Rachel’s character- I have always thought of her as the beautiful girl that Jacob fell in love with. She’s held a romantic spot in my mind, but reading how she treated her sister time and again has recast her as her father’s daughter to some degree with me.

But the thing to remember is that these people are human. They have faults. And as I’ve said before, our Bible does not try to whitewash our spiritual ancestors.
👉🏻And how many times in our lives, if someone were reading our story, would they find serious fault in our own behavior?

Time and again in YHWH’s word we see humans as fallible, making poor decisions, and the results of their life being directly related to whether or not they turned to YHWH or turned away from Him, whether they sought Him or sought the World. We see the consequences of these decisions as a clear and distinct lesson to us.

As we are reading these stories, we can either shake our heads at them or realize that we have been told this bit of history because we are prone to repeat it. The Bible is a mirror. Each of these lessons has an application in our own lives.

By the way, these are my own notes, my personal takeaways from these verses. Do you know who the sole authority is on YHWH’s Word? YHWH.

Test everything, hold tight to what is good – and HE is the only source of good.

May YHWH bless the reading of His word!

Today’s link: Homestead Banana Bread

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May YHWH bless the reading of His word!