Matthew Blewett - Heaven and Earth - Class 2 - Heaven and Earth

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   This is day two of the 2024 Idlewild Bible School. Our third period teacher is Brother Matthew Blewett. His general topic is Heaven and Earth. Today’s topic is Patterns of Purpose. Brother Matthew. December last year, my wife and I had the pleasure of celebrating the wedding of my daughter and of course our new son-in-law, Kayla and Jeremy.

2. 0:27

   An absolutely incredible occasion for those of you who’ve had the opportunity and the blessing of attending a wedding of your one of your children. It’s something that you plan hard for and that is a time of incredible joy and beauty. And for me, especially as the father only have one daughter, I knew this was going to be the opportunity to walk down the aisle and hand my daughter over. The wedding took place in a farm near to where we live, which is in a beautiful mountainous area.

3. 1:03

   It was a spectacular day. You always pray for that kind of day. Blue skies, not too hot little gentle breeze and everybody was looking incredibly beautiful. Of course, the most beautiful besides my wife was my daughter Kayla in her beautiful bridal gown. And it was just such an amazing occasion for me as we walk down the aisle surrounded by those mountains and all of that beauty. And then the next thing that comes into visual are all the people that have been a part of your life. People that are friends, family staring at you and you walking down the aisle holding your your daughter’s arm, slowly absorbing all of this occasion.

4. 1:51

   And there at the end is the bridegroom smiling an incredible young man that you are so blessed to be handing your daughter over to. And going through my mind was of course, a million things as I tried to do everything so slowly. Although Kayla said we’ve got to get there before the song ends. And I normally do everything pretty fast as you hear the way I speak, but I was just trying to slow this moment down. As for me, everything that was going on was playing itself out, not just the love and the beauty of the occasion and the family and the friends and my daughter, but all that it represented for what we were doing.

5. 2:30

   The symbol of marriage, the coming together, ultimately of heaven and earth. In this moment. And as I try to put all of it together, I cannot use words to even begin to describe the feelings that went through me. In that moment and through the rest of that evening, I hope you’ll remember that story because it has some significance as we move on in our considerations in Part 2.

6. 2:57

   So part one actually was patterns of purpose, Jeff. And I know it’s confusing because Part 2 is Heaven and Earth and the series is called Heaven and Earth. So just to keep you on your toes, the second part is entitled Heaven and Earth and I must make a confession here. 2 confessions. First of all, I’ve been thinking about this topic for a long time, giving talks here and there. Single talks, two talks that are fraternal. And I can tell you that the content just went like this. And the first time I’ve been asked to do it in a series is actually here.

7. 3:29

   So you are the Guinea pigs. And it’s really difficult to then come up with section titles. And I’ve already worked out because every time I come and do the session here, I’ve just had a practice with the youth. So you’re not quite the Guinea pigs. And I’ve already worked out that this section is now 2A and two BI don’t know what we’re going to do with the last session.

8. 3:50

   So we’re going to be having heaven and earth today and then God willing, heaven and earth tomorrow. And and the reason this is called heaven and earth is because this session is where I really want to try my hardest to, to demonstrate to you why I believe Genesis one verse one is describing the purpose of all creation and the pattern of all creation, the structural pattern of all creation.

9. 4:15

   That’s why we spent a lot of time yesterday. For those of you who were confused or who had your minds blown but talking about patterns, I really wanted you to understand a couple of key things. Just to remind you. First of all, there’s a relationship between purpose and patterns. If we have a purpose, we design A pattern to achieve that purpose. If we see a pattern, we know that patterns is pointing pattern, pattern is pointing towards a purpose. So there’s a relationship that’s very important there. And then secondly, I was trying to show you that through fractals, when we identify a pattern, we’re probably going to see it appearing over and over again at different scales all over the place as we see in nature. So we will see in Scripture.

10. 5:03

    And the proposal I want to make to you this morning is that the pattern of heaven and earth is the fundamental structural pattern of all reality, that once we understand it as best we can, we will see it playing out over and over again, Small, big, big, big in the Bible and in all the world around us.

11. 5:27

    So that is what we want to try and talk a bit about today. The pattern is heaven and earth. So I’m going to emphasize that when we read Genesis one verse one, it’s an interesting introduction because it immediately establishes something very important which runs throughout the rest of the Bible, And I’m sure you’ve noticed this.

12. 5:53

    The Bible is really a book about one and two, one and two. Essentially, we start with one. We are then presented with two that must become one again. So that’s why we read in the beginning God Elohim. We know that what the Old Testament is very, very the emphasis of the message of certainly the Torah is to say that that God is one God here, O Israel, the Lord your God is 1 Lord.

13. 6:28

    So it all begins with a unity and that’s why we sure that there’s a unity of purpose. There is God one. But then Genesis one verse 1 immediately tells us that there’s a duality that we will experience from this one, a reality that has two parts. You might not have thought of it like that. That’s that’s what should be catching our attention. And those two parts are heaven and earth. I use the word duality.

14. 7:02

    My wife says don’t use words you don’t need to use. So why don’t I say opposites? I could maybe say pears. It’s very important because we’re going to see throughout the rest of the Bible and you know, this is true. Many dualities. If you have a better word, please share it with me. They’re not necessarily two concepts that are opposite. Sometimes they are.

15. 7:21

    Mostly they are two concepts that are complementary. They appear to be opposite, but they are able to be reconciled. If you just think about Scripture right now, you should have hundreds of dualities going through your mind. What about mercy and truth as an example? And so we have here in Genesis one verse one, the first duality. We are told that we are to see creation, the reality of our world, our experience.

16. 7:54

    I’m going to use the word creation and reality interchangeably if you will. We are to see creation as consisting of a part called heaven and a part called earth. Now, that in itself is quite a statement to make because people who don’t have this book, the Bible, and they’re trying to make sense of the world, will typically see the world through the lens of what the Bible will talk about when it talks about earth. They will see the world through the lens of atoms and all of the molecular structure that makes up the material world that we live in.

17. 8:26

    Both the things that we can see in that material world because our eyes can’t see all of the things in the material world, and the things that we can’t see but are still a part of the material world. They won’t necessarily see or believe that there’s a whole nother part or dimension to reality which the Bible calls heaven and Genesis One is putting that thought through. For us as well.

18. 8:51

    Now, the other interesting thing is that the pattern that we are emphasizing is heaven and earth. And when we deep dive, because we haven’t started that Genesis one verse one in a few moments, we’re going to be really interested in all three of those words. You see, The thing is this. In Genesis one verse one, we have the idea that heaven and earth are created at the same time together for each other, at the same time together for each other.

19. 9:27

    Something went off the I noticed. They come back. I came back. Wow. OK, so they are together at the same time for each other. And so we have this idea that there is a pattern that is intended in creation, that heaven should be joined with earth, heaven and earth. So let’s think about it from a purpose point of view.

20. 9:55

    If this is the pattern of reality, obviously it is pointing towards the purpose of all creation. And so I’m going to put it to you that as I said, every one of these talks is simple and complicated, like fractals. So here’s the simple part. If you ever want to ask or anybody ever asks you what is the purpose of reality, why I’m not here? What is the purpose of all creation? You can say to them, for heaven to be joined with earth. There it is.

21. 10:24

    It’s a very, very simple answer. And we would expect, would we not? That if God was going to nail down his purpose, he would nail it down in the first sentence of the book that he had written for us. And I believe it’s there. In fact, not only has he nailed the purpose down, he’s nailed the whole gospel message down.

22. 10:43

    And we will see that reveal itself hopefully shortly. So it’s something for us to think about certainly as a community, because as a community, quite rightly, if I had to ask most of you what is the purpose of creation or what is the purpose of reality, we would definitely say something like this, that the earth should be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

23. 11:07

    I was taught that Numbers 1421, Habakkuk 2, verse 14. Good passage. Right on, Sir. We would also say something like Daniel two, that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth and full the whole earth. That’s the purpose of creation, right? Absolutely, but not necessarily the macrocosm pattern of it all. Because here we have the highest macrocosm that in fact it is the joining of heaven and earth that is the purpose of creation.

24. 11:44

    And, you know, I guess the emphasis as we as a community have made is quite correct because we find mainstream Christianity saying, well, actually, there’s no purpose with the earth. It’s all going to be about heaven. And we’re all going to go off in an abstract, ethereal way and be in heaven wherever that may be.

25. 12:02

    And that is where all of the purpose of creation and reality is. And so in a sense, our emphasis on the earth is, is a reaction, I guess to say, well, that’s clearly not right. But I think in some ways getting just the balance right by saying, yes, Isaiah 45, God did not create the earth in vain. There will be a Kingdom established in Israel. The promises will be fulfilled out of Jerusalem. But what’s going to happen here is that heaven is going to be joined with earth.

26. 12:32

    And of course, when we break out of linear thinking and we start having connected thinking, pattern based, fractal based thinking, now it starts to make sense. And now we know why the primary words that go with Kingdom are Kingdom of God mentioned 70 times, Kingdom of heaven mentioned 32 times. And in fact, Kingdom associated with earth is only mentioned 8 times right now.

27. 12:59

    We don’t need to grapple over that once we get our overall understanding correct. And this is the ultimate purpose, the joining of heaven and earth and Genesis one verse one is saying when you understand fully what heaven and earth is like, this is the. Reality of everything that God has planned, that all dualities, all pairs, all.

28. 13:22

    Opposites, when they are opposites, are going to be reconciled into one and just that expression of the pattern when you’re doing your Bible readings, you will see this idea coming up over and over again. So if what I’m saying doesn’t sort of resonate. With you, which is good because that mean means we can sort of be learning together.

29. 13:45

    Let me show you what I call the threefold chord. As the writer to the Ecclesiastes said, a threefold chord is not easily broken. So here are three passages that I think really hold together this as the purpose of creation. Genesis, one verse, one first verse. Here it is the beginning, the statement of purpose.

30. 14:06

    We’ve we’ve spoken about that. We go all the way then to the end of the book and we say what happens at the end of the book? This is the macrocosm of macrocosms. This is the pattern at the highest zoom level you can imagine. Revelation 21 Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth. He’s just lifting that purpose out of Genesis One. It is a new heaven and a new earth for the 1st heaven and the first earth has passed away.

31. 14:33

    Also, there was no more sea then I, John saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband. Oh wow, now we sing Genesis 1 fulfilled in a macrocosm, the Kingdom of God falling the earth, and it’s a marriage. It’s it’s, it’s God walking down with his bride, the new Jerusalem down the aisle with the bridegroom at the end and heaven and earth are touching each other. They are being met and unified together. And I always find that this third passage that, and there are many others like this, when you open your eyes to them is just so beautiful and pulling this idea of the purpose of all. Creation together Ephesians 110 by the way, it’s very easy to remember Genesis 21 one Revelation 21 one Ephesians 10/1 is kind of like a pattern there.

32. 15:31

    So here it is, Ephesians one verse nine. First of all, having made known to us the mystery of his. Will I just love passages like that? I always say to the young people, you know when God says for as truly as I live, when you hear God start start a verse like that, you’ve got to sit up what you’re about to say.

33. 15:47

    This is another one of those. Having made known to us the mystery of His will, so now we’re going to understand what’s the mystery of God’s will according to His good pleasure which He purposed in himself. We’re going to understand what His purpose is that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times in pattern, fractal technology or terminology, the big scale version of the pattern, He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth in him. There it is.

34. 16:27

    And what Ephesians one verse 10 is telling us is that beautiful piece of information that the duality is ultimately reconciled by the joining that God provides called Jesus Christ, the gospel in Genesis one verse one. Now I keep telling you that this is a pretty. Important verse with a pretty important pattern. Let me give you some facts, maybe to try and further convince you.

35. 16:58

    The words heaven and earth appear together in the same verse over 400 times in the Bible. I certainly didn’t know that a few years ago. That is the third highest pair of content words together in verses in the Bible. So if you’re sitting there, what’s the first, Matt? The 1st is Lord and God appearing together. The 2nd is God and Israel appearing together. The third is heaven and earth.

36. 17:29

    So here we have two words that appear together many, many times throughout the Scripture. That in itself should, should get our attention. They are the 2nd and 3rd nouns of the Bible. Heaven, earth, God is the first noun of the Bible. Heaven is the second, Earth is the third. The order is really interesting.

37. 17:50

    The order of the pattern is almost always heaven and earth in the almost 400 times that they appear together in the same verse. About 95% of the times heaven appears before earth. Of course, it’s a pattern. There’s some on the edge that are different. I’ll leave you if you’re interested to see what exciting surprises lie because of that. But the pattern is clear.

38. 18:15

    It starts from heaven and it moves to earth. The Third Point we’ve already emphasized is the pattern is 3 words, heaven and earth. So what we’re now going to do, finish the simple part. If that wasn’t simple, sorry, we’re now going to go and do a little bit more complexity. But what I want to try and do is to really open up your mind now to what might, what might the word of God be trying to get us to think about when we think about heaven?

39. 18:44

    When we think about Earth and when we think about the and and so we’re going to do a little bit more like deep dive stuff. Now I’m by no means a Hebrew scholar, so I’m going to say straight away every time I pronounce a Hebrew word it is using the Hebraic South African pronunciation dialect.

40. 19:04

    I’ve approved, it’s an approved dialect. So if you’ve studied Hebrew, ancient Hebrew, and you intend to come to me afterwards to correct me, you must check with my dialect first. I do the same when I’m in France because every time I try and pronounce French words like French people, they always correct me.

41. 19:20

    So I just go back to the straight, the way it looks, which upsets them. So when we look at this phrase heavens and earth in the Hebrew. We’re going to try and unpack it a bit. We’re going to do a bit of a deep dive here. You know, it’s, it’s quite interesting because Hebrew and we kind of, I don’t know if we got on to this, but but Hebrew itself is just such a beautiful language. When you think about multiple fulfillment of patterns, it’s because the language itself is a very poetic and symbolic language.

42. 19:51

    And you know, often when you might hear a speaker or presenter and he and he and he finds a Hebrew word and he says, oh, well, that word, it means that and that and that. And sometimes we think, oh, they’re stretching in a mid, but we need to understand that, that Hebrew is actually quite an abstract language. The words are dense.

43. 20:07

    And So what that means is they can have lots of meanings depending on the context. It’s the idea that they can. The word itself can actually have a number of meanings depending on context, and they all get joined together in one overall meaning. English is a much more precise language and as English has become more involved with the scientific sphere, every time we we, we need to express ourselves more, more sort of precisely, we invent a new word just to be a little bit more accurate. Hebrew doesn’t work like that.

44. 20:34

    So it’s quite important when you look at Hebrew to try and keep that kind of holistic, abstract view so that you can be looking out for the concept. The other thing is, and I was trying to emphasise this to the young people the other day. I mean, words are really important, but it’s what words convey that we’re really interested in.

45. 20:53

    We’re interested in the concept, we’re interested in the idea. The word is the symbol that’s capturing the idea or the concept. So we want to try and understand. What? Is the the concept and the idea of heaven? What is the concept and the idea of earth? And in order to do that, there’s at least 4 mechanisms that I think are valid to do that. There may be others and I’d love to hear from you, but four that I think are really useful, and I’m sure you’re very familiar with some.

46. 21:19

    So the first is yes, it’s very useful to go and have a look because we don’t speak Hebrew. When we we’ve got an English word, we go look at the original word. Very useful to go and say, well, you know, what does that word mean? As I’ve said, what other meanings might it have? How might those other meanings help me to have a fuller understanding of that word over and above what the English might portray to me?

47. 21:41

    In addition, because we’re trying to understand the concept better, it’s often very useful to to look at the etymology of a word. Again, this I might get sort of feedback from my wife. Why are you using the word etymology? But you guys are all clever. Anybody not know what etymology is, raise your hand.

48. 21:59

    You see, nobody. Oh, there’s always. One in the audience. Of course. You all know that etymology is looking at the origin of words, how the word came to be, because when we look at the origin of a word, we can understand it sort of a bit more. The idea behind the word. There’s some beautiful examples of that in English. So for example, the word sympathy, we use that word often when somebody has a tragedy, we send them a sympathy card, right?

49. 22:26

    And that word, the origin of that word, when you go back and look at the old English words, 22 English words, the one word meaning sym, sym, from where we get like words like symbiotic, to, to, to, to, to, to, to be with, Symphony, to be with. And then the second part, PATHY. Pathy, which actually comes from the original English word passion, from where we get the passion of Christ, from where we get the idea of suffering.

50. 22:58

    So now we know that the English word has to do with the idea of being with somebody in their suffering. So we send them a sympathy card to say that we are with you in your suffering. That’s where the word compassion comes from. And that’s originally why people said that person is pathetic. You see how we destroy our words? We say someone’s pathetic today.

51. 23:18

    That’s not a very nice thing. But normally it would mean that that person’s going through some suffering. There’s an etymology lesson. So when we look at Hebrew words, it’s really helpful to look at the etymology to understand where the concept better. So that’s a second or a part of the first tool. And then of course, something we we know that we all do, we look to see how that word is used in the Bible. Look at the cross references.

52. 23:39

    Let’s have a look to see what. What ideas we get from that concept as it’s used throughout the word of God, which is a very, very powerful tool and very important. The third tool is something that that’s an extension of the second tool. But it’s harder for us to do this because in reality, the way language works is that words are actually, they don’t stand alone.

53. 24:03

    They’re like like planetary systems. And they have word associations with the words that are very, very closely connected to them. And to understand a concept as broadly as you, as you as you could possibly, it’s important to understand all the words, if you can, that are associated with that word or that concept. We call that word associations.

54. 24:22

    You know, there’s good news now. I mean, many of you have used that tool. You may not know that you’ve done it in the Boss, but there’s really good tools available for those who enjoy studying the Bible to to actually fast track. Looking at concepts in the Bible through word association and we can talk more about that maybe if I remember a bit later on.

55. 24:38

    And then I also believe something that we often miss doing is that if we’re trying to understand a concept that we’ve found in the Word of God, we also do well to actually just think about that concept on earth in terms of. What we see, especially if it’s a concept that is like a table or some object that we can actually physically interact with and see that we can learn about that idea from natural observation. So there we have it, four ways to understand a concept more broadly.

56. 25:09

    So let’s take that and let’s put it into practice. The heavens and the earth. So here it is. The first verse of the Bible goes Bereshit Bara Elohim ET Hamashaim Shah mayim vayat ha arets. That’s the South African Hebrew dialect. If you want to learn one verse in Hebrew, which is always impressive to at least know one verse in Hebrew, easiest verse to learn could be easier ones that are shorter, but that’s 7 words in Hebrew. So we’re going to concentrate on the three words that I’ve got up here.

57. 25:42

    I’ve got more than three, but don’t worry about the ET ha Shah mayim vayat ha arets, which is translated in our English Bibles. The heavens and the earth. So let’s start with heaven, and there we have the word ha. Shamayim, which appears 420 times in the Old Testament. So it is a word that appears many times in the Old Testament.

58. 26:08

    The ha. For those of you who, who, who, who are aware of Hebrew, the ha is essentially in Hebrew the the equivalent of the definite article in English. The So actually the word for heaven is shamayim. And the word for earth is arets, because the heart is just a definite article. So those are the two words we’re focusing on now. It’s pretty obvious, but you may not have thought it’s obvious there because these are like the second and third noun in the Bible.

59. 26:36

    They are both root words, so we like dealing with root words. We don’t have other Hebrew words that they’ve come out of. They are root. Words and as a result, actually when you go to Strong’s Concordance and Thaeus Lexicon and other places, you’re going to find that the, the definition of the words are quite broadly spoken.

60. 26:55

    And, and it’s quite difficult to sort of get, especially when it comes to the word shamayim. But generally speaking, the Hebrew scholars will tell you that the word shamayim means lofty, high or over there. That’s an interesting starting point. So we’ve got this first part of the duality that is described as something that’s lofty and something that’s over there, like not here, but over there.

61. 27:26

    So that’s a, a starting point from which we can build out this concept. Interestingly, you may, if you’re really astute, you may remember that at the end of Ezekiel, like when you have the vision of Revelation 21, and of course it is Revelation 21 and 22 is Ezekiel 464748 like the the final coming together, the marriage supper of the Lamb, all of it’s happening and you get to the last verse of Ezekiel and he’s showing you the whole land that’s been filled with heaven, been filled with God. You eventually come to the city and it says this is Yahweh Shama.

62. 28:05

    The Lord is. There. Yeah, right here in the middle of it all. So there is the idea of where the word shamayim comes from. So from an etymology point of view, it’s quite interesting. There’s a bit of debate here because as I say, it is a root word on its own. So it’s really people saying, well, sounds like could be. And there’s really two sort of, I think, complimentary answers that come from the Hebrew scholars, and they’re both quite interesting to think about.

63. 28:34

    The 1st is that the essence of the word originates from the idea of water. A bit later on in Genesis, we’re going to read about the water, and the word for water is mayim. So some Hebrew scholars say Shah mayim is really referring to like a plural of water, and that’s why in fact, it’s translated to heavens. And so there’s this idea that heaven is in a sense like understood as the waters.

64. 29:01

    Now you might say, well, how does that work with this concept? Well. Let me work it through with you. So it’s this idea that heaven is not, not the place that we are comfortable. It’s it’s not the place that we understand. It’s, it’s, it’s a place over there. It’s lofty and it’s not our place as such.

65. 29:20

    All right. And we know that because we prefer like Terra Firma, all right, Some of us can go and swim for a while, but we need to get out after a while because it’s not the place we can breathe and survive it. So there’s one idea, the the rabbinical sort of tradition is in fact that shamayim comes from 2 words, mayim and ETS.

66. 29:41

    Mayim is the word for water, as I’ve just said. And ETS is the word for fire. And so they have this lovely idea that that heaven, heaven has this, this, this is named after the fact that that heaven is the place from which the water comes and from which the fire comes. So of course that’s true. That’s where the rain comes and that’s where the sun comes and the lightning comes from.

67. 30:07

    And the rabbinical tradition says this is teaching, and this is a very important underlying concept, that heaven is both a provider and a refiner. Because the thing that water and fire both have in common is we need them to provide for us so that we can live without water. As we’re learning very quickly here at Outer World, we’re just going to crawl up in a heap and die. And without fire we can’t warm ourselves in the winter and we can’t cook any food, etcetera, etcetera. But at the same time, water can come as a flood and completely flush us and clean us and refine us and we use it to wash ourselves and to clean ourselves. And fire is also used to destroy and to refine. So really interesting idea there. This is the place that both provides and refines. What is the direct usage?

68. 31:03

    How is heaven used in direct usage throughout the Bible? Well, again, because of time, I’m going to ask you just to, to stick with me and, and, and, and believe in me. But there’s a whole bunch of information I can share with those who are interested. Perhaps the one verse that we could turn up is, if you’ve got your Bibles open, Psalm 115, because this is a verse that just establishes something I think you know. But let’s go and see it in the Bible. A very, very clear distinction in terms of Bible usage between heaven and earth.

69. 31:33

    And we cover both here. So we get 2 for the price of 1. Psalm 115 and verse 16. So it says the highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to mankind. So there is probably the simplest example in terms of Bible usage of heaven being the realm or the place which belongs to God, and earth being the realm or the place which belongs to man. All right, so there we have it.

70. 32:14

    In, in, in Psalm 115, there are many, many other passages that support that Psalm two, he who sits in the heavens shall laugh. Genesis 28, the letter that goes up to God at the gate of heaven, which is then called God’s house. So plenty of examples showing that word associations. Well, this is where it gets really interesting if we take the word heaven. What are always the associated concepts that that are linked to the concept of heaven?

71. 32:49

    Well, we already established the one very clearly from direct Bible usage. And some of these we can also show you in direct Bible verses. But for now, I’ll just ask you to just think about all of these as being concepts that are directly associated with heaven. So when you think about heaven as abstractly as you can, you could see it in represented in each of these individual concepts or ideas.

72. 33:11

    God, spirit, lot, word, purpose, meaning, seed, authority, identity, name, and we could go on. And once you get the hang of it, you’ll probably be able to add other words, but those are some of the words that appear. When we do word association, so you might ask what do I mean by word association? Well, one of the tools that we have today, which is really amazing is large language models. And what we can do is we can say I want to know. In the Bible, I want to know for this word what other keywords appear with an X number.

73. 33:48

    Of words of that word. All right, And we can build word clouds. I’m sure you’ve all come across word clouds and we can begin to identify words that are associated with the word that we interested in. Now, as I said, you’ve been doing it before, but it’s pretty much the hard way because what happens, we’re doing our reading and we keep seeing. Hey, I keep.

74. 34:05

    Seeing the word light linked to the word heaven. And then we do a concordance search and we find all the times that light appears with heaven. Well this is a shortcut to find the other ones you didn’t notice. So there we have a whole list of word associations with heaven. And then of course, if we’re looking to understand heaven from a natural point of view, what are the things that we might think of? We might go outside, we look up, that’s where we think. That’s where we perceive heaven to be in the natural context. It’s above, it’s infinite, it speaks of Infinity because we just look.

75. 34:32

    When you look out at the stars at night, you just feel this, this timelessness, this idea of time. And of course, we often associate the colour blue. So that, I hope, has broadened out your perspective of heaven. Now let’s move over to Earth. You’ll be happy to know a lot quicker because we can establish these concepts pretty quickly.

76. 34:54

    The Earth, the word arets or arets. Appears 2500 times in the Old Testament, so lots of references and essentially it means like what you think it means. But I want to emphasise more that when you think about it. So of course it means earth and it means land and it means soil. And when we get to the etymology of the word, until we try and understand what’s lying behind the word, we start to see concepts like concrete, material, substantial.

77. 35:27

    All right. So now we’re beginning to see that this is the term that is used to describe the material world, the world of the atoms and the molecules. And heaven is over there. It’s not a part. Of that world. We we often get confused because in some sense we think that heaven is just some other part of the material realm that we haven’t yet got to.

78. 35:50

    But if we get an Elon Musk spaceship to fly fast enough, we’ll get. There. That’s an incorrect view from the biblical understanding. How is it used in direct usage? Well, we’ve already seen it’s man’s dwelling. It’s often used to refer specifically to dry land as opposed to the sea dry land. And often it’s used to refer to Israel, to the promised land Arets. In fact, a number of the Jewish sort of traditional songs, if you know your Jewish songs, actually use the word arets or however they would pronounce it in their dialect in in their songs.

79. 36:25

    What are the word associations? What do we then link to the idea of? Earth. Well, man, of course. Flesh, dark fruit, body, expression, family. So we’re starting to see that it’s not quite as simple as saying the one is good and the other is evil. No, no, no, no, it’s not quite that the one is the opposite of the other.

80. 36:51

    We can see that in some respects the associations are opposite, but in some we can immediately see there’s something else going on here. And we have this idea that we’re going to be emphasizing over and over again of this vitally important relationship between heaven and earth, where heaven is providing purpose and meaning, an identity to the potential of earth. Think of it from the creation record. You’ve got an earth that’s dark and covered in water. It’s chaotic, there’s no order, it looks like it’s useless. And then there is the word from heaven. There is the idea, there is the meaning, and it is first expressed and let there be light. And then it’s expressed and let the waters be divided and the earth comes out and now it has potential. And now we can, we can understand because the earth is now moving towards purpose.

81. 37:47

    But at the same time, what is happening is that the earth is expressing the idea of the heaven. And this is a really important concept because many spiritual ideas are incredibly dense. They, they are, are, are are compact ideas that we can only truly understand or even more importantly, experience. When they are materialised, when to use our community’s language, they are manifested.

82. 38:21

    That’s when we begin to truly experience heaven. And maybe an easy way of me explaining this is think of a seed and a tree or a flower or a plant. Think of the seed as representing the potential, the word, the idea. And you can look at a seed and as much as you stare at that seed, inside it is this compact information. The scientists have now told us there’s Adna programme inside that.

83. 38:50

    Seed there’s there’s a. Programme of words and that’s inside that seed and as much as we know all of that’s there, we can’t truly appreciate it until, as Jesus said, we planted into the ground, into the potential of the. Earth. And it becomes a mustard tree, and we see the mustard tree and suddenly we gain an understanding and an experience of that.

84. 39:14

    Seed. God is love. One of the greatest spiritual principles and heavenly ideas. And when love is experienced between each other in, in in a husband and wife relationship, in a brother and sister relationship, then we can truly begin to understand what and experience what love is. So that’s really this important association between heaven and earth that is being taught for us right in the beginning. We have one word.

85. 39:47

    Well, let me just show you now this is really important because we’re going to draw on this in in 2B. We can see here how now these associations, we’ve really now expanded our understanding of heaven, earth. So we’ve got. God and man above, below, light, dark, word, body, spiritual, natural, inform, express, meaning, matter, seed, fruit, authority, power, name, family and I could go on and it takes a while, but I’d ask you to come on the journey. Keep keep practicing it and you will start seeing the amplification of the pattern of heaven and earth playing out over and over again.

86. 40:32

    It’s it’s it’s. Describing every duality, every single duality that you’re going to encounter both in the Word of God and in your life. And the pattern is this, when they are joined correctly, when heaven is joined with earth by Heaven’s provision, there is fruitfulness, there is blessing, and there is abundance. And when they are disconnected, when they are attempted to be joined by man’s provision, there is destruction, there is cursing, there is sin.

87. 41:09

    That is the message of the Bible. So it’s very important that we finish with one last word. The word in our English Bible is the word, and in the Hebrew you would have noticed. I don’t think my pointer works out. Maybe it does. It is there via ET VA ET. The word and throughout the Hebrew Bible is actually a letter, kind of like we have a word that’s a letter, like the word I.

88. 41:41

    It’s both a letter in the English alphabet, but it’s also a word. The same is true in the Hebrew. It is the letter vav, which by the way, is the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet. That’s one worth chewing on for a long time. You could go down a couple of rabbit holes with that one. It’s a 6th.

89. 41:57

    Letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and typically in Hebrew. Almost always, not always, it appears attached to a word that it is using, that it is intended to join to another word. So it, it doesn’t often appear on its own all right, but it is the joining word of the Hebrew Bible, Vav. So if anybody had to say to you, what is the joining word of the Hebrew Bible, it is the letter vav.

90. 42:24

    And here’s the thing, it appears over 50,000 times. You know, I was reading some rabbinical writings and they said, you know, this is the most mysterious letter and word of the Bible because it is everywhere, this tiny little letter. And, you know, almost every version, in fact, every English version of the Bible, the the translators actually cannot begin to translate every occurrence that they see of the vav as a conjunction because English just doesn’t work with that many conjunctions.

91. 42:58

    English actually is a language that likes to use pretty concise sentences. One thought, one thought, one thought. And you know, if you talk to write academic articles, stop using the ands. Any of you heard that? Or if you’re writing a history essay, Hebrew doesn’t work like that in the base of the Hebrew language is these conjunctions. It’s like it’s like God’s built into his book. The and the join, the join the join and we don’t even know how to begin to translate it.

92. 43:24

    So there it is. It’s in this little letter valve, the 6th Hebrew letter. The meaning of the of the letter or the word it does appear as a word we’ll talk about in a moment is and join then. Etymology, Well, it’s one letter. We really can’t go any further back in terms of that letter. But what we can do, because when you eventually get to Hebrew letters, all you’ve got left, if you want to try and understand a bit about the letter is to look at how the letter eventually got in terms of its shape.

93. 43:53

    All right, the shapes, I’m sure some of you have looked at that. So when we look at the shape of the letter vav and we look at that and of course you can all see we see a nail, we see a hook, we see something that is used for joining. And so that is why it became the word in Hebrew for and the word for joining, the word for bringing things together.

94. 44:19

    And interestingly enough, it appears three or four times as a word on its own, not attached to another like we have over here where it’s attached to the word ET in the in Genesis one, verse one and in that occasion. I’ve got the reference for those who are interested. It’s in Exodus 26 and it is the record of the Tabernacle for the joining of the curtains.

95. 44:48

    And the curtains are all joined with clasps and they’re all joined with these hooks. And that is the, the one time that the word vav just stands on its own as a word. And it’s pretty interesting because when the, the Hebrew scholars used to write out the, the, the Torah, the Old Testament, first five books of the Old Testament, the Torah, and they would be right and they get to the end of every line.

96. 45:13

    They would put a vav at the end of the line to say this line is joining with this line. And the, the tradition was that all of the lines are the curtains of the word of God that are joined together with the vow. Very interesting idea. Another little interesting thing about vow before we bring it to conclusion is of course it has this. Well, not.

97. 45:34

    Of course. It has this very interesting ability, when used again as a prefix to other words to a verb, to change the verb from the past tense to the future, or from the future to the past. Word associations. Well, one of the words that jumps out at us when we look at the word or the letter vav is in fact the name of God.

98. 45:59

    It’s often referred to as the joining letter in the name of God, Yahweh yud hai vav hai. We talk about the two hais in the name of God, the two breaths in the name of God, the breathe in and the breathe out Hai Vav. Hey, well, you don’t need me to bring this home for you, because I’m sure you can see that he who is the nail, he who is the one who joins all things is indeed our Lord Jesus Christ. In Colossians it says for in him, in Jesus, all things were created.

99. 46:38

    Genesis one verse one things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether Thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, All things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him. All things hold together, the great joining word of all, the Bible, the Lord Jesus Christ. I submit to you that Genesis chapter one verse one is the purpose of all creation.

100. 47:12

     It is the pattern of all creation, and it is the Gospel.