Getting In Sync
Our focus for last week was on “the heart felt promise” beginning with Abram’s desire to know what he believed in his heart. God invited Abram to hold confidence in what he believed through a covenant that was given with the same dynamics of darkness, fire, and sacrifice that carried through to Mount Sinai and found full expression at the Cross. We also saw that the Lord did not desire offerings from man but delighted to give us knowledge of His ways through them. Our week ended with the discovery that even though God provided a hands-on way for His people to understand the nature of atonement, their felt sense of reality was different from the unchanging truth of our cleanness in His sight.
This contrast between the soul’s need for regular assurance and the eternal truth we believe in Spirit is profound. On the one hand is a continual awareness of sin and guilt; on the other hand is a rest of soul where worshippers “once cleansed no longer feel guilty for their sins.” (Hebrews 10:2)
To rely on the tangible is to be holding on to a fading glory and to offerings that are on the verge of death; whereas to receive by faith is to touch in Spirit the flow of ever increasing in glory and to life that has conquered death. This means that the difference between clinging to tangible experience for a sense of reality versus believing what cannot be seen or felt is in fact a matter of life or death. The Lord desires to bring us into life: out of the place of relying on feeling and into the realm of faith.
At the same time, He loves our souls and made us to experience and enjoy the world with our senses: through what we taste, see, hear, touch, and feel. Jesus came to experience all of the depths of soul as man, to touch and be touched, weep, hunger, thirst, and know not only how we were made, but how we feel also. This is why, when He was on earth, Jesus gave His disciples the same word that was spoken when Abram needed concrete understanding: “Take…” (Genesis 15:9; Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22)
Jesus invites us now to take and eat His body that was broken; to drink His blood that was poured out for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26:28; Luke 22:20) Here is the key: we are not taking a sacrifice that will have to be slaughtered in order for us to be in covenant; we take His body and blood in remembrance that it is done and we already are in covenant. (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24-25) Here we see that the tangible is no longer needed to guarantee that we will possess what God has given; instead, it serves as a reminder of what we already have by faith.
This was the promise that God gave to Abram: to bring us, the future generations of his family, back to the inheritance that was received by simply believing: a place called Canaan.
The word Canaan in Hebrew comes from the verb “kana” meaning “to be brought into synchronicity” or “come into unity.” While Canaan is an actual place geographically, it is also a way of living by faith: in sync, in agreement, and in oneness with God. What we are about to begin is a rich exploration of the ways that the Lord prepares His people to enter the Promised Land by teaching us to discern our experience of the tangible things in alignment with the truth of His Word. This is an epic journey of the soul worked out through Israel’s Exodus, and it is our theme for the week: Toward Canaan.
