From the Desk of Cheryl Hauer
I was reading Genesis Chapter 12 the other day and was reminded of a teaching I have done in the past. I called it God’s Circle (or Cycle) of Blessing. You know, there are Christians who arrogantly condemn those who bless Israel “just to receive a blessing themselves.” But that was clearly God’s idea, not theirs, and it’s the way he first introduced the nations to their unique opportunity to find favor with him. You bless Israel, God says, and I will bless you. Full stop. But then, Israel will be blessed so that they can bless the nations, and because of your obedience, I will bless you so that you can bless Israel so that …
You get the picture. It is a beautiful sequence of giving, bursting with God’s love for Israel and for the nations. And it’s a cycle, according to Webster, a series of events that are regularly repeated in the same order.
And it seems pretty clear that it is supposed to begin with us, those who are technically outside the commonwealth of Israel, but who love the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and take his word seriously.
But as I thought about it, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea of cycles … in the Torah, in creation, in my life. Everything that makes our world livable, our lives sustainable, and that makes us who we are is cyclical. The rain falls and fills the oceans; the sun shines so that the water evaporates and returns to the heavens so the rain can fall and fill the oceans. Think about it. The earth revolving around the sun, bringing the seasons of planting, growth, and then harvest so that it can all begin again. The cycles of the moon and the ocean tides. And our bodies exist only because of a myriad of cycles happening constantly and without fail. Our hearts, our lungs, our digestive systems … like a fine-tuned life-sustaining engine.
God created Adam and placed him in a world already fashioned specifically for him with all its systems and cycles already in place. It wasn’t a foreign, unfriendly world in which Adam would have to fight for his existence. It was home wherein everything that surrounded him reminded him of the faithfulness of God. The only cycle that Adam didn’t know was that of life and death. He was not created to die but to live forever in the presence of the Lord.
When Adam and Eve sinned, they stepped out of eternity and into a temporal world that was not the welcoming home they had known. It was a place marred by sin and death. But all of those cycles remained, all of creation retelling Adam every moment that even after his sin, God was with him, his faithful God who would never leave him or forsake him. Every sunrise, every breath of fresh air, every child he held in his arms reminded him of God’s love. The cycle of life and death was engraved in every strata of his reality, but with that came a promise, creation’s crowning touch: rebirth and the destruction of death.
And so, we live in Adam’s temporal world where that promise has been realized, and even in the midst of sin and death, we can honestly say in Him we live and move and have our being. Every minute detail of creation reminds us of the God who loves us. He is not capricious, he doesn’t change, this is all a demonstration of his faithfulness. So why do we doubt Him? We don’t doubt that seeds will sprout, that babies will turn into adults, or Passover will come in the spring and Christmas in December.
With every sunrise, every morning that progresses into evening that brings night so that morning can come again … with every tiny budding leaf in spring that blazes red in the fall and then floats to the ground to make room for the next one that will burst forth when spring comes again … with every breath, we inhale oxygen that nourishes our bodies and sustains our lives and then exhale carbon dioxide so that we can repeat the event “regularly and in the same order” … 7.5 million times per year!
And as I pondered all this, I really heard the Lord say, “So just look around you and see the world as I do. Look out your window at the sky, the leaves, the snow; look into the eyes of a loved one; take a deep breath and hear me say, ‘I am here.’”
Blessings and Shalom,
Issachar Community