Hi all,
In Genesis 1:14 God made the lights (stars and planets) to shine through the water atmosphere of the earth saying, “Let them be for signs, for seasons, for days, for years…to give light upon the earth (v15)…and it was so.”
This was not the creation of light, which was described in 1:3 in the famous words ‘Let there be light’, or more literally, ‘Light. Be.’
The light of Genesis 1:14 is the recognition that physical light is God’s creation made to serve Him and His purposes, and is therefore now ordered to provide such to the planet and its inhabitants. It is within these boundaries man’s life exists, and within which He asks us to walk with Him.
But I live in minutes and seconds!
God moves in signs, seasons, days, years. The trouble is, we live in minutes and seconds. We get upset if a 2 hour high definition movie takes longer than mere seconds to load onto our electronic device. We cook food by microwave in minutes. If we are in a drive-through lane at a fast food restaurant more than 3 or 4 minutes we get agitated and wonder what is taking so long with the car in front of us. We wonder as we sit at a red light with no traffic around if we should run it, or wait for it to turn green. We expect life to move in seconds, and we therefore expect God to do the same as we try to make Him into our image, rather than us into His.
But He isn’t moving. He moves in signs, seasons, days and years. Period. Get used to it. With Him, slow down. Waaaayyyyy down. Learn to meet Him in His seasons of your life. Pursue the seasons of God in your life. (My book which details some of the early visitations with the Lord and my angel is called, Pursuing the Seasons of God). If you want to walk with Him, learn to appreciate a slower pace, develop your own culture of solitude as Abraham did when he stood under the stars at night contemplating the things of God and communing with Him. The Father isn’t into performance based faith, He is into the process within the relationship.
The season of spring in the northern hemisphere looks like winter when it starts. But soon things begin to come alive, plants green, flowers bloom, and the end of spring looks almost like summer – like baby summer. The end of the spring looks very different from the start. Such is our seasons of life in Christ. More on this later…
How then do we then, who live in a world that runs faster than God, walk with Him? How do we live in the physical world by minutes and seconds while within us He is moving in signs, seasons, days and years? Externally we live in minutes and seconds. Christ in us moves in signs, seasons, days, and years.
What those Hebrew words of Genesis 1:14 mean
The word ‘sign’ is ‘oth’ in Hebrew, and is used when God puts a ‘mark’ (sign) on Cain in 4:15, and is used of the rainbow as a ‘token’ (sign) in 9:12. One meaning would be the constellations, the zodiac – the original meaning of the 12 signs shows the story of Messiah and redemption on the earth. (I have a cd/mp3 series on this subject if interested), but if you go back to the original star names and constellations, you’ll find the zodiac starts with Virgo the virgin giving birth to a son, all the way to Gemini, originally a bride and groom not twins (twisted by the Greeks), to the outpouring of the water of the Spirit in Aquarius to the return of Christ and destruction of Draco the Dragon. As the Rabbi’s teach, Adam, Seth, and Enoch had perfect knowledge of the world and understood how it all worked.
Another application of ‘sign’ is that most basic; a marker for longer periods of time – era, epoch, age. These are the longer stretches of time, sum totals of many years, which gives us understanding that in God’s mind, there are larger divisions of how He deals with man. This is confirmed in Ephesians 2:7 where we are told the Father God will “in the ages to come He will continue to show the incomparable riches of His grace, in HIs kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.” The ages to come. Signs.
Spiritually these larger ages of our short lives might be compared to the maybe 20 years a parent has with children in the home. It may be the celebration of a 50th wedding anniversary or the retiring of a faithful employee after 20, 30, or 40 years of employment at a company.
A smaller unit of measuring time is ‘seasons’, and many seasons may make a ‘sign’ or age. Seasons here is both literally the seasons of the year, and therefore seasons in our own lives – the length of time a child is in diapers, the time where we are led to a particular church and then God moves us on, the season where God deals with us about a particular issue, and then He moves on to deal with us in another area. Interestingly, as we’ve all experienced, Satan (that infamous counterfeiter of the genuine) also tests us in seasons of time before backing off for a more opportune time. As seen in Luke 4:13 with the temptation of Jesus: “And when the devil had finished all his temptations, he left Him for a season.”
It is interesting to note that next God mentions ‘days and years’. Not years and days, continuing the flow from larger spans of time to shorter, but rather grouping ‘days and years’ together, with emphasis on ‘days’. Of course many days comprise a year, but by mentioning days first, it shows us God is emphasizing each day in our life as a focus point.
The scriptures are full of references to making this day, this morning, count for the Lord. As a time to spend with Him, as a time understood as if each day is a bowl that can contain only a certain amount of trouble and worry, for tomorrow a new bowl is before us. Jesus said ‘each day has enough evil of its own’ in Matthew 6:34 in His exhortation to deal with today while it is day – tomorrow will come soon enough.
In the midst of his funeral dirge and mourning for the now destroyed city of Jerusalem and the carrying away of many captives to Babylon, Jeremiah yet said through his tears: “This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul; therefore will I hope in Him.” Lamentations 3:21-24
We need to recognize each age, each season, each day and year spiritually, in our lives, and find God within. Each marker of time has a purpose…but to learn how to find that purpose we have to understand this: Before you were born again, you set your own seasons, but now we submit our seasons to Him. As Shakespeare said, ‘therein lies the rub’ (Hamlet). We want to govern our seasons, but so does God…
And we’ll pick it up there next week, until then, blessings!
John Fenn
