Whenever we sit with our Bibles and consider scripture we must at some point come to the conclusion that some words used are foreign to our understanding with the natural mind. It is a given that we need the inspiration (the breathing in) of the Holy Spirit to help us reach for the Lord's meaning for today. And He will reveal more and more as we mature in our faith. It is a walk after all and we do not reach our destination instantaneously.

Sir Christopher Wren is reputed to have said that his design for St Paul's Cathedral in London was 'awful, amusing and artificial'. You would think that he thought poorly of it, but if we used more present-day words, we would say something like 'awe-inspiring, thought-provoking and beautifully done'. 'Awful' meant full of awe; 'amusing' described how it would engage our attention and hopefully be pleasing, and 'artificial' came from the word 'artifice' meaning clever or ingenious. We sometimes forget that The Bible was originally set down in a language not our own; one that was described as 'word poor', in that one word had many meanings or inflections.

In the Exodus verse above, The Lord urges Moses to consider His covenant after the purpose and character of these words. In other words, "Do you understand what I am saying, Moses?" So when we read the Genesis we see what Joseph's brothers wanted to know. They were making a distinction between dominion and reign. Now both dominion and reign can be and sometimes are replaced by the word 'rule'. So what is the distinction?

To reign has the additional sense of to counsel, to advise and consider, rather than the mere exercise of power. In essence, Joseph's brothers are asking "Are you going to rule with fairness and justice, seeking the best for your people, or are you going to be a tyrant?".

We must always remember that Jesus disappointed His disciples at the end. He was to be King of Kings. For Jesus, 'reigning' seemed to be 'despised of men'; they had yet to realise that His kingdom was turning the world upside down so that we could all be 'rightly related to God'.

What an amazing and wonderful thing it is that we have a Heavenly Father, who seeks no dominion over us, but gives us free will to come to Him or not, just as we choose; but if we choose Him now and every now, He invites us to grow in faith, hope and love until we are ready to rule and reign with His son. Our God reigns!

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. [Revelation 20:6 AV]
And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever. [Revelation 22:5 AV]

I will love You, O Lord, my strength.
The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer;
My God, my strength, in whom I will trust;
My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.
I will call upon the Lord, who is worthy to be praised;
So shall I be saved from my enemies.
[Psalm 18:1-3 NKJV]

In these unsettling days, we have a tremendous assurance of The Lord's covering hand on us, and the peace that comes from His strength encourages us to trust Him, not just in the present trial, but in all things. We have experienced His love, and we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. [Romans 8:28 NKJV].

Our God is the only one we can trust. He is unfailing and unchanging. The natural life teaches us to distrust. People let us down, or simply stop short of our expectations. The reality of this is that our focus is on ourselves - what we want - instead of looking to Our Saviour and what He wants. He wants us daily to repent - to turn ourselves around - our gaze on Him, not on ourselves. Looking to Him, we can accomplish great things, in His strength; things we would never countenance in our own.

It puts in mind a poem, written by Leo Marx, Code Poem For The French Resistance. It was used in the film Carve Her Name With Pride, which told the true story of Violette Szabo, shot by the Nazi's as a spy. Violette was played in the film by Virginia McKenna, for whom the poem became a personal favourite. The poem reads as a message of love and faith, both essentials for trust.

The beauty of this poem - as indeed of all great art - is the multi-layers of meaning that can be discerned. It was devised as a code, although what that code was is unclear, but these verses have consistently meant a lot to many people and in many different ways.

Lord, help me to trust in you - and to nurture that trust that I may find 'the peace of my years'. In deed and in truth, 'all that I have is the life that I have' and my life was bought at such a price by You, Lord. Direct my ways to be Yours, and Yours, and Yours.

For the last three days I have had today's title running around in my head trying to find a home. I knew that the Lord was speaking - distilling some things together - but it proved to be an elusive message. Until this morning.

I went to bed last night trying to 'search it out' [1], and was given a vivid and strange non-sensical dream, in which I was wading into water trying to drag a cluster of eider ducks to shore when they plainly wanted to stay where they were, as well as explaining the Scripture below to our son, Marc.

If we spend our days living in what happened yesterday and fretting over what might occur tomorrow, then we do not have our all concentrated on Him today. Run the race with Him as your pacemaker; one day at a time ...

There is a time to every purpose under the heaven, said in Ecclesiastes 3:1 and our verse in Isaiah 60 I, The Lord will hasten it in its time, makes it clear that the time for anything is His time, not ours. Indeed, God says we do not understand the time we are in ...

We may think we see the end from the beginning, but if we act as though that end had already happened, we fall out of step with God. He wants us to be where He has us - now!

We have been told by the politicians that we know this pandemic we are going through will end at some point - possibly in three months, six months, and now probably fourteen months time. The fact is that no one can tell. Viruses do not just go away - they must be eradicated. The Lord seems to be telling us that the pestilence will be overcome, but in His time, not ours. He is teaching us to hear and obey His word, and to draw patience (longsuffering in AKJV) from His Holy Spirit.

But, beloved, do not forget this one thing, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. 
The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. 
Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat? 
Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.
Therefore, beloved, looking forward to these things, be diligent to be found by Him in peace, without spot and blameless; and consider that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation—as also our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given to him, has written to you, [2 Peter 3:8-15 NKJV]

O LORD our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! who hast set thy glory above the heavens.
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? [Psalm 8:1-4 AV]

The King, Belshazzar, saw the fingers of a man's hand write on the wall* and he was greatly troubled by the message from God - he could not interpret it  - and called on all his astrologers, soothsayers and wise men to find the meaning of the heavenly writing, but they too failed to find the answer. They could not understand what God was pointing at. Only Daniel ('in whom is the spirit of the holy gods') could give the understanding.

It is always the case that only those that have eyes to see and ears to hear will understand the works of God; will see what the finger of God is writing in their hearts. The Hebrew word for 'finger' means to seize or grasp. It is an active word. We cannot grip without fingers - either physical or spiritual ones - and when The Lord wants us to grab hold of something that He is saying to us, He uses the finger of His Holy Spirit to point us in the right direction, be it a verse of scripture, a word spoken by a friend, or a thought placed in our minds.

Now a similar word, but from the same root word as 'finger', means 'diverse colours'; used for Joseph's coat of 'many colours'. Colour has great spiritual significance in Scripture - too much to go into detail here - but for me as a painter in watercolour, I know that my colour is a pigment suspended in water, properly a 'colloid' - a cloud of colour held in place by the action of water molecules on the particles of pigment. In the science class at school, this 'Brownian Motion' could be observed through the use of a thing called a 'Wilson Cloud Chamber'* This device allows us to understand what is happening through the action of light shining through a cloud.

God's fingers bring the light of understanding to His people. He shines the clear pure light of The Holy Spirit through the clouds in our minds, so that we 'see the light' ...

... and when white light is shone through a prism, it splits into many colours - or to turn it around - many colours make up one pure light. To me this speaks of the many attributes of God in one; that He is The great God above all gods.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. 
All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. This man came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world. [John 1:1-9 NKJV]

  * Note that the fingers wrote over against the candlestick, the source of light.

** Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869–1959), a Scottish physicist, is credited with inventing the cloud chamber. Inspired by sightings of the Brocken spectre while working on the summit of Ben Nevis in 1894, he began to develop expansion chambers for studying cloud formation and optical phenomena in moist air. Very rapidly he discovered that ions could act as centres for water droplet formation in such chambers. He pursued the application of this discovery and perfected the first cloud chamber in 1911.
In Wilson's original chamber the air inside the sealed device was saturated with water vapour, then a diaphragm was used to expand the air inside the chamber (adiabatic expansion), cooling the air and starting to condense water vapour. Hence the name expansion cloud chamber is used.
When an ionizing particle passes through the chamber, water vapour condenses on the resulting ions and the trail of the particle is visible in the vapour cloud.
Wilson, along with Arthur Compton, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his work on the cloud chamber. This kind of chamber is also called a pulsed chamber because the conditions for operation are not continuously maintained. Further developments were made by Patrick Blackett who utilised a stiff spring to expand and compress the chamber very rapidly, making the chamber sensitive to particles several times a second. A cine film was used to record the images.

What beauty there is seeing the sunlight piercing through a heavy cloud and illuminating the land or sea beneath. I have tried to capture that effect of the weather on many occasions, either photographically or in paint, with mixed results. The real thing remains inimitable.

Many years ago, I heard this light described as 'The Fingers of God', reaching down to us from the heavenlies revealing His hand and thus His presence with us, and I have wondered if this was the light from heaven that shone around Saul on the road to Damascus to round up those of 'The Way' as the early Christians were known.

Certainly, He is a light in our darkness - needed now more than ever.

Think of how we use our fingers ... they are tools for detailed work; they enable the fine caress of a loved one; they turn the pages of a book, plant seeds, prepare food, enable creativity, perform surgery ... a myriad of essentials. We often pray for the Lord to place His hand upon someone to heal or protect, but it will be His fingers that will see to the detail of that work. Our Lord knows even the number of hairs on our heads; He knows every detail, and He does detailed, precise and restoring work in each of us.

The Fingers of God in our photograph are pure light, and just as the shafts of light search through the cloud to find the earth and cast aside the darkness, His fingers grip our hearts and bring His heavenly light to our spirits. His fingers bring divine illumination - a word used to describe the work of monks creating beautiful illustrated Bibles, like The Book of Kells. These books brought light to the minds of men.

Oswald Chambers said "Love is not measured by what it gets, but by what it costs" [Oswald Chambers 'The Psychology of Redemption']

These verses from Philippians encapsulate and reveal perhaps the greatest foundation stone of the Christian faith. That Jesus died on the cross, defeated death and lived again, so that we too may be reassured not only of eternal life, but of new life in this life.

And yet it can so easily get us tied in knots if we consider it with the natural mind. The rational mind always asks the question 'how', which is why we need 'the mind of Christ' ... that mind which is in you ...

Do you not know that your body is the temple (the very sanctuary) of the Holy Spirit Who lives within you, Whom you have received [as a Gift] from God? You are not your own, [1 Corinthians 6:19 AMPC]

For “who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct Him?” But we have the mind of Christ. [1 Corinthians 2:16 NKJV]

and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. [Philippians 4:7 NKJV]

That gift from God was and is the greatest gift we can ever receive - a gift of love from our Heavenly Father to His children - but at what a cost ...

I stand before the presence
of The Lord God of Hosts
A child of my Father
and an heir of His grace
But Jesus paid the price for me
The veil was torn in two
And the Holy of Holies
shall become my dwelling place

Isaiah 55:6 was suggested by Pat, who says that this verse and the encouragement in Isaiah 62:10 to Go Through The Gates (sung in the video below by Barry and Batya Segal) are important for this time.

Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near has been very important to us, and has been a recurring word in our walk of faith. There is the implication that there may come a time when He may not be found, that He will be afar off. This word seems echoed in the The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. In Matthew 25:10 we are told: And while (the foolish virgins) went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut.
There is an urgency about our relationship with God. He says "Don't let your faith slide. Work at it!" And the reality is that it is not God closing the door of the Kingdom on us, but ourselves - through our lackadaisical approach to Him - failing to answer His knock on the door. It is the question discussed in Holman Hunt's painting 'The Light of The World', based on Revelation 3:20 Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him, and he with Me.
Isaiah is calling us to draw near to God, seek Him before we do not know where to look. Answer his knock on the door and "Go through the gates!"

Several years ago, I felt led by The Lord to study the gates of Jerusalem as mentioned in the book of Nehemiah. This ended up being a series of talks, but briefly, I believe that the gates relate to our walk with The Lord, and that we can go in and out of the city of our God until we can go no more out. Isaiah seems to be encouraging us in 62:10 to hear from God and 'put His word into our walk', for the rewards are immense, and where one leads, others will follow on that Kingdom highway to everlasting life.

Below is a table of the Gates, Names and meanings which begin to build a picture of the pattern being revealed in Scripture. This is not the place to give in in-depth interpretation, but at some point soon, we hope to put our notes into an article which can be downloaded for further study.

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow - lines from the popular Bill and Gloria Gaither song (see video below); lines which resonate with us all at this time when we are grieved by great trials. And this message applies every day; not just in the current crisis.
It is said regularly that the times in which we are living are 'unprecedented'. In a sense that is always so; every today has not been experienced before; every tomorrow is unique. 'Groundhog Day', when each day is identical to yesterday, is an amusing fiction in the movies, but would be intolerable if experienced as reality.
The truth is that the only experience which is unchanging and the same yesterday, today and forever is Jesus Christ [Hebrews 13:8 NKJV] ... and yet He is also new every morning. That is a great mystery of our Lord; the same forever and forever alive. He is indeed a living hope through the resurrection ... that does not fade away. Because He lives. Hallelujah!