Charisma Magazine?

This is so amazing!
I have been expecting something like this for a long time, but now that it has happened it almost takes my breath away. Charisma Magazine of all places calls for a return to God's calendar!
So Happy! 
Enjoy,

http://www.charismamag.com/blogs/standing-with-israel/21053-it-s-time-to-get-on-god-s-calendar

Better days ahead?

This past Wednesday the 27th of August was the first day of the Hebrew Month of Elul, the sixth month, if you start a count at Nissan, the month of Passover.

By the way there is a great smart phone app out there for converting dates from the modern calendar to the Hebrew calendar produced by appstudio.

Therefore it’s the sixth month of the six year in what I count as the fifth, seven year cycle. If that sentence means nothing to you, reading my previous posts #1, #10 and #11 may help.

I want to focus on what we observed in the last six years. There can be no doubt now that this seven year segment, which started in the fall of 2008 and is slated to end next fall, has bitten a lot a people just as you would expect from the birds and fish of day five. It often seemed like buzzards and sharks were the order of the day.

As always some of us were at the right place at the right time and caught some of that explosive new life but for many, this has truly been a difficult six years.

Regardless what situation you find yourself in now, this is not the time to panic. Consider Noah’s story about the birds. He had survived a great tumult, but was anxious to find out when things would get better. Sound familiar?

The text tells us that;    

The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible. After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.  Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground.  But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark.  He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.  When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him. Genesis 8:5-12

So let’s walk this through, you can make the case that the story is telling us that the birds begin to fly from Noah’s ark the 10^th day of the eleventh month, 40 days after the tops of the mountains where seen on the first day of the tenth month. The eleventh month can be considered a fifth month if you count the seventh month as a new beginning, just as the Hebrew calendar counts the seventh month, Tishrei, as the first month of the annual year. (I know this is a difficult concept for westerners to get in our heads, you are going to have to study it. There are plenty of sources out there to explain it)

So 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 could be thought of at 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I understand this is may seem a reach, but is it not logical that a month with so much information about birds, would have a fifth day connection?

Therefore the indication is that the raven left the ark on the tenth day of the month of birds, month five.  As each seven days pass the indications improve. Of course right from the start the raven has no problem, he has plenty of carrion to cleanup, so his food needs are taken care of immediately. The next bird sent out is a dove which needs vegetation. The dove soon returns as it cannot find even a perch. Interestingly the third time a bird is sent out, the dove stays out till evening and returns with vegetation, an olive leaf. (New life in the third) The fourth time Noah sends out a bird, the dove does not return indicating the dove has found food and shelter.

Therefore the implication is that in a fifth day pattern, if things have been bad, they begin to improve slowly as the fifth segment of time moves along. I feel strongly that this is exactly what I have seen in the last six years, in other words in my view the events of the fall of 2008 seem to have started a day five like, pattern for this seven year segment which ends next fall.  

Thus I expect the business climate will continue to slowly improve as we begin this last year of the fifth set of sevens. Things are still volatile, the buzzards and the sharks are still out there but now the doves also start to find places to rest and feed.

There you go. How about that for an alternative way to read the Bible?

Gather what you can as you prepare to remember the economic reset which should happen next fall. If you find yourself a long way from where you wish you were, as we head to the end of the seventh, take some comfort in the indication that things are improving and from this passage out of Zephaniah.

“I will gather those who grieve about the appointed feasts—
They came from you, O Zion; The reproach of exile is a burden on them.  

Zephaniah 3:18 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

Zephaniah has given me a lot of comfort over the years with these words. Clearly the prophet is commending those who grieve the appointed times, he recognizes that often we cannot do all that we wish we could in regards to following all the revealed instruction about the appointed times. 

Zephaniah is telling us that living in a place that ignores these things is a burden on those who wish to follow the instructions concerning the appointed times.

That would be us.

Always remember, timing matters. But God looks on the Heart! 

”Mystery of the Shemitah”

Hi Everyone.

It’s been a while since I posted, my book’s first draft is up to 58,000 words so we are getting there.

I wanted to let you know about another book coming out by Jonathan Cahn called ”Mystery of the Shemitah”. It comes out September 4 you can read parts of it on Amazon.

I have no idea what his ultimate conclusions are and take no responsibility for them but thought I should let you know about his work. I have seen him speak and he is a dynamo!

Beginning of a Book

The “Know the Time / Change Your World” post is meant to be the beginning of a book, as such it will be my last weekly post for a while, maybe a long while.  As you read “Know the Time / Change Your World” you may get a sense of where I am headed.  I intend to regularly to monitor and follow up with my Google Plus community and Blog. I will try to reply timely to anyone who posts to either. I expect I will post every so often, however, my goal is to have a book completed by early 2016 along with a 45 minute to an hour verbal and Power Point presentation related to the content of the book. I would love to hear from anyone who has questions or is interested in being a sounding board for my “Seven and Fifty” projects.

Best wishes to each of as you prepare for the Smitah year. 

Know the Time / Change Your World

 From antiquity, man’s fascination with time is demonstrated in the remarkable archaeology still visible at places like Stonehenge, the flat topped pyramids in South America, or Newgrange in Ireland. The sun, moon, and stars seemed alive to ancient man and he came up with stories, legends, gods and religions based on his imagination and his view of the changing sky.

   Today, we have a calendar which adds one day to the next in a rising numerical progression. We still pay attention to the changing seasons as we count through the twelve months of the year. The term month has a connection to the lunar cycle even though our months no longer consult the phases of the moon. We do, however, look carefully at the rotation of the Earth around the Sun and our calendar is designed to closely monitor the annual cycle.

   As each year ends, we add a digit to our yearly count; a practice that was arbitrarily started over 2,000 years ago. Another practice that affects our measurement of time is the twenty-four hour times sixty minute day. This base of sixty mathematical system has been used in one form or another since Babylonian and Egyptian times. Therefore, what we have today is a breakdown of three extraterrestrial cycles for the purposes of measuring time.

   First, the rotation of the earth equals a day which we arbitrarily broke down to twenty-four sixty minute hours. Second, the rotation of the moon around the earth, which takes twenty-nine to thirty days, we arbitrarily broke into months and then solidified them in the annual calendar which is based on the third extraterrestrial cycle we use to determine time, the annual cycle of the Earth around the Sun.     We view the annual cycle as the most important cycle since it effects our seasons of planting and harvest. (This idea apparently has its origins in the Greco/Roman period.) All of this has a certain logic to it and is normal to us. In our part of the world, much of North America, corn is planted April or May and harvested in September or October. The sun’s angle on the earth is at a very similar angle on May 1, year after year, thus giving confidence that a warm spell in late April or early May should mean that frost is over for this growing season and planting should proceed.

   That the time element of a single day is broken down as it is also has a logic; high noon or 12 o’clock, should mean the sun is directly overhead and at its zenith or highest point. (Daylight Savings Time is a whole other subject.) It seems our modern sense of time is mostly affected by the sun; its turning on its axis gives us our days and its rotation around the sun gives us our years. Our modern months are a nod to the old lunar calendar, but we rarely connect the phase of the moon to any element of time which affects our lives.

   This leaves one mysterious element of time in our modern lives, the seven day week. While all the other elements of time have clear connection to some celestial rotation, the seven day week has no anchor in an extraterrestrial cycle. Follow me for a moment; 60 seconds times, 60 minutes times, 24 hours makes a complete day, 365 days make a complete year. (Of course, every four years we have to add a day for leap year to keep things on track.) Even our months, though not tied specifically to the moon's cycle, are set up to range from twenty-eight to thirty-one days at least closely resembling the old lunar moon.

   But a week hinges on what? How did week come to be and what is its story? How did a seven day time element become so important having no celestial support?

    This is a study of those seven days; how they came to be, how they changed the world and how a little imaginative use of them can improve your life and change our world.

    The story goes that a young man was kidnapped by his jealous brothers and sold into slavery. More than twenty years later, those same brothers were standing in front of him begging for food and worried for their lives. Joseph’s story has a key element, not of seven days, but seven years; in fact two sets of seven years. One set of seven fat years and one set of seven lean years. Interestingly this story, found in the first book of Hebrew Bible, seems to echo some elements of the seven day creation story found in the very beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures. It would be difficult indeed to divorce our modern practice of a seven day week from that well know writing, Genesis chapter one.

   But if Joseph’s story implies value to seven years, could it be that there is significance not only for the seven day week which we practice to this day, but for seven years? Indeed, the foundational Biblical texts known as the five books of Moses includes instructions for not only seven days, but also seven months and seven years and also seven sets of seven years; in other words, forty-nine years to which one additional year is added to create a fifty year Jubilee cycle.

   Absolutely none of these segments of time has any obvious connection to the celestial cycles of the sun, the moon, or the stars. There is no obvious sign in the sky when these sevens begin or end. For many, it is a question that they exist or have value at all, yet the fact is, that the seven day week endures. Could it be a sign to us that the others are out there somewhere also? Could it be that though modern man often does his best to ignore a seven day week, its persistence in sticking around is telling us we need to consider the other sets of seven laid out in the ancient texts?

   What did Joseph know? Was he just lucky? Is it just a story? Even if it is just a story, what was the story teller trying to communicate? Is it any more unusual to contemplate old words or stories and what they mean than to ponder old structures or archaeology findings and what they tell us about our ancestors?

   The Books of Moses are unique in many ways, but in their use of a variety of seven segments of time, the Hebrew Bible stands alone and seems to beg us to explore its unusual ways.

The years since Y2K

In the last fourteen years the market place has been amazing in its confirmation of the seven year cycle. In each set of seven it would have been wise to unload what was hot early in year six and be out of debt in year seven. In 2000 the internet bubble sprang a leak in March. But though out that spring and summer opportunities to move to safety where available as the Nasdaq rallied back to prices still 25% higher than they had been the previous summer. By fall however the down trend was reconfirmed and by the time terrorists flew our planes into the World Trade center and the Pentagon a year later, no one doubted that the internet bubble was over.  Enron and World Com where shown to be frauds and the whole economy was in a shambles. 

If as I believe the fall of 2001 ended a seven year cycle then the next seven years was overwhelmed by the run up of housing prices.  In the fall of 2002 prices on homes started to move up very quickly. For the first time in recent memory, to buy a home one often needed to offer more than the listing price to become the buyer, if you did not, someone else would offer more, leaving you still looking. As the 00’s ticked by the mortgage market seemed to be in full support of higher housing prices. Indeed banking as a whole was very aggressive at marketing loans for almost any item, housing or otherwise. The excesses are now well known, the exact top of the housing market is thought to be in early 2006 but serious declines did not happen until late summer of 2008 when the world’s banking system nearly melted away. Leading to some of the most non-free-enterprise actions ever taken by western governments.

The result was lower prices for not only homes but stocks and almost any other consumer item. The banking crisis would have a long term de-leveraging effect causing drag in the economy for years.

Now as we come to the end of another set of seven one has to wonder, what is the excess this time? The stock market has had a nice recovery from the 2009 lows, Housing has recovered a bit but is by no means over heated. The one thing that seems impossibly priced is interest rates. That 10 year United States Treasury bonds trade at 2.5% is remarkable. Some have argued that we are in a bond bubble.  Maybe so but I don’t see any excitement to buy 10 year bonds at 2.5%. Unlike the internet bubble or the housing bubble no one is buying these bonds with dreams of riches, rather they are being bought almost as a last resort and mostly by the Federal Reserve. Which is a whole other subject.

My point in all this is, that as I sit here in the late spring of 2014, it seems to me that this cycle may very well pass in similar fashion to the first one I observed after becoming aware of this cycle. Having discovered Deuteronomy 15 in the summer of 1991. At that time I became convinced that fall of 1994 was the end of the second cycle of seven years since the Jubilee of 79/80.

I personally made my preparations and was as far out of debt, as I could reasonably be, at that point. Selling our home and taking a rental for a few years and otherwise simply becoming very conservative until the beginning of the new set of seven years.  Interestingly the years from 1987 to 1994 where very similar to the years of this current cycle. It seemed the combination of the stock crash of 1987 and the first Gulf war had kept most excesses out of the market place and the end of that cycle passed rather uneventfully.

As I pointed out in last week’s post at this point I expect this cycle’s end to pass rather similar to 1994. But you never know and Deuteronomy’s direction to be de- leveraged is still the ideal. The one area of serious risk I see is Geo political, think about the Jubilee cycle and its 50 year pattern for a moment, WW1 started 100 years ago in the summer of 1914 and the US civil war ended in 1865, a little more than 150 years ago. Both these events created a dynamic shift in the economic picture. Of course Vietnam also started to heat up around this time 50 years ago, so some of the world events we are hearing about give me more pause than usual.

On the optimistic side the wars and shake ups we have seen in the Middle East in recent years make me hopeful that a new dynamic emerges in that part of the world which could open a new chapter for Freedom, Justice and Economic expansion for the world. 

If the fall of 2015 does pass uneventfully then I expect the next seven years to pattern 1994 to 2001 in which case some of those internet dreams may actually come to fruition. Pondering again the Jubilee pattern, in the summer of 2019 we will celebrate 50 years since man first walked on the moon. We could see some very interesting things between now and 2022    

While now is the time to be preparing for Smitah.  Once you are prepared for the Sabbatical year it is also wise to be thinking about how to participate in the next seven years. As you can see Deuteronomy 15 really can help you become a long term thinker and goal oriented. 

Three Rhymes

The kingdom of God is best revealed when we work together. I felt impressed this morning to post this verse in an attempt to explain why I have been writing for the seven and fifty community since January.

"Do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others." Philippians 2:4

My purpose is to improve lives by highlighting the cycle of the sabbatical year. Shmita is just one, little noticed principle of scripture that I have been fascinated with and found helpful in my daily life.  In other words, dear reader, these posts have been my way of looking out for your interests. While at the same time, they have helped me, clarifying for myself the ebb and flow I have seen during my lifetime.

I posted the below piece back in January but felt that it would be wise to post it again as we enter early summer, approaching Shavuot (Pentecost). Some of you may have missed it or are just joining us.

One of the interesting rhymes concerning time, in the creation story is the is the link or parallel of day one to day four, day two to day five, and day three to day six.

Day one; Light - Day four; Sun moon and stars.

Day Two; Separation of waters to above and below with space between – Day 5; Birds for the space above, fish for the water below.

Day Three; Bare ground and plant life – Day 6 Mammals and Humans.

This week I want to encourage you to look back over some history. Specifically early summer of this particular year in the seven year pattern.

I suggest each of you think carefully about 1986, 1993, 2000 and 2007. Give some thought to what these years and the ones immediately following them looked like for you. Rather than making decisions based on what is occurring now or what occurred in recent years consider the events of these years in in your planning.

My guess is that we are in the sixth year and as we would be wise to at least begin preparing for the seventh year which I see as starting this fall. 

However regardless if my count correct or not 1986, 1993, 2000, and 2007 all should be the same year in the count.

One additional thought; I recommend you pay special attention to 1993 as the seven year time frame that it resides in, very likely has one of the rhymes to our present seven years in the pattern of what I described in the beginning of this piece.

My thought is that fall of 1992 to fall of 1993 is the sixth year of the second, seven year cycle and that fall of 2013 to fall of 2014 is the sixth year of the fifth, seven year cycle.

And even if my count is off, there is a good chance that 1993 rhymes more with 2014 than the others.

Think about it.