Our World and The World of Christ

Today was an amazing and key day in our trip through the land of the Bible, the setting of God's continuing story for humanity. The past days we've learnt very valuable lessons, looking at the word of God in a completely new way as we venture into the mind of our Creator and His people. By hiking in the desert, we learned what it truly means to be in the raw, to be humbled and rid of our outer self to reveal what the content of our heart is. We also learned what it really means for the soul to long for God in a dry and weary land. By understanding the symbolism of the desert in the Jewish mind, we could know what the relief of water is, how bathing in a waterfall can surely be amongst the most heightened sensations of joy ever. And in this thought and many others, we've seen the underlying presence of Christ throughout this entire story as not only a distant promise, but an active agent.

Today was the day that we saw how this story we've been walking in, the story of the Israelites, came to be our own, as we tie in all the strings of this tale into the coming of the Christ.

Both yesterday and today were dedicated to seeing what the world was like just before the Messiah was born. Yesterday we looked at the Essenes, and how their zeal and passion for the word of God foreshadowed his coming. Today, we saw the entire opposite side of the coin. We stared straight into into the eyes of our own world: Hellenism. We learned that the ideas brought by Alexander the Great to Israel took hold and were radically changing the spiritual lives of Jews. Hellenism as a mindset proposed man, as opposed to God, as a measure of beauty and truth. It was powerful to see how that worldview pervades our own insight into reality. To me, it was a moment of reevaluating all the things that I've seen in my life as desirable and grand, and realizing just how easy it is to stray away from our good shepherd. In Rod's words, we need to understand that what is holy is beautiful, not that what is beautiful is holy. We visited Caesarea, a city built by Herod on the coast of the Mediterranean as a monument of adoration to Rome and Caesar Augustus. We saw that even there God worked His ways, as this was the place from which Paul sailed on his journeys.

From there we went to Mount Carmel, where Elijah challenged the worshipers of Baal and Asherah, gods of rain and earth, and with unbreakable faith and passion showed that the Lord is God, the Lord is one. Once more I felt challenged, confronted by God as I asked myself who I was and what I was doing, if I was dancing between my devotion to Him and to the world. As we reached the top and overlooked the valley below, and Rod spoke once more of our world, I heard the voice of the Lord telling me to share my testimony. My story was one of fallenness, and of the power of Christ to save. The love I felt from the entirety of the group was overwhelming, especially considering that I knew absolutely no one on the trip before the day that we set out on this journey. I felt the community that we have been called to be as brothers and sisters, and I felt how our little trickles of water came together to be a waterfall in the desert.

Our final stop of the day was in Tabgha, where we see the dawn of a new world, not the world of man, but the way of Jesus. It was there, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, that rabbi Jesus first saw some young men, teenagers even, in the water and said to them: “Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people.” Matthew 4:19

He will send us out to fish for people... The questions then, as we soaked our feet in the story of Christ, changed from what God is to us, to what we are to God. Are we DISCIPLES of Jesus, following and imitating Him to be become just like Him? Is he not just our Savior, Lord and friend, but also our Rabbi? Does someone follow me as I follow Christ?

I am very excited about the days to come, to walk the steps of our Shepherd, so that we may learn to be shepherds ourselves.

Written by Fede