Hope for the Cities

Hope for the cities was a month of discovery from covenants, rediscovering the Kingdom of heaven on earth, and short nuggets on the early church, and how Africans played a major role in Christianity.

 

Chesed

I discovered a new word, Chesed. Chesed is such a powerful word that cannot be easily described; in short, it’s loving kindness, but it’s way more than that. When you pronounce it has a strong guttural vibration from the back of the mouth. It is supposed to describe a passion that reverberated a type of passion when spoken. This word is used several hundred times in the bible, Hebrew, that is, don’t go and start searching in your NKJV or NIV versions, you will not find it. In essence, this word Chesed brings out the commitment and love of God in many dimensions, especially in covenant making, covenants that started with Adam and went through generations upon generations till it reached Jesus, His new covenant. Blood covenants were God’s way to Chesed on us. Sounds cheesy, right!! Well, not, you see, when God entered a covenant with man, he expected more from us, and unfortunately, we let him down numerous times because we did not love(chesed) back. We did the opposite and fell and got sucked into the darkness and horrible despair of sin and eventually death. Now God wanted a permanent solution, I think he had all planned it from the beginning or He grew tired of all the back and forth of the judges, kings and prophets, especially the kings I would say, reading the canonical in the book of the chronicles and kings, I felt like I was being taken for a ride back and forth from good king to bad king to worst king ever lived, then when we get a break and think that finally we have the perfect king, David I thought, his son ends up having more than 600 wives and concubines and foreign wives that eventually lead to his downfall, what a roller coaster. OK, enough of that, now you think that is a lot, God must have been waiting for the right moment to bring Jesus in, and in He came, and He was the solution and the final piece of the covenant, the ultimate sacrifice. OK, let me try to illustrate this...

 

From Fall to Redemption (atonement to cleansing)

In God’s ultimate love, He created man, Adam. He put man in the Garden of Eden, the perfect place, the best place on earth. I wish I were there to witness the magnificence of this place. Enter Satan, man falls, aka sin enters the world, and the authority man had, satan stole by deception. God kicked man out of the garden and clothed him on his way out. The first blood sacrifice, God kills an animal to clothe Adam and Eve, to atone, to cover up the sin. Centuries and centuries pass by, Abraham, Noah, Jacob, Isaac, Joseph, the list goes on and on. Blood sacrifices, atonements are the order of the day. In comes Jesus, Jesus was without blemish or sin, but he was tortured and hung on the cross. Remember, he was sinless, but he was killed like he had sinned. This act, this very act, was what condemned the devil. Jesus died for sins that he did not commit, and when he rose from the dead, the covenant was fulfilled, completed, and he regained the authority that Adam had lost that day in the garden those eons ago. The Kingdom of heaven can finally be experienced down here on earth. Now our sins are not just covered up, they are completely washed, cleansed away.


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