THE BARA-ASAH AHA! (part 2- Imagine)

OK! Now, don’t give up on this just because you don’t understand the title! Hang in with me… Before I am done, you will get it, I promise! Ready to hit the trail again? Let’s go back to Genesis 2:7, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul.” I don’t know how many times I read through that verse over the years and, like Charlie Brown, it was “wah, wah, wah”…in my Imagination I had no spark of understanding. Well, because I can’t possibly take you on my entire trip, I will give you a short cut here. First, God formed man out of the dust of the ground and that made him a being like all other living beings in the earth, eating, drinking, walking, and focusing on life, itself. We were hard wired, plumbed, equipped and tooled to be able to survive in this material world. The image in my brain is that we are a spirit being, and God had just created our “space suit” that enabled our spirit man to navigate in a material existence.

But Man was meant for so much more and so God breathed (n’shamah’ – divine , essence, inspiration and intellect) into his nostrils and man became a living soul, capable of thinking, reasoning and discourse. The Rabbi commentators in the Targum say man became a speaking spirit. Wow! Do you realize that the breath of God is what makes us capable of being in the “likeness” of God? The word “likeness” means we function as God functions. The gray matter between our ears was suddenly full of capability that set us apart from the rest of creation and our IMAGINATIONS became the vehicle that propelled us into the “God realm”. Einstein is so cool to me, he got it! He lived and discovered great things out of his imagination. He said “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world and embraces all there ever will be to understand”. In other words, our imagination is the infinite part of us! That small part of our brain in the back of our head that touches the limitless, immeasurable wisdom and knowledge of God! (I Cor. 2:9-16)

So, what does that have to do with the crazy title of my blog? And why does that matter to us? Turn around and run back to Genesis 1:1… “In the beginning God created…In the Hebrew that word is “bara” It is a unique word that, according to my lexicon, means to form, plan, create by thought or image, ideate, imagine, design. God used his imagination to create the entire universe and all that would happen there from beginning to end. It included every human being that would ever live (Psalm 139:16, Eph. 1:4), and included Jesus who was crucified “before the foundations of the world” (Rev. 13:8, I Peter 1:18-20). In other words it was done in God before He ever said Light be! No wonder He is the beginning and the end! Out of the fullness of his imagining, the fullness of His faith, He began to command all that was in his imagination to become material. Look at verse 7, “And God made…” The word “made” in Hebrew is “Asah”. In the lexicon it means the creativity of God, to work, create, build, plant, and procure. Look at Psalm 33:6 “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made (asah)! Now, connect that to Hebrews 11:3 “Through faith we understand that the worlds were “framed” by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” So… God imagines and then He speaks and it happens. He is a thinking, reasoning, creative speaking spirit!

Now, think about it, we were made to function the way God functions! We imagine and we speak and we produce. On a very elemental level think of something you have made. What did you do first? Yup! You had the idea, you thought about it, imagined it and even imagined how to do it. You probably talked about it or even recorded pictures along the way to strengthen your imagining. Then, you gathered the materials and put it together to replicate what you imagined. Right? What does the word say about how we function? God imagined (bara), then He recorded (Psalm 139), He gathered materials (“Light be..”  He didn’t create light, He IS light!) and then he built, planted, and procured creation!

Let’s look at some negative examples of the power of our imagination, ok? In Genesis 3 we see that Adam didn’t imagine himself to be made like God, even though he was, so he ate the forbidden fruit trying to accomplish something that God had already established, and he lost that intimate connection to hear the voice of God in his spirit. The breath of God was greatly diminished. Men could no longer have dominion over God’s creation. Jump over to Genesis 6: 1-5. God saw, early on, that men were evil and every imagination of their hearts was evil and so He allowed the flood to happen. By chapter 11:1-6 men were at it again. They were building empires that were not ruled by God. He saw that the people were united, they spoke the same language and said the same things. They spoke and acted on a common imagining! God made a profound statement here… “…the people are one, and they have one language and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have IMAGINED to do.” So he confounded their speech and destroyed their unity. Powerful!

Let’s look at a positive word, Deuteronomy 30:14… Paul uses this scripture to explain the spiritual law that brings us into salvation, and it is “bara and asah”. “But the word is very near unto you, in your mouth that you may DO it.” The word do is ASAH!!! The word is in your mouth that you may create, build, plant, procure and operate in it. Paul explains it like this in Romans 10:10, “for with the heart (the imagination) man believes unto righteousness and with the mouth confession is made (to procure) salvation”. Little ferret dance!!!  Woohoo!

Now, back into the Old Testament to Jeremiah 1:9-10, 14 where God is speaking to Jeremiah explaining how he will be used by the Lord, ”…I have put my words in your mouth…to root out and to pull down and to destroy, and to throw down, to build and to plant”, “…I will hasten (watch over sleeplessly, be alert for, watch for) my word to PERFORM it. The word perform is ASAH!!! And where was God’s word? It was in Jeremiah’s mouth! Bottom line there is power in the words in our mouths because we function the way God functions.

This should be a Woop! Woop! moment, but OMG! It turns out that we are a bunch of very powerful loose cannons firing off faith filled words everywhere, that do NOT line up with the word of God. What a mess we make! To quote Hosea 4:6 “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge”. Uh huh! That pretty much sums it up! Or we could quote Forrest Gump “Stupid is as stupid does”. We are in desperate need of the BARA- ASAH AHA!!!!

The big “elephant” question in the room is what do you THINK on? Dr. Newberg, the guy that started this whole adventure for me, said “the more you focus on something, the more it becomes your reality, the more it is written into the neural connections of the brain”. I would say the more you focus on something, the more vivid it becomes in your imagination! What we imagine to be true will come out of our mouths, for good or evil! The world understands this perfectly. How many signs have you seen that say things like “Never say Never!” or “If you can imagine it, you can accomplish it.”   We just don’t understand that it all goes back to the creative gift in all of us that God intended to use with us and through us to create a wonderful world.

Let’s go to the New Testament to Matthew and check out what Jesus had to say about it! He spends a lot of time warning us about our thought life, what is in our “imaginations” (our heart) and what comes out of our mouths. One key here is the word HEART. In the Greek it is Kardia but it literally means the thoughts, understandings and feelings in the mind. Matt. 14:34-37 “…out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart brings forth good things, and an evil man (one with twisted thinking or one who thinks counter, or incorrectly, to the word of God) out of evil treasure brings forth evil things…. every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give an account thereof on the day of judgment. For by your words you will be justified and by your words you shall be condemned.” That’s not good!!! 

I don’t mean to be a downer here! The main point is,  when life stinks, change your “stinkin’ thinkin’” and when God’s Word comes out of your mouth, you can create, plant, procure and operate in that.   That’s why we need to intensely study God’s Word every day, we need to keep it in our thoughts (focus on it), in our imaginations and in our mouths in order to transform our minds and renew them to God’s way of doing and being right, which is to “ASAH” God’s way! When Paul was in a Roman prison he wrote to the Phillipians that, in bad times, we should rejoice (not in the problem but in God’s deliverance.  I Cor. 10:13 – He makes the way out). Think intently on the nature of God to encourage you that He is faithful. And when you believe His word to be true, the Peace of God will guard your heart and mind against what is going on around you in the world. (Phil. 4:4-7) Image what God says about you and your circumstances until it is fully vivid in your imagination, more real than what you see in the world. Then speak that against what the world is saying to you. There is creative (asah) power in that!!!

OK, I need to tie up two loose ends!  When Jesus went to the cross He purchased our total redemption. The first thing he did when he appeared in the upper room was to breathe on the disciples (just as God breathed on His man at creation) and He said, “receive the Holy Spirit”! ( John 20:20-22) The intimate connection was restored and our imaginations came alive and became tender to the voice and thoughts of God. The Breath of God was restored! That renewing in the Holy Spirit wasn’t the end, it was just a taste of more to come. So He told the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the complete baptism in the Holy Spirit. With that infilling, they were given speech in the form of new tongues. (Paul explains this in I Corinthians chapter 14) Of all the manifestations that God could have given them, why a new and unknown language? And why has that ability been passed on to generation after generation of believers?

Well, God needs a unified body and, now, the Holy Spirit can pray, instrumentally, through believers in total agreement with the mind of God. And how do we know and hear God’s mind when we pray? We use our imaginations, our mind’s eyes and ears! The languages we speak may sound varied and unknown to us in the material world, but they are known to God so that wavering flesh is cut out of the process!  In Romans 8:26-27  Paul is talking about wavering flesh not knowing what to pray and so the Holy Spirit prays “in” us.  The word “in” means instrumentally, so we are the instrument that the Holy spirit used to pray the perfect mind of God in our circumstances.   The confounded languages of Babel were restored in the unifying power of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit body of Christ still speaks in God languages in total agreement with what God prays through them. That’s why it is an important blessing to the Body of Christ. To quote God, we speak the same thing, by the same spirit and now, nothing we imagine to do, in agreement with God, will be impossible to us. God bless our IMAGINATIONS!!!

The BARA-ASAH AHAH!!! Woop! Woop! Big ferret dance!!!! OH YEAH!!!