The Wonder of "God Is One"

Did you ever wonder? Did you ever wonder?

I do. Did you ever wonder? Why the sun always rises, but the stars never fall?

Why dry land is never satisfied by water? And why fire never says enough? I did want to mention for those of you who listen every day to my podcast that the one I produced yesterday got truncated and so I fixed that and if you want to hear the end of yesterday's episode you can go back and play it from where it left off if you like. Again, if you get this later, then obviously it was fixed, but I'm grateful for your listening and wanted to know I got that fixed for you and I am so sorry, but grateful for your listening.

All right, on with the next episode. The wonder of one God, or depending on how you read it, the last two words of the first verse of the Shema or Deuteronomy 6 4 is in Hebrew. It's Yahweh Ahad, not that God is one, but that Yahweh is one.

It's fascinating that, to me, just beyond fascinating, you can chew on these two words for a long, long, long time and I have thought about them many, many, many times, but I guess, you know, one way to look at it that I think is just fun and beautiful is, you know, if you watch many Christmas movies or love movies on the Hallmark channel or whatever, that the people are always talking about is he the one or is she the one, you know, that you're going to marry, that's going to be your life. Partner, all those kinds of things is the one and so one way that you can look at that if you want to, these two words is Yahweh is the one or, you know, this infinite idea of presence of that's always here that's bigger than infinity. However, you want to look at that, that's Yahweh and then Ahad is he is, you know, the one. And so if you break down those words and begin to just chew on them, obviously, we talked about Yahweh in the previous episode being that that was Yahweh, the infinite God is our God, but in this case, the infinite God is one. And I think the Jews teach beautifully on this idea that that he is above and beyond everything because he created everything.

Right. And so, you know, everything is that you see or envision or whatever is part of what he envisioned or wouldn't be here. He says, kind of like I like the way they teach this. There's a rabbi that teaches all these things.

I love to listen to him. And he talked about, well, just think of a character in your mind. Create an imaginary character in your mind. And so with that character that you've created in your mind, the question is, would that character even exist if it wasn't for you? But it's in your mind. And so as long as you're thinking about that character, it exists.

But at the point in time you stop thinking about that character, it doesn't exist anymore because outside of you, it doesn't really exist. Well, in the same way, you know, God obviously spoke everything into creation, began the whole thing, and everything is a reflection of, obviously, what he had envisioned at some level. And so to some extent, it all does come into play right there. And so as we begin to take on this idea of the Shema, to hear, to listen, to perceive, to chew on all these ideas. As we talked about at the very beginning, is that the Shema, it ends with an ayin, and the haad, in other words, the last word, ends with a dalit.

And so those two letters are big and huge. If you look at a Torah scroll, which is an ayin and a dalit, which are those two, which means a witness. And so to an extent, we're witnessing how God is really in everything. And as we point that out, it's sort of like bringing the light to others, we're God's witnesses. And of course, you know, that's all through the Bible and the Book of Acts, right?

You're going to receive power from on high to be his witness. And of course, in Revelation, where it talks about, you know, they overcame by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. You know, again, that idea is that we are, you know, bringing that as we listen and we see God in different things, then we begin to see this. But then there's this whole idea of unity, right? Like in John chapter 17, Jesus prayed and prayed and prayed for us to be in unity. And that, again, is oneness. And again, to me, it gets back to the power of one that happened in Babylon when they became unified to go against God to build this power of Babylon. You know, he confused their language so they wouldn't be one, right?

Kind of confused their language so they wouldn't hurt themselves. It's kind of like what happened. And so as we reverse that curse of Babylon and we get on the same page as we become a band of brothers or our church unifies or whatever, you see, we become more and more like God because God is Ahad. It's this amazing thing that it kind of comes together as we witness it, as we see God in others and we share that light. Then, fascinatingly, we relate to each other and we become more, I guess, in bands of brothers together, especially if we do this in honesty and sincerity and in truth and most of all in love, which you'll obviously find in the next verse all over the place. But the idea is, interestingly, that he's going to bring that together in love in a minute. But it begins with just witnessing and giving God the sovereignty of he is the one. He is above it all. But he is also very finite. He's there with us.

And so all those things come together to what does that look like in your life? Well, tonight for me, we have another one of these fires that Wild at Heart puts on. And we did this wildfire in Stokesdale last Wednesday and this Wednesday we've got. I mean, we did it in the Ashboro last Wednesday.

We're doing it in Stokesdale today. But as those men were gathered around the fire, I noticed, oh, the longing of their hearts was for deep close friends. Obviously, they want to chase after the heart of God, but they also want a sense of fellowship, a sense of belonging, a sense of this is people that love me, that I share life with, and that I can go to at two in the morning. Do you have that in your life?

And what does that feel like? Well, the amazingly beautiful thing for me, as the more I serve God and have a chance to be that witness to him. I have those kind of friends with a group I meet on Tuesday nights, with Masculine Journey, with the group I meet on Thursday morning, where I do the devotions at Somerset with a retirement home. I have that kind of group of friends. I have that kind of group of friends at church and all sorts of different places as we witness for God. It's interesting, he puts us in that very longing of our heart that we not only obviously get to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and all our minds, but also we get to love our neighbors in new and fresh waves. But it seems like it results from first and foremost, like, do we really, do we really Shema, do we really hear, do we really understand that Yahweh is our God and that he is truly, in so many different ways, the one? Thanks for listening.