A Study of qara
Hello everybody and welcome to Wednesday Night Live. This is Ron Crawford coming to you from the Father's Church in Dallas, Texas, and it's a great blessing to be able to share the word of the Lord together. I so appreciate you being willing to access this broadcast every week. It's a way for us to be together in our walk as saints, and I I pray that it's of some benefit to you. I know that I enjoy it.
Speaker 1:The only thing that I would prefer more would be that we could be together, in person, but this is certainly a blessing. Many years ago we did not have this privilege, and we had to send out cassette recordings, remember those, or then CDs, but now we have this privilege, and I'm grateful for it. Today we are going to study the term Kara in a deeper way than we have. And Scott has graciously posted an outline for you. It's really not an outline, but it is collection of scriptures that we're going to be talking about regarding this powerful word.
Speaker 1:Now over the years we have considered this term from the standpoint of embracing a calling that was not ours in the natural, but a calling that God invites us to. And we say, I will take responsibility for this, for you Lord. And we've we've used as a descriptive the illustration of the bird that is called by a variation of this name. That partridge that would come upon a nest that abandoned and sit on those eggs and cry out and really embrace that nest as its own. But that understanding came from what this word really means.
Speaker 1:So if you have the outline, we want to look at this next emphasis of the spirit of the Lord for us in this word. See, God is God is looking for us to partner with him. God is looking for us to embrace his purpose. God is looking for us to abandon who we are in order to do what he is calling us to do. And if you have that outline, I want to switch things up just a little bit, and I want us to consider the very last passage, which would actually be on page four of your outline.
Speaker 1:And it's it's a derivative of this Hebrew word q a r a, and it's karab. And it's I've given you the Hebrew designation from Strong so you could study this further. But it's it's the life of Moses when he's been in the wilderness tending to the flocks of his father-in-law whose name was Jethro, and I'll resist the Beverly Hillbillies association here. But in Exodus three, we find that Moses is out on the hillside and he's tending to these flocks, and the angel of the Lord is in a flame of fire in the midst of the bush. This is the burning bush story.
Speaker 1:And Moses says in verse three, I will now turn aside and will see this great sight why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside, God called Karah unto him out of the midst of the bush. And this is interesting because this is what God does with this term. And we're going to be looking at our in our study today at how God calls, the places that God calls from. And and he calls to us through Kara.
Speaker 1:If we're partnering with God in this way, it establishes a line of communication that really is a function of of heaven. Moses is tending to whatever business he has. He's probably done this hundreds of times. And suddenly he leaves the path of his own pursuits and comes to see what God is wanting to do. And when he does that, God initiates the karah to him.
Speaker 1:Now let's look what else he says. When God calls and says Moses Moses, that term of intimacy, the double issuance, Moses says, here am I. And verse five says, draw not nigh. And this is the derivative of charah. This is charab.
Speaker 1:Don't come to this place wearing your own shoes, doing your own devices. You're you're being invited to come into a place of holy ground where God is wanting to do a work that he has longed to do in his holiness. He's wanting to restore. He's wanting to turn something back to what he originally wanted. And of course, we know that that would involve the deliverance of the seed of Abraham, bringing them to their place of inheritance, and but but this whole business of taking the shoes off the feet and coming into holy ground, God prefaces it by saying, don't come into this place of Kara until you have taken your own devices from you.
Speaker 1:And you come into this, you're coming into a place of holy partnership with me. And then God says, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. Moses hid his face and was afraid to look upon God. That's interesting, isn't it? In fact, if we look further at the myriad uses of of Kara in the Old Testament, we'll find that Moses being plucked from the River Nile was a Korah kind of an experience.
Speaker 1:So from the time he was born, God saved him for this purpose. But the whole burning bush issue is a qurah issue. Moses turns away from his own path. He sees something that is intriguing him from God. He comes God calls qurahs to him.
Speaker 1:He says, I'm here, and God says, don't come into this place of Qarah, that's the derivative, until you first take your shoes off your feet and until you then are willing to enter into this partnership of holiness. That's the essence of the burning bush story, and that really is what Korah is all about. So we come back up to the beginning of our study and on page one of the handout that you can access, we find that Moses later on in his life is on the mountain with God, Exodus 34, and the Lord gives Moses the two tablets of stone. This is after the first episode of the tablets of stone. Now these are the ones that are going to last, And God descends in a cloud and stood with Moses there and God Korad, the name of his plan.
Speaker 1:And the Lord passed by before him and charod, Yahweh, Yahweh Elohim. This is very interesting. There's another instance where God charod out of the cloud. But here at the issuance of the establishment of His Word and His name, He speaks in a qarah fashion. Q A R A.
Speaker 1:And I love this because I my outline this really isn't an outline as you can see. If I was making an outline I would have probably started with the one we talked about with Moses in the burning bush. Then I would have gone next to first Samuel three, which is on your sheet there, the calling of the little boy Samuel. You remember in the night there was the whisper of God, Samuel, Samuel, here am I. 11 times in first Samuel three going from verse four through ten, eleven times the word karah is used.
Speaker 1:Samuel, his whole life was a karah. You know, God miraculously caused him to be born of Hannah, the woman whose name was Grace. God opened her womb. She dedicated this child to God. And from the time he was weaned, she brought him to the tabernacle, the temple at Shiloh, and surrendered him to the service of the Lord.
Speaker 1:That is absolutely a picture of Korah where this little boy was not gonna grow up in the home of a family that was devoted to him. I mean, he was the miracle child of the wife that the the man loved and thought was beautiful, with all due respect to the other wife that was there bearing children. And this boy could have been like the rich young ruler, but he was put in Shiloh. And so here there's an extension of it, 11 times. You know we talk about John four where proscuneo was mentioned eight times and derivatives are there, and it's the wonderful story about worship.
Speaker 1:What is God really looking for? But here, with Samuel, the one that would change the days of the judges into the days of prophetic streaming, the the days of the judges into a kingdom, the days where the people just did what was right in their own eyes, the the development of the Rama schools. These were all things that God wanted to do, and Samuel had to leave his own purpose, whatever that would be in the natural, to follow God. That's incredible, isn't it? So God is calling to Samuel.
Speaker 1:God is calling. 11 times we have this Karah. I think God was serious about this, don't you? So let's look next at how God called to Moses out of the tabernacle. Leviticus one one.
Speaker 1:Yahweh called Korah unto Moses and spoke unto him out of the tabernacle saying. This is interesting because the tabernacle represented not only the place of meeting, but the place of invading under the direction of the spirit of God according to his timing. God spoke out of that. In second Samuel 22 verse seven, and is a direct directly, quoted in Psalm eighteen six. David says, in my distress I called upon the Lord, and called to my God, and he heard my voice out of his temple.
Speaker 1:So you have God hearing the Korah in the temple. This was before the temple was built. This this is probably the temple in heaven. God showed this to David, and David was able to script out how the temple in in Solomon's day could be built. But it was a Qurah communication.
Speaker 1:This is what you want to do God. I'm committing myself to it. In Psalm three:three David says, Thou, O Lord, are a shield for me, my glory and the lifter up of my head. I corrode unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill. Selah.
Speaker 1:So here we have God and God is responding to someone who has abandoned their own earthly desires to embrace a calling that God was presenting to them. Now I want to meddle a little bit here. I'm just fair warning. A lot of times we say we're doing God's work, but we're really doing our work and they're just asking God to bless it. You know, I suppose that people who are called into the ministry and go to some school to learn bible training, ministry training.
Speaker 1:I was there for four years, and then I was in seminary for years following that. And but I have to tell you that I was learning how to minister, but I can tell you what most people in ministry think. Just cut down to the bare bones. They're hoping for a good place to serve where they can provide for their family. And they're hoping to do a good enough job so that a next state, the next place would look at them and say, oh, let's interview them in a bigger city, in a bigger facility, in a bigger congregation.
Speaker 1:And God we pray you bless that. Now I'm not saying God can't use that, but for the most part it's our plan. For the most part it's we're gonna do the work of the Lord but we're gonna do it in a way that we prepared for and that we are gonna ask God to bless. And most of that is our own plan. Now again, I'm not saying everybody is that way, but I am saying that the majority of people are that way.
Speaker 1:We don't want God doing anything weird that will destroy what we've built. We don't want if there's anybody that's having a manifestation, we don't want to scare the people in the back row who are the big givers. So you skirt those people off to the side. That's the way it is. God, we want you to come and bless.
Speaker 1:We don't want you doing anything strange that will risk what we've built. So when God speaks to somebody about a Korah, They're asking he's asking for somebody to partner with him in a miraculous way, and it's going to entail you taking the shoes off your feet. It's going to entail you doing something that is different than what you planned for. Now God can bless the other. I'm not saying he can't.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying God doesn't love all of the good little girls and boys that are just playing it safe and asking God to bless it. But if you're going to change the nations, if you're going to change the world, it's very likely that God's going to say, come over here. Take the shoes off your feet. And he's going to communicate in a Korah setting. Second Chronicles seven fourteen famous famous passage.
Speaker 1:If my people who are called Korah by my name will humble themselves, pray, seek my face, turn from wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. If you want an extravagant work from God to be done that He has chosen, He's going to ask for an extravagant offering from you. And know Thomas Jefferson, one of the great icons of American history said, and I can't quote him directly but I remember reading in his journals, he said, If you want to do something that is extraordinary you're going to have to do it in an extraordinary way. And that's true. When he bought the Louisiana Purchase from the Napoleonic government, Many people in the Eastern Coast said, You're wasting money.
Speaker 1:Don't do it. When Seward bought the Alaska territory, it was called Seward's Folly because he was doing something that in a land far far away for people who just wanted to stay by the home fires and use whatever monies were there to placate their own desires. If you're going to, you can't offer to God something that doesn't cost you. So if my people which are called by my name, God spoke spoke to Moses in that first verse where he was having the two the carvings of the 10 commandments. God was talking about his name.
Speaker 1:His name is what he's doing. The name is what he is wanting to represent upon the earth. The name is not a signature for you to put on whatever check you're wanting. If we're following the name of God, we and we're called by his name. That means that we have embraced His plan.
Speaker 1:We have embraced something that He's doing. And and if you're if you're not feeling a sense of, uncomfortability, maybe you're not really walking in the Korah. Jeremiah 33, famous song we've heard this from the Morningstar recordings. Jeremiah thirty three, the word of the Lord came unto Jeremiah the second time while he was shut up in the court of the prison. Well, that's a good place.
Speaker 1:Thus says the Lord, the maker thereof, the Lord that formed it to establish it. The Lord is his name. Call unto me, and I will answer you and will show you great and mighty things which you did not know. Call unto me. And then Psalm 42 verse seven.
Speaker 1:Deep charaz, unto deep. What's that mean? We've studied a lot in the New Testament about the garment of the saints being indicative of going into the deep places, the bathos, the bisos. We've talked about we've extrapolated that study into the book of Revelation, into that marriage supper, and the garments of the saints are this, bisanos, where you have determined that you're going to go with God into the deep places. And there was some other guy that was a friend of the Lord.
Speaker 1:Well, obviously he was there in heaven for legally, but he wasn't wearing this garment and he got the left foot of fellowship, in love, from the Lord. You figure that one out. How do you get up here? Is there a backdoor in heaven? Did he come through some enemy trapdoor?
Speaker 1:No. No. Friend is what Jesus called him. So when I read deep calls to deep, I'm saying that you have you have found yourself in the deep place of the Lord because you've to be there, and it calls to these resources of the waters of God. I love this.
Speaker 1:Isaiah 56 verse seven. Jesus quotes this during his temple escapades in the New Testament. Even then will I bring them to my holy mountain to make joyful in my house of prayer, their burnt offerings and their sacrifices accepted on my altar. My house shall be called, Karah, a house of prayer for all people. How many people?
Speaker 1:All people. Isn't that interesting? So the house of prayer is just not people praying whatever way they want to. And I know there are many different types of prayer that are mentioned in the Hebrew and in the Greek. We've studied them from Sha'al to Prosyoke to Eitayo to Iritao.
Speaker 1:We've studied those and more. But what will Jesus' house of prayer be? It's the house of Korah, and it's for all nations. We should consider this. This is the first Jesus quoted.
Speaker 1:He was looking for people who would embrace his ways and call upon him for what he wants to do. Not just coming to pray the prayer list or the prayer chain or lifting up all the the petitions that we have, and there's nothing wrong with casting your cares upon the Lord. But if you're going to touch the nations it's going to be a house of Korah. Look at Look at what these people of Korah are supposed to do. Recently we did fasting over ten weeks' time and we studied, we call it the fasting decalogue from Isaiah 58, the 10 facets of that fast that God chooses.
Speaker 1:And five times during that fasting decalogue, qarah is used. And it speaks about us representing God and being in a position through our fasting to do that efficiently. Because fasting is not to bend the arm of God, it is to prepare us to partner with the arm of God. You understand that? They that be of you will build the old waste places.
Speaker 1:They will raise up the foundations of many generations, and you will be karah, the repairer of the gap, the restorer of paths to dwell in. That place God has called you to to rest on. He sought for someone to stand in that gap. You said, here am I. I'll do it.
Speaker 1:I will do this for you, Lord. And you're called that. You're you're called. You're restoring that breach, and you're restoring the vitality of the parats, the breaker, because you were willing to say yes to the Lord. Isaiah 60.
Speaker 1:This is this is amazing. Spirit of the Lord is upon me. Another verse that Jesus read for his first sermon. And here we have four instances of Korah in Isaiah. The first is Korah liberty to the captives.
Speaker 1:Somebody's gonna have to be meek to lay their own strength down. Somebody's gonna have to get their heart in order so that the steering wheel of our life is seeking God, and you then are freed from bondage to partner in the liberty of the Korah. Then we're proclaiming Korah in the acceptable year of the Lord. This is similar to what we talked about last week with Mary, the spirit coming upon her signifying a new thing. Then we're breaking through the spirit of heaviness to be called called charah, the trees of righteousness where God is planted.
Speaker 1:And we will be charahed, as the priests of the Lord, ministers of Elohim, and will eat the riches of the Gentiles, and in their glory we will boast in the Lord. Joel three nine. He's speaking about the Gentiles as well. Proclaim you this among the Gentiles. Korah this among the Gentiles.
Speaker 1:Prepare war. Wake up the mighty men. Let all of the men of war draw near. Let them come up. Beat your plowshares into swords, your pruning hooks into spears.
Speaker 1:Let the weak say I am strong. Assemble yourselves and come, all of the heathen, gather yourselves round about. Thither cause the mighty ones to come down, O Lord. This is what we're doing as a saints network right now. Do you realize this?
Speaker 1:We're being sent into the nations, to the Gentile church. The tabernacle of David is that if we believe what the scripture says. And we're calling them to a qurah before God. We're preparing them for war. We're preparing them to stand in their gap and to pray this way in this relationship with God.
Speaker 1:You understand this, don't you? Over and over again, you're going to heal the nation. This is what you do. You're going to raise up a house of prayer? This is what you do in it.
Speaker 1:Oh, what about loving God? What about telling Him how much we care? Well, if Elvis had a tune in the hymnal, he would probably say, little less talk, little more action. It's one thing to tell God you love him, it's another thing to tell God you'll give your life to do what he's wanting to have done right now. I remember when we were all first overwhelmed by the honeymoon outpouring of the Spirit when he called us to be saints.
Speaker 1:And when we first started saying, you know what the scripture says those prayers that we're praying need to be interpreted. And the scripture is saying that we, yes, we love the Lord and we worship him, but what does love really mean? What is agape? And what is God asking us to do? And there were lots of people who said, oh, well I don't want to work.
Speaker 1:I just want to love I just want to feel his love and I want to spend time with him. Let me tell you, we should never abandon that kind of pursuit of his passion. But God is not just looking for a beautiful date. He's looking for a partner, and he's wanting you to be an heir and a joint heir. And what he's wanting to do right now is to restore the ancient desolate places that have been broken down, and he's looking for somebody that will be a redeemer for him.
Speaker 1:That's the Korah. And when we begin to do this, we find ourselves as heirs and joint heirs partnering with the angelic in new ways. One of the first kind of an odd examples is in Genesis 21. Abram showed measures of impatience and his wife also had bright idea since she was not at that point having children yet, she brings her servant Hagar to the man of God. And he does what the man of God did back then, and he produces a child with her named Ishmael.
Speaker 1:You know that story. Pretty soon then Hagar is given the stink eye to Sarah. Sarah's saying, I have enough of this. Get rid of this get rid of this woman and her child. Problem was that this was the seed of Abram and God took that very seriously.
Speaker 1:So Abram sends this woman out into the wilderness, you know this story, and they're about to die because they're out of water, they don't have food, and God hears the voice of the lad. There it is on your teaching sheet. And the angel of God called Korah to Hagar out of heaven. What aileth thee, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the lad where he is, Ishmael, the son of Abram, calls out his calling.
Speaker 1:This is kind of a hard thing to answer, to explain, but considering what the seed of Ishmael would do even in the day we're living in. But God honors Abram. And the angel heard the karah of the boy and, the angel calls. Genesis twenty-two 11, the next chapter. The angel of the Lord charod out of heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, here I am.
Speaker 1:And then in verse 14, Abram charod, the name of that place Jehovah Jireh. This was when Isaac was being offered in obedience to God. And in verse 15, the angel of the Lord corralled unto Abraham out of heaven the second time. So Abram was offering himself, his plan, his son to God, and this initiated the Korah for him in heaven. And the angel is Korahi.
Speaker 1:But boil it down to this. Abram was willing to abandon what was most important in his natural life for God. It's kind of a gruesome but yet prophetic picture. God provided. And the angel communicates, Abram, Abram, that intimate double issuance.
Speaker 1:What about Isaiah in Isaiah six one? In the year that king Uzziah died, we know this story, don't we? I saw the Lord sitting upon the throne high and lifted up. His train filled the temple. Seraphim are flying about, and one charade unto another.
Speaker 1:Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. And the posts of the roar moved at the voice of him that Qurad, the house filled with smoke. We have other instances with Daniel where there was the exchange of Korah, God speaking, the angel speaking. And I'll just say this, that when you abandon your own desires and you embrace the nest that God has called you to fill, and you're partnering with God in that way, and you're speaking to God in his holy hill, in his temple, in his tabernacle, on that Korah wavelength, the angels respond to that. Could it be any more clear?
Speaker 1:I don't think so. So what we've studied about Korah over the years has been accurate. It's been very simply, I'm going to embrace something that God has asked me to do, and in obedience and love to him, I'm willing to do that. We've equated it with the parrets, the standing in the gap. And we've enjoyed these other aspects, but now God is saying, I want you to take a deeper look at where this anointed word is used, And I want you to respect the power that is within these passages that is reserved for those who are engaged in the Korah.
Speaker 1:Do you understand that? There's some unusual scriptures that you'll read about, like, pharaoh making a Korah appeal in authority in in his kingdom. Why would that be? Because, essentially, that entire Egyptian civilization was built upon the principles that God is laying out, but it was being utilized for demonic and human purposes. So all of the the accumulation of wealth and the conquering of territories and the, the seeking after the spirit realm and the Egyptian hierarchy of the demonic.
Speaker 1:There was power in that, in the enemy. And so when Pharaoh would speak a qurah command, it was in a perverted way, a perversion of the purpose of God. It was applying the eternal principles in a demonic way. I think we'll experience things like that in the days to come where remember we've studied about when the enemy is in control in the book of Revelation, and everywhere the mark of the beast is mentioned, it is always accompanied by proskuneo. And not only do the people need to take the mark or be killed, but they have to proscuneo before the enemy or be killed.
Speaker 1:There's power in that, and the enemy wants it for himself. He wants what God has ordained for mankind. The enemy wants that for himself. I don't want to focus on the enemy, but what I'm saying is you'll find instances of Korah, but you've seen what the true definition is. And I pray that as you engage in this study, that you'll also embrace the empowerment that God is making available to you.
Speaker 1:So I've given you this smattering of scriptures. I believe that it's something that God wants us to look at now because there is an enhanced release of partnership with God in the mission he's given us, Enhanced an enhanced authority, an enhanced awareness of what God has promised through this amazing partnership. So, dare I say that because you've chosen to partner with God in this way, it has given you communicative access to the holy hill of heaven, to the temple of the tabernacle, and to the place that God is calling you to establish for him. It has given you communicative access to the angelic in that same partnership. It is giving you communicative access to the deep places, the resources of the spirit that he's called you to access through the power of his cross and through the amazing awareness of partnership with him.
Speaker 1:All of these are your promises. So let's embrace it. Let's study it, and let's become it to a greater degree than we've known. Thanks for joining today. Don't forget this coming Friday we'll be posting another devotional on the power of God.
Speaker 1:It'll be in the Saints Network channel of this website. And then we'll look forward again to being with you this coming Sunday. Until then, God bless you, and goodbye.