Revelation 2:7 “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.”
The place we call home in Israel is in the rebuilt city of Arad, an ancient city rebuilt in 1962 near the historic site of Tel Arad. It was the first planned city in Israel.
Tel Arad was an ancient fortress that, according to archaeologists, has been destroyed and rebuilt at least ten times. The citadel was thought to have originally been built during the times of King David and Solomon. The Negev desert’s arid conditions have remarkably preserved the fortress’s archaeological layers, providing a continuous record of its history for hundreds of years.
One of the most significant discoveries within the ruins of Tel Arad is the only Israelite temple ever found in an archaeological dig. Inside the site, you can see an Israelite altar and two limestone incense altars, which once stood at the entrance of the Holy of Holies.
This Israelite temple (high place) remained perfectly preserved, and archaeologists attribute its destruction to King Hezekiah’s reforms.
During his reign, Hezekiah removed the idolatrous cults and destroyed the high places throughout Judah (2 Chronicles 32:11-12; 2 Kings 18:4; 2 Kings 18:22; Isaiah 36:7).
The high place at Tel Arad was buried beneath a layer of dirt, and great respect was shown during the process. Both incense altars were laid on their sides before the entire structure was covered, effectively erasing the memory of the temple from history until excavations began on the Tel in the 1960s.
Some believe this final burial may have occurred during the reign of King Josiah (2 Kings 23:1-37). Regardless of the exact timing, worship at the high place came to an end.
Fast forward to today, and recent scientific techniques have shed new light on this ancient site.
In 2021, as Israel’s Knesset debated the decriminalization of cannabis, researchers revealed that the incense altars at the Tel Arad temple contained traces of cannabis, frankincense, and dung.
Astonishingly, the very place God commanded to be destroyed for its idolatry—what Hezekiah referred to as a “high place”—was indeed a literal “high place.”
Just months before the Israeli government debated the cannabis question, God provided the answer through archaeology: “Bury the habit!” The cannabis used in the ancient temple produced a counterfeit high, unlike the true euphoria that comes from being in the presence of God and worshipping Him.
While many argue that the Bible doesn’t address modern issues, we are constantly surrounded by evidence that God continues to answer even the most challenging questions of our time—because God is still speaking to us today! The real question is … “Are we attentively listening?”
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[worthy_plugins_devotion_single_body]As we discussed last week, the word for “sign” in ancient Hebrew is “oht”. It was used in Genesis to designate God’s covenant sign with Noah, (the rainbow). And we see now the same word again, in Exodus, identified with the deliverance of the Jewish people from the tenth plague, when the angel of death passed through all Egypt to strike the firstborn. Anyone under the “sign” of the blood was spared.
Yesterday we wrote about one of the greatest moves of God … the Moravian Revival. When the community was in complete disarray, Count Zinzendorf focused on how they could live together in love despite their differences. He called all the men together for an intense study of the Scriptures to focus on how Christian life in community was portrayed. These studies combined with intense prayer convinced many of the believers that they were called to live together in love and that their disunity and conflict were contrary to the clear calling of Scripture.
In the late 1800s, an awakening in South Africa led by Andrew Murray was a powerful move of God. Studying that revival yields essential insights concerning the events occurring now throughout the United States. As the spirit of God began to move in Cape Town, Murray compared the SA revival with past experiences of revivals in Europe. He decided that the intense “emotionalism” was a false experience of God and charged in to break up the meeting. Stepping out of the church, he encountered his father standing and weeping. His father rebuked Andrew, “How dare you stop something that I have prayed to happen for 30 years!”
Revivals, that is, genuine Divinely ordained seasons of the activity of God among men, have a universally unusual character. Normal activities and behaviors give way to the tangible influence of God’s Holy Spirit, whose inspiration brings a freedom of expression, emotion, conviction, worship, and other variations from normal experience.
During the Catholic inquisitions, as millions of Christians were being killed by the Jesuit Priests for apostasy, throughout Europe, Christians were fleeing. In Bohemia alone, there were an estimated 4,000,000 Christians before the Jesuit inquisition, and ten years later, only 800,000 people remained in Bohemia – all of whom were Catholic. These terrible events prepared the ground for one of the greatest moves of God that have ever been recorded, the Moravian Revival, which lasted for over 100 years. Gustav Warneck, the German Historian of Protestant Missions, testified, “This small church in twenty years called into being more missions than the whole Evangelical Church has done in two centuries.”
I love to study past revivals and in studying them, there are two recurring themes that stand out:
First, that He has often used obscure and unknown individuals to lead revivals, and that even these men whom He used so powerfully never considered themselves to be “special”, but often wanted to stay out of the limelight.
During the Great Depression, poverty swept across America like a whirling tornado, ripping up dreams and scattering hopes to the wind. One such poverty twister hit a small part of Texas where a man named Yates ran a sheep ranch. Struggling even to keep food on the table, Yates and his wife did all they could to survive. Finally, they had to accept a government subsidy or lose their home and land to the creditors.