“(God’s) Master Plan is announced in our original identity …” (Rom. 8:28b, MB)
Since Day 1181 we have been taking a slight detour from the teaching of spiritual mantles, to focus on the term forget, as well as its complement, remember. These were presented as a complementary pair that are foregrounded as immensely important in the larger message of the Bible. We thus want to spend some more time focussing on this important pair of terms, as it can reveal a lot about calling, mantles, spiritual authority and remembering that which is before time.
Those who have forgotten God do not remember that which is before time, in other words, they do not remember another reality – they do not hear “the calling with which … [they] were called” (Eph. 4:1). Remember that calling is part of the completion, perfection, conclusion, fulfilment of God’s desired end goal of who you were before time, or then: what you already are in the other reality (which is outside of time)! Rom. 8:30 suggests it in these terms: “Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called …” Every born again individual is thus “called … with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began” (2 Tim. 1:9). Therefore Paul says in 1 Cor. 7:17 – “But as God has distributed to each one, as the Lord has called each one, so let him walk …”, and in verse 20: “Let each one remain in the same calling in which he was called.”
The extraordinary translation of Rom. 8:28b-30a in the Mirror Bible explains this beautifully: “(God’s) Master Plan is announced in our original identity. He pre-designed and engineered us from the start to be jointly fashioned in the same mould and image of his Son according to the exact blueprint of his thought. We see the original and intended pattern of our lives preserved in his Son. He is the firstborn from the same womb that reveals our genesis. He confirms that we we are the invention of God. Jesus reveals that man pre-existed in God; He defines us.”
This understanding of calling then also necessarily implies that there is One who calls man to the fulfilment of the task. The believer should answer this call by taking up his position in Christ.
The story of Samson in Judges 15 beautifully illustrates this in typological terms. In verse 11 we read that Samson lived in “the cleft of the rock of Etam”, where the men of Judah went to find him so that they could deliver him to the Philistines. The ABP-translation presents this verse as “a hole in the rock”, which clearly implies Samson’s life IN CHRIST the Rock. With his consent they bound him and “brought him up from the rock” (verse 13). When he reached Lehi (which interestingly enough means jawbone in Hebrew), when the Philistines came to meet him, the Spirit of God came over him, and he grabbed the jawbone of a donkey that was lying nearby and killed a thousand of his opponents.
One is struck by the fact that the area where this took place is already predestined by the name or identity that Samson’s salvation carries – the jawbone. Here it is specifically the jawbone of a donkey. Let us for a moment pause and think about the symbolic meaning of the donkey in Scripture.
The donkey is found in various instances in the Bible, with the specific purpose of firstly illustrating wealth (for instance Gen. 12:16; 32:15; 45:23; 49:11; Job 1:3 and 14), and secondly as the traditional example of the beast of burden, as it is referred to in 2 Pet. 2:16.
In 1 Kings 1:33-34 Solomon rides one of David’s donkeys on the way to Gihon, to be anointed as king (also see 2 Sam. 13:19; 19:26), which then suggests that this action is the equivalent of royal status, as it is for instance presented in the royal archives of Mari, as well as the classic Sumerian text the epic of Gilgamesh, namely that the sons of kings ride on donkeys. (Also applicable to judges – see Judg. 10:4 and 12:4.) But it is primarily Zech. 9:9 which lays the prophetic foundation of the donkey as royal vehicle: “Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your King is coming to you; He is just and having salvation, lowly and riding on a donkey, a colt, the foal of a donkey.” In Matt. 21:5 and John 12:15 the prophetic fulfilment of this is reported – Jesus enters Jerusalem on a donkey. Like his typological predecessor, Moses, who also rode on a donkey (Ex. 4:20), it also points to them both being characteristically humble. Another Scripture that links to this is 1 Sam. 10:1-9, Samuel’s prophecy that points to the mules that will be found, and that are linked to Saul’s position as king, which in turn is again linked to Jacob’s prophecy about Judah (the tribe to which Jesus belonged): “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh comes; and to Him shall be the obedience of the people. Binding his donkey to the vine, and his donkey’s colt to the choice vine, He washed his garments in wine, and his clothes in the blood of grapes.” (Gen. 49:10-11). This vine is clearly the Christ (John 15).
After Samson’s victory over the enemy, he makes the reason for his victory quite clear in Judg. 15:16: “Then Samson said: ‘With the jawbone of a donkey, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of a donkey I have slain a thousand men!’” We then read in the next verse: “And so it was, when he had finished speaking, that he threw the jawbone from his hand, and called that place Ramath Lehi. Then he became very thirsty; so he cried out to the Lord and said, ‘You have given this great deliverance by the hand of Your servant; and now shall I die of thirst and fall into the hand of the uncircumcised?’ So God split the hollow place that is in Lehi, and water came out, and he drank; and his spirit returned, and he revived. Therefore he called its name En Hakkore, which is in Lehi to this day.”
God answers Samson through a supernatural event – in contrast to what most of the translations note, God has the water flow from the jawbone! The CAB-translation reads as follows: “And God broke open a hollow place in the jaw, and there came out water …” It revived his spirit, similar to how Jesus explained in John 4:14: “but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”
Another interesting linguistic element to consider is the fact that Samson then calls the place En Hakkore, which, according to Easton’s Bible Dictionary, means: “Ramah of Lehi”, or then: “height of the jawbone”. Note the similarity between the Hebrew ramah and the Greek rhema, especially because the latter is also concerned with language/sound-identity in the heavens (=spiritual realm, third dimension). The donkey was the only animal who could still speak after the fall (Num. 22:22-33). The jawbone of the donkey could then easily be the symbol of Samson’s rhema-word, his unique identity in Christ, his “sword of the spirit” (Eph. 6:17), his rhema-word that announces God’s “Master Plan … in our original identity”! From there, from out of the innermost being of the jawbone, flows his God-given identity.
- Selah: What do you remember about your primal Godly identity?
- Read: 47-49; Matt. 21-22.
- Memorise: 49:10-11 (what glorious synchronicity!).
