I have a single, simple point to make before we carry on together. I dunno how many of you have messed around with the Book of Jashar… but we’re gonna need it in a coming article. And we should probably be on the same page -- and you not think I’m too much of a lunatic (“just enough” of a lunatic is ideal), so I wanna set a straight path today.
You might recall when we talked about Joshua’s idea of what is possible, as our faith increases we start to develop an expectation that the earth wants to work with us to accomplish the will of God. Recall Joshua 10:12, where he’s leading Israel in battle to destroy the entire Amorite army under the instruction of the Lord; he’s watching meteors take down more Amorites than soldiers were killing with swords; this is pretty helpful to Joshua to fully assure him that yeah, this is God’s will; daylight is running out and he tells the sun and moon to stand still to give them enough time to finish the work.
And then in verse 10:13 the scriptures do something interesting: they defer authority to the Book of Jashar. It reads, “And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.”
We are correct in believing that every word of scripture is the Holy Spirit teaching us the truth of God. Through men, throughout history, he’s doing what Jesus taught in John 16:14, “He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” So we rightly believe that the scripture carries the full weight of the authority of our Father.
And in this particular case… when Holy Spirit says, “Is this not written in the Book of Jashar?” – lemme paint an example of what I mean by “deferring authority”:
Suppose you’re telling someone, “Dude! Lloyd was over at the Gas’n’Sip last Friday night, and he saw Bruce and that new French kid Michel get mugged right on the corner outside! But then this girl came outta nowhere and did some kinda jiu-jitsu crazy moves and beat the crap outta the thief, and I think he went to jail or something!”
And your someone’s like, “No way! You gotta be kidding me!”
And you’re like, “For real! Don’t believe me? Go ask Lloyd, he was right there!”
… because Lloyd is the eye-witness and more of an authority on what went down than you are.
This story in Joshua is that. “Here’s what Joshua said to the sun and moon, and they stopped in mid-heaven. Don’t believe me? Go ask Jashar.” The authority or authenticity of the story is deferred to Jashar’s account.
To double-down on it, 2 Samuel 1:17-18 does the same. “And David lamented with this lamentation over Saul and Jonathan his son, and he said it should be taught to the people of Judah; behold, it is written in the Book of Jashar.” Like saying, “Here, I’m gonna tell you about this song that I got from this other book and I’ll teach it to you here.”
Adding a fun undercurrent to it, the Hebrew word “yashar” (which is also the name Jashar H3477) means “straight”, “right”, “honest”, “safe”... Almost as if the Helper is trying to help us trust the book by virtue of whose name it’s titled under.
So here’s where we put some guard rails on this business.
Not everything in Jashar should be treated as equally-inspired-by-Holy-Ghost as Scripture. It takes careful discernment to sift it and separate the wheat from the chaff. I mean, I haven’t even read the whole book so I don’t even know what all might be lurking in there. But there are parts where scripture says something relatively ambiguous, and then you’re reading along in Jashar and you come upon this little tidbit that makes what scripture said suddenly make a lot of sense. In the next article I’m gonna have to use it in that way to make a stunning point – Jashar bridges two critical sections of scripture that honestly make no sense on their own.
I’ll give you a quick example for fun here, and then we can sleep on it.
This one starts with my man Noah – but in Genesis 6 you wouldn’t know that’s who we’re talking about. Right at the top of the chapter is one of those most fascinating moments in history, where rebellious angels – not the ones that fell after Satan’s war against Michael, these are some different ones, later on – come down and physically mate with human women. Not only are these guys who you usually consider to be 100% spiritual beings very tangible, but they’re fully interacting with the created things.
By the way, anyone who tells you angels can’t reproduce, or have no reproductive organs or whatever; you just refer them to Genesis 6. I mean, tbh, if you even hear someone try to tell you that angels have wings, please refer them to “the whole Bible” because not once does an angel appear with wings. Even when they appear in the sky to the shepherds in the field, or they’re flying through mid-heaven – no wings. Seraphim and Cherubim have wings. Angels fly like superman. They look like tall men dressed in brilliant white robes. There are NO scriptural accounts of angels with wings. And if someone starts telling you they had a dream or a vision of an angel with wings – seriously, seriously put up your radar and shields. Prolly wasn’t of God; not necessarily demonic; I think most often it’s their own imagination trying to comfort or affirm themselves.
Okay back to Genesis 6. All this evil stuff is happening and now verse 3 says, “Then the LORD said, ‘My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.’” Until I read Jashar, I had heard what every religious dude will mindlessly spout at you: “God said nobody will ever live to over 120 ever again.” – even though tons of dudes live many hundreds of years after that statement is made, including Noah at 950, with 350 of them after the flood, and Shem at 600… the list goes on. Even Abraham way down the line lives to 175. What, do we think when God speaks it takes a couple thousand years for men to pay attention to what he said and it happens?
(i’ll touché myself and say you could make a case for that, seeing as nobody has yet done greater things than Jesus… that’s on us) Naw, the plain fact is that verse 3 doesn’t mean that at all.
But when you head over to Jashar, it’s explained very clearly. They organize Jashar into chapter and verse to make it easy to reference like the scriptures. By the time we get to Chapter 4, God is at that point where he regretted that he had made man on the earth (Gen 6:6).
Genesis 6:7: So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.”
Jasher 4:19: And the Lord said, I will blot out man that I created from the face of the earth, yea from man to the birds of the air, together with cattle and beasts that are in the field for I repent that I made them.
Then Jasher continues to tell how the Lord made all the people who had followed him start to die so they wouldn’t have to live through the flood. In Chapter 5:6 we get this helpful tidbit:
And after the lapse of many years, in the four hundred and eightieth year of the life of Noah, when all those men, who followed the Lord had died away from amongst the sons of men, and only Methuselah was then left, God said unto Noah and Methuselah, saying, [7] Speak ye, and proclaim to the sons of men, saying, Thus saith the Lord, return from your evil ways and forsake your works, and the Lord will repent of the evil that he declared to do to you, so that it shall not come to pass. [8] For thus saith the Lord, Behold I give you a period of one hundred and twenty years; if you will turn to me and forsake your evil ways, then will I also turn away from the evil which I told you, and it shall not exist, saith the Lord. [9] And Noah and Methuselah spoke all the words of the Lord to the sons of men, day after day, constantly speaking to them. [10] But the sons of men would not hearken to them, nor incline their ears to their words, and they were stiffnecked. [11] And the Lord granted them a period of one hundred and twenty years, saying, If they will return, then will God repent of the evil, so as not to destroy the earth.
So Genesis 6:3 means God gave people 120 years to repent before the flood.
Can you imagine being Noah and his grandfather Methuselah, going around preaching that one message for 120 years?? I know you can’t imagine doing anything at all for 120 years, but even imagine having the same message for One year, much less five; or Fifty!… Seriously, let's say God came to you when you were six and said, "Tell everyone you see to repent or I'll kill them in a giant global flood," and you were still at it to this day. Life of the party.
115 years into that message, Noah’s wicked father Lamech dies and God tells Noah to start building the ark when he’s 595 years old. He does it in five years and the flood happens in Noah’s 600th year.
Just imagine that kind of life… Fascinating.
Anyway; without Jasher being given permission by the Holy Spirit to be part of the official record, we might think we all need to go die by 120 and keep speaking that death over ourselves ;)
See what the doctrines of demons do to us??
So that's an example of how Jashar can contribute to our understanding of the heavens and the earth. You can find Jashar as a free PDF, if you’re curious about it. Just please, please… if you find something meaningful to you in there, share it with someone who keeps you accountable in your walk. Test the spirits, talk it out, be okay with being wrong. Don’t blindly trust, but don’t be too guarded either. The Lord speaks through many prophetic sources and it’s quite helpful that he vouches for this one.
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