01/25/2024
It’s Tu B’Shevat, the traditional date that marks the beginning of a “New Year for Trees.” 🌳 Tu B’Shevat is associated with the start of spring in Israel (since the earliest-blooming trees begin a new fruit-bearing cycle). The rainy and cold season ends when the blossoms of almond trees first begin to appear. 🌸
God gave Jeremiah a lesson from this tree and we can also remember that sometimes we see a word from the lord blossom but it takes a while to bear fruit.
Jeremiah 1:11 - 12
“The word of the Lord came to me: “What do you see, Jeremiah?” “I see the branch of an almond tree,” I replied. The Lord said to me, “You have seen correctly, for I am watching to see that my word is fulfilled.”
The Bible’s allusion that human life is “like the tree of the field,” Deuteronomy 20:19 led many people to observe Tu B’Shevat as time to assess man’s place within creation. Since God created the world for a habitation some have pictured the world itself as a “great tree”. Yeshua often used such agricultural images in his parables. Yeshua regarded the world as a “field” for planting with different “types of soil” (Matthew 13:38 - 43) and warned of the “great harvest” of souls at the end of the age. He pointed to signs from a fig tree to indicate the nearness of the prophesied End of Days.
The book of Jeremiah is a reminder to be like a tree planted by the water which is a representation of the Holy Sprit.
Jeremiah 17:7–8
“Blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”
Finally, in 1948 the State of Israel miraculously came to pass, and one of the first things the settlers did when they came back to their land was to plant trees . Tu B’Shevat therefore resembles an “Israeli Arbor Day” when trees are planted and the rebirth of the Jewish homeland is celebrated. 🇮🇱
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