As I sit down to write this blog, my first thought, as is every thought right now, is upon all those in the world who are battling the Covid19 virus. Whether that be as patients, doctors, nurses (soldiers), medical or post death care workers, government leaders, whoever you are, our family’s constant thoughts and constant prayers are with you every single day.
Quarantine Life has brought a few changes for our family, but not like most. I home school my three children so we were not affected in the least in that way. I also work from home, so again, I wasn’t affected in that way either.
My husband, Josh, was also laid off on October 1, 2019 so we were already handling that and all the work I do is from home, so that wasn’t a problem for us.
Right now, we are healthy, strong, and grateful. How we have been affected by Covid19 is in the same way as millions of people all over the globe. We are staying home. Quarantined. No basketball games. No outside lessons. No church or youth events. No Huggabear Children’s Project, Inc. events. No concerts or performances anywhere. No (regular) shopping. No dining out. No libraries. No movies. No parties or social events of any kind… you understand. BUT! We are thankful to be healthy and alive and not suffering like so many hundreds of thousands of people in our world today. May God bless them all.
While I have had this time without any extra running around or activities, I have had more time to read, study, write, sing, and create–which I love doing.
In order for you to get a better understanding of what I am going to write in this post, I need to explain a few things. First, one of my favorite nonfiction authors and teachers of the Word of God is Rabbi Jonathan Cahn who is a Christian Rabbi of New Jersey and founder of Hope of the World ministries. www.HopeOfTheWorld.org
Rabbi Cahn has a church in New Jersey and is a New York Times best selling author. He has written several books and I, ironically, got the last one and am working my way backward to the first! His other works include, The Harbinger, The Mystery of the Shemitah, The Book of Mysteries, The Paradigm, and, The Oracle. (Since I wrote this article, he also wrote The Harbinger II and published it this year in 2020).
I highly recommend these books to anyone who is a believer in God and His Holy Word, the Bible. They will enlighten you in ways that I can’t describe well enough in written words. What reading his books has done for me is opened my eyes to see that God is still doing miraculous works of mystery all around us everyday. Prophesies are coming true all around us even though we don’t always see it as it is happening or even understand it. Rabbi Cahn has been given a gift of understanding and his works have inspired me to look deeper into the timings of events that occur in my life. For example, the Pandemic of Covid 19.
I learned from Rabbi Cahn’s books that our calendar, the “Gregorian Calendar” or Christian (western) Calendar, is not the calendar that God uses. While we are recording and tracking our days, weeks, months and years by the sun, God uses the moon to track and calculate time. Upon learning this I bought a calendar that has both the dates of the western world and the dates according to God; the Jewish calendar.
The Jewish calendar differs from ours in many ways. Let’s begin with the days and how a day begins and ends. Genesis 1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness He called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.“
What is key here is that first, there was darkness. Then God spoke and there was light. So God doesn’t count days beginning and ending at midnight like we do. He counts the ending of the day when the sun goes down and at sunset that is the start of the next day. Let me explain it this way. Today is Thursday, March 26th and the time is 4:23 pm. When the sun goes down this evening at let’s say 6:45 pm, according to God’s clock, Thursday is over and Friday has begun during the evening of March 26th. I hope that makes sense!
Knowing this helped me understand many key points in the Bible and I hope it will help you too. In addition to how God tracks the timing of days, it is also interesting how He tracks the months.
According to God’s calendar, the beginning of a new year is not January 1st like we recognize and celebrate it. On God’s calendar, the first month of the new year is called Elul and it takes place during the month of September.
With every new moon there comes a new month which makes the Jewish calendar lose about 11.25 days from the western calendar. For the purposes of this blog I am not going to delve further into the understanding of how the days and months are distributed, you can Google that and find all kinds of excellent information on how that part of it works. For this article, I just needed to explain the basic timing of the days and months and how they differ from the calendar that the western world uses.
Our family has daily devotionals and Bible studies with our children, once in the morning at the beginning of school and once at night before we go to bed. Before the new year of 2020 came, I felt led by the Holy Spirit of God to have our nightly Bible reading start from the beginning of the Bible in Genesis. We were entering a new year, a new decade, and it made sense to start it with the beginning of God’s Word.
There have been some nights we missed or some nights we re-read something, so the timing of us reading a chapter of God’s Word since the beginning of the new year has landed us, at present, in the book of Exodus and the ten plagues of Egypt.
One night this week while my husband, Josh, was reading, I started thinking about when the plagues began. I knew that next month, April 12, 2020 would be Easter, Resurrection Sunday, when Jesus rose from the grave after being crucified on the cross and Passover, which is the celebration of God “passing over the Hebrew nation” and protecting them from the angel death, would begin on April 8, 2020. This made me think, we are experiencing the Covid19 Pandemic, which some might call a “plague”, at the same time as the plagues took place during the days of Moses.
Here is the definition of the word plague according to Dictionary.com
Plague: a contagious bacterial disease characterized by fever and delirium, typically with the formation of buboes (bubonic plague ) and sometimes infection of the lungs (pneumonic plague). “an outbreak of plague”
The Biblical definition of a plague is a bit broader and is defined as anything that afflicts or troubles; calamity; scourge. Any contagious epidemic disease that is deadly.
I began my research and according to AskMoses.com (and other sites) I found “The plague of blood began on the first of Av 2447, and continued at the rate of one plague per month.”
The month of Av is during the end of July and beginning of August.
I then broke out my Christian/Jewish calendar and charted what the time frame looked like when comparing the two calendars and events side by side. If the first plague of blood began in Av and each month there was another plague, this is how it breaks down:
Plague Jewish Month Gregorian Month
1. Blood Av July/August
2. Frogs Elul August/September
3. Lice Tishri September/October
4. Flies Cheshvan October/November
5. Pestilence Kislev November/December
6. Boils Tevet December/January
7. Hail/Fire Shevat January/February
8. Locusts Adar February/March
9. Darkness Nisan March/April
10.Death of 1st Born Iyar April/May
Credible websites such as, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, all list the beginning of Covid19 from Wuhan, China during the month of December 2019.
When compared with the time frame of when the plague of pestilence (a fatal epidemic, disease) was cast upon the Egyptians as written in the book of Exodus, it would have been during the Jewish month of Kislev, which falls within the same time frame of the Covid19 emergence in December.
According to the scriptures, when Jesus Christ gave His life for all the sins of humanity upon the cross, He nullified the old covenant that sins must be paid for with other blood. His blood was enough to cover all the sins of all mankind for all time. He paid the price in full. The blood Jesus shed fulfilled the plan of salvation for the new covenant (promise), that mankind, when we humbled ourselves, repented of our sins, asked Jesus to forgive us, and to live in our heart as our Lord and Savior, would not have to die as a punishment, nor would God any longer place punishments upon us. Jesus took all our punishment.
Having said that, I do believe that there is evil in this world. The Bible tells us in 1 Peter 5:8 “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.” There are many other teachings of Christ in the New Testament which reveal there are many different kinds of strongman spirits, or evil spirits, that come to attack us. One of those is the strongman spirit of infirmity, meaning sickness and disease.
After studying the scriptures of God’s Word as well as the books of Jonathan Cahn I do believe what we are experiencing with the Covid 19 pandemic is a judgement. We have turned away from God. We have pushed Him out of our public places, our churches, our courtrooms, everywhere He could be removed by those in the government who endorsed it to be done, God was removed. So what do you think could possibly be the outcome of that? If we know that the devil roams the earth seeking to devour us, what hope is there of being protected from his attacks? Yet, then when tragedy strikes, we cry out, “God help us!” or “God bless America!”
Wait… what? How does that work? God, we don’t want You in our American schools, courthouses, public places, we don’t want to see crosses, we don’t allow prayer in our schools, we don’t want Your ten commandments placed in public view… but God bless America!
America… that is just not how it works.
And yet, even though Americans have done their very best to drive out God, Christ, His love, His gracy, His salvation and His hand of protection, still, He wants to bring us to redemption, forgiveness, and healing, He does not want to destroy us. That, my fellow Americans, is the supernatural power of God’s mercy. God wants to be able to work a merciful act through this pandemic to bring His children back to Him.
After the pandemic had started, I felt led to dive into the scriptures and study about the ten plagues during the time of Moses, and confirming they were taking place during the same time as what we are experiencing in this world with the plague of Covid19, I found this verse:
Exodus 9:15-16 “Now if I had stretched out My hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, then you would have been cut off from the earth. But indeed for this purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth.”
I believe that God once again, is extending to us His mighty hand of mercy while the Covid 19 pandemic rages on. I believe that those of us who return to Him, repent of our ways and cry out to Him for His forgiveness and mercy, He will show His power in us and then we will declare His name. I am declaring His name right now and I know without a doubt, though we may not see it or even understand it, His mighty hand is at work, even while I write.
Jonathan Cahn teaches us in The Harbinger II is a judgement that has come upon the world because of our sins, but most specifically, because of the killing of unborn children through abortion. (I highly recommend again for you to read all of the books God has given Jonathan Cahn!)
My mind travels to John 13:7 “Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” Again, just to be clear, I do not believe Jesus is placing this virus on people. Not at all. But for whatever reasons that we don’t understand at this time, He is allowing it to happen. I believe it is so that we will turn and cry out to Him.
My mind then goes to 2 Chronicles 7:14 “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”
Perhaps this is another reason why it is being allowed. So that people of all nations, especially America whose foundation was built upon God, Jehovah, will turn back to Him, the God who loves them more than they will ever imagine.
Is it too hard to believe that when we push God out of our nations, tell Him we don’t believe in Him, we don’t want to believe or obey His Word and instruction, and literally slap His beloved and mighty hand of protection away from us, that something like this could happen?
I have heard it taught that to fear God doesn’t mean that you are afraid of Who He is. God, Jehovah, Yahweh, calls us His children, His friends. He freely gave His only Son, Jesus Christ, to die for us whether we accepted His gift or not. He loves us more than we can possibly comprehend and wants to have a close relationship with us. There is no need to have fear of Him. The expression “to fear God”, means to revere Him, to respect Him, to trust, and believe what He teaches us in His Word. His Word is truth and to follow His path and direction is the way we can live a wonderful life!
The fear of God is not be afraid of Him, but to be afraid of living in this world without Him and the covering protection of His loving hand.
If ever there was ever a time for prayer–this is it. This is a time to humble ourselves and turn from the ways of the world to the ways of God and welcome His Holy Spirit to dwell in our lands and nations. I believe that God wants to do exactly as He has told us in Exodus 9:16: “But indeed for this purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth.”
I believe that is why God revealed the connection to the timing of the ten plagues and Covid19. What He said to the people then is what He is saying to the people now. He is the same and His Word remains true throughout all time.
Although I am a writer of Christian books, I am not a writer that is gifted for the task of discovering God’s mysteries like Rabbi Jonathan Cahn. That is not my calling. It is his. But I know that I was led to this information and to the verse above for this purpose, for this blog, for this time. Although I don’t know Rabbi Cahn personally, I believe that God is revealing things to him during this pandemic and I’m quite sure we will see it come forth in a future book!
I do want to encourage you to get into your Bibles and if you don’t have one, jump online! You can listen or read God’s Word in several different translations all over the internet. Listen to what it is God is trying to speak to your heart during this time. Heaven knows we have lots of it right now!
I also encourage you to pray. I already wrote a blog about prayer tips which you can find at “Daily Life During a Pandemic – Entry 2 A Call to Prayer.” Our family also created a display for the children of our neighborhood to reach out from our nonprofit children’s organization, The Huggabear Children’s Project, Inc. to let the world know WE ARE PRAYING FOR YOU every single day!
If you would like to see the display we created, you can find it on YouTube here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_1DZB3h_Gc
There is power in prayer! I say this from many, many years of personal experiences of miracles and answered prayers. Call out to Jesus. He will hear you and He will answer.
I also encourage you to get all of the books by Rabbi Jonathan Cahn! https://www.amazon.com/s?k=rabbi+jonathan+cahn+books&ref=nb_sb_noss_2
They are excellent and will shake you up–in a great way! They are mind blowing and proof that God is still on His throne! He is, was and always will be in control of all things!
Thank you for taking the time to read this post and if you would like any of my books, I am giving away FREE ebooks of all my titles for children, tweens, teens, and adults! Visit mastersmessengers.net for the list of titles. You can message me at that site or any of the other sites listed below to request free ebooks.
May God richly bless and keep you, your family, and your friends! Hold strong to God’s unchanging hand! HE WILL NOT FAIL US!!
huggabears.org
thehuggabears.com
theintercessors.org
mastersmessengers.net
Angelique La Fon-Cox 