Lessons in the Ladder Days

Candace Long: I'm Candace Long with Lessons in the Latter Days, offering biblical commentary to make sense of the times that we're living in. I wanted to do a special teaching to begin the new year 2024 because as far as my teachings this past year are concerned, a lot of them were very heavy.

I want to thank those of you who reached out to me to say how much the radio programs have meant to you. That meant a lot. And as I said in an earlier episode, if the funds are not there to return to radio, I will still be writing and producing new episodes as long as God gives me breath.

Today's episode is called Torah 101: Your Genesis Destiny. What I'm going to be teaching has been a recent discovery that blew me away. You will learn from the Book of Genesis what God assigned to you on the day you were born. Now, before I share this teaching, I need to wrap up some things that we learned in 2023.

My calling, as I understand it now after walking with the Lord over 50 years, is to chronicle and memorialize in writing and recording what the sixth generation is going through living in the very end of days before the day of the Lord. These last weeks I've been busy putting together a monograph called Uncovering the Ancient Snare, which includes all six transcripts of the episodes I just finished in that series, as well as graphs and charts and concluding commentary on how I believe this part of the end of days is unfolding.

Now, just so you know, once the Lord leads me to a topic, He plunges me into the depths of research to discover the lessons He wants me to find. So each episode is its own set of important lessons and takeaways. And only when I conclude a series like the Ancient Snare am I able to see it all laid out, the dangers that we've been dealing with, and the lessons God needs us to learn.

So it has taken me a good month to process what I have just taught you. You will find this new monograph, Uncovering the Ancient Snare, in my online store at candacelong.com/store. It's an important 35-page monograph to help you and your family navigate through these wars and political struggles and life and death decisions that we each have to make to get to the kingdom safely.

My conclusion is that we are living in the final three-and-a-half-year period before what Christians refer to as the Rapture. Three-and-a-half more years. That is not long. Now as biblical commentary, the time leading up to the Rapture will get worse. We must be prepared for that. But our Father promises supernatural protection and guidance through the darkness.

Another insight to pass on to you is how important our prayers are for Israel. We need perspective now more than ever in how to pray for them and what our prayers mean for them. One positive thing about the war they are in is that they are experiencing firsthand godly prayer support from Gentiles, from Christians.

I have Israeli business colleagues, and they are blown away by how much we are standing with them. For the first time in our generation, they are feeling and needing our prayer support. I pray specifically for those whom I have gotten to know over the years, and for those to be sealed for the day of redemption when they go through the seven-year tribulation.

If I'm correct in my understanding of where we are on God's timetable, imagine what they will experience when billions of followers of Jesus leave this earth in the twinkling of an eye. Imagine the gulf of darkness they will be plunged into because their prayer support will be gone.

I believe this will be their wake-up call when God removes the veil from their eyes and they will know Jesus was and is the Messiah and that He has removed us. That understanding will be life-shattering for them. That's what we pray into. Just think about this: all throughout biblical history, the Jews lived out God's ways in order to teach us.

They were veiled so that Gentiles would be able to have a relationship with God through Yeshua. And now it's our turn to live through these final days so that we can leave something wonderful for them. Now let's get into Torah 101: Your Genesis Destiny.

I'm going to share how I learned this incredible lesson and what the Lord began to teach me concerning how each one of us can find the destiny seed that God put inside of them when they were born. This lesson was given to me just a week after Israel's war with Hamas began. It was on the 13th of October, which was Tishrei 28 on the Hebrew calendar. That is a special time because the Torah scroll is rolled back to the beginning, as it does every year at this time.

The Jews have a marvelous way to study the Torah. It's been this way since the Babylonian captivity. The devout priests, Levites, and sages were passionate to create a way to unite God's people who were scattered all over the world. They had lost the temple because of their unfaithfulness to live out the Torah. So here in this wilderness period, priests such as Ezra divided the Torah into weekly readings called Parashot.

Now the Torah readings follow an annual cycle, beginning and ending on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, which is a festival during Sukkot in which God's people celebrate and rejoice in the Torah. Every Sabbath, no matter where the Jews are anywhere in the world, we all are studying the same thing. This is as God designed it, for the Sabbath is a time when Almighty God teaches His people the Torah.

So on October 13th, the Torah scroll had rolled back to the beginning, and the first Parashat was the reading called Bereishit, which is the first book of the Torah that we know as Genesis. Bereishit covers Genesis 1 through 6, verse 8. And each Sabbath, as you know, starts on Friday night at sundown, and that's when I began reading the Parashat. And my prayer that evening was, "Lord, what will You teach me today?"

Now, I have read Bereishit countless times over the years. The first six chapters of Genesis contains the foundation of all things. So I really wasn't expecting to see something new and fresh. But there was one thing that I had learned recently, and it was that Bereishit was the very passage of scripture assigned to the day I was born.

So I began reading these 120 verses with new eyes. And what I read and subsequently discovered blew me away. Here's what I wrote in my journal: "What is significant this Sabbath is that this is the Parashat for the day I was born. And looking back over all these years of my life, I see that my life's mission was to teach the hard lessons I had to learn, and they all came from these verses."

I started to get excited at the thought of what this could mean. I was blown away by how much this Parashat of Bereishit lined up with my sense of calling and mission. And I came away asking, "Could these verses have been intentionally given to me by God to carry and to teach others throughout my life? And if so, does everyone have a passage of the Torah specifically assigned to them?"

That Sabbath, as I read this passage from Genesis, I saw immediately that everything that I have been compelled to teach over these last 23 years, since my wilderness, came from this one Parashat, Bereishit. As I read the passage with these new eyes, here's what I wrote in my journal.

Here are the five truths I think I was given by God to carry, to understand, and to teach. And they are all found here in these 120 verses. Here are the five things. Number one is the meaning of inspired creativity. What makes creatives tick and the gift God gave each one of us, which is a genetic wiring to be able to hear God.

My goodness, I have spent years and years of my life field testing all of the things I learned about how to hear inspired ideas and walk them out. I founded Creativity Training Institute in 2004 after coming out of the wilderness. I wrote my books Wired for Creativity as well as The Ancient Path to Creativity and Innovation.

I have spent years as an arts leader empowering and coaching creative women and right-brain thinking entrepreneurs. And I am known internationally as a forward thinker on innovation. So that whole part of my life is rooted here in Bereishit.

Number two, the law of the seed has been a core part of my teaching. I have developed, written, and field tested the law of the seed and have been teaching others how to name their seed and walk it out. There's a podcast episode about it. There are chapters on it in all of my books and sections of my training resources fleshing out this brilliant truth. And that was found in Bereishit.

Number three, the topic I'm most known for as an end-times navigator is all the writing and researching I have done on the invasion of the Nephilim and the dangers they brought about in the days of Noah, and lessons and warnings that we can learn from that period to protect ourselves today.

My most popular downloads include Return of the Nephilim, The Nephilim UFO Connection, Warnings of a Nephilim Invasion. The number one topic God has been warning me about in dreams over 19 years is the invasion of the Nephilim in our day. Once again, the roots of all of this teaching are found in this Torah portion, Bereishit.

Number four, the seven-day plan of God, as you probably know, is a long-time fundamental part of my teaching. This is the lens through which I see and teach the biblical end of days from the Jewish perspective. And where is this truth found? In Bereishit.

Now one of the prayers that we pray on the Sabbath ends with these words: "Lord, grant me a share in your Torah." I realized that by God's grace, He has shown me my share. And the fifth takeaway for me is the one that I'm learning now and I'm passing on to you. And the lesson is that God entrusted a portion of His Torah to you just like He did with me.

Now, if you have been learning from me for any length of time, you will easily understand how much I was blown away realizing that all of my major teachings came from 120 verses in the Torah. And for the rest of this teaching, I'm going to show you how to find your Parashat. Let me share the five insights I learned.

Insight number one is about God's light. God is light. It is so bright and glorious no one can handle being in the fullness of it. Every time in scripture when we read that someone has encountered the brilliance of the glory of God's light, such as when Moses beheld the Shekinah, when Ezekiel had his vision of being in the throne room before God, or Paul on the road to Damascus, people fell to the ground.

We can't handle God's light. And I realized while reading Bereishit that light was created on Day 1. This was right after we read that darkness was on the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters, and God said, "Let there be light." God's challenge is that His light is so full and brilliant, He has to distribute it in bits and pieces so that we understand what is meant by the phrase "the glory of God fills the earth." These are His deposits of light.

Insight number two has to do with luminaries. These are the things that carry light. In verse 14: "And God said, 'Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from night, and let them be for signs and seasons and for days and years to give light upon the earth.' And God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. And He made the stars also. And God set them, the luminaries, in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night and to separate the light from the darkness." This was Day 4.

Now, if God is light, then He must have people and things referred to as luminaries that reflect or carry the amount of light given to them. The sun was assigned to carry more of His light than the moon. Although the moon is used most in establishing God's times and seasons, it is an important sign.

Insight number three for me was the order of their creation. What struck me was that light was created on Day 1, but the luminaries or carriers of His light were not set up until Day 4. Now, if you remember the seven-day plan of God as laid forth in Genesis 1, God has given mankind six days, each day lasting a thousand years. And after that comes the seventh day, which is God's day, the Sabbath.

This means that God created our world to last six days or 6,000 years. And when it has reached 6,001, that day is Rosh Hashanah, Tishrei 1, which is the birthday of the world. And that very day begins the seventh day or the kingdom. Now I'm going to ask you a question: What day did Messiah come? He follows the pattern in Genesis. He was the Torah in the flesh, right? God's fullness of light in human form.

He died and was resurrected on Day 4, which is when the luminaries were set in place to carry God's light as signs and to mark the seasons. So the light of the world, Jesus, was set in place on Day 4. And He taught His disciples in Matthew 5, "You," meaning us, "are the light of the world. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."

So for 2,000 years, the light of God's Torah was passed from Jesus to us. But we lost our instruction when we dismissed the Torah. I want to show you that God assigned His Torah, His fullness of light of truth, to each one of us at birth. But because we are not in the habit of worshipping on the Sabbath and studying the Torah, the majority of Christians has missed this glorious truth. By God's sheer grace, I stumbled upon it, and I'm going to restore it to you today, glory to God.

Insight number four: God's Torah is divided into 52 weeks of passages. And every person born on this earth has a Torah passage assigned to their birth, just like Bereishit was assigned to me. Think about it. All of us are given different sections of His Torah to learn from and to reflect in the earth.

God intended us to work together as His people to shine fully as the light of the world. When we study the 52 lessons every week, we absorb the light that is there, and that's how we become God's light in the world. And a special anointing is given to teach the portion that we were each given at birth. When the hour of darkness comes, we have access to all of the light we need to find the path and lead others. I am given one portion, you are given your portion.

Insight number five is how to find your portion of light. Psalm 97 says, "Light is sown for the righteous." God has sown a portion of His light into you. Here are the seven steps in how to find it.

Step one, go to a website called hebcal.com. That's H-E-B-C-A-L. It stands for Hebrew Calendar dot com. Step two, on the homepage, you'll see a place where you can click date converter. Step three, you enter your date of birth. As an example, let's say you were born on November 1st, 1983. Then click where it says convert to Hebrew. Step four, you will see that the date you were born on the Hebrew calendar was the 25th of Heshvan in the year 5744.

Step five, if you look just a few lines up, you'll see what the Parashat was that week. And it happens to be called Toldot. That is the Torah portion assigned to that week. Step number six, you click that to learn what that Torah portion is all about. Your assigned portion of scripture is Genesis 25:19 all the way through 28 verse 9. Toldot means generations, and it opens with the births of Isaac and Rebecca's twins, Jacob and Esau.

And finally, step number seven is to begin studying that passage and ask the Lord to begin teaching you all about the light that He has given you there to carry regarding this part of His Torah. Looking back at my passage now, as you recall, there were five major truths that for decades I have had the privilege to walk out: the light that I was given to carry.

This is so important a teaching that I have made a brief handout showing you the steps visually so you can find your Torah portion. And you'll find this Torah handout in the description notes to this episode, which is called Torah 101: Your Genesis Destiny. And you'll find it at candacelong.com/podcast.

I pray that this new year brings you incredible insights into your destiny and that you grow in your ability to carry His light and shine it as only you were created to do. I'm Candace Long. I hope you join me again next time for Lessons in the Latter Days. God bless.