Repetition Reveals Reality

James Bond knew it.  Sherlock Holmes knew it.  Even Lieutenant Columbo on the NBC show from the 70’s knew it.  There are no coincidences in life.  If these famous agents and detectives repeatedly spotted someone in their vicinity, they were being followed.  If the same gun was used at separate crime scenes, the crimes were linked.  When something occurs repeatedly, there is usually a useful message waiting to be recognized.  However, we don’t always get it.

You might have heard someone exclaim in exasperation, “That always happens to me!”   Maybe you have noticed repetitive patterns in your own life.  For instance, someone I know is frequently late for meetings and appointments.  He is quite certain this is always because of unexpectedly bad traffic.  A woman I know seems to lurch from one domestic crisis to the next and attributes it to bad karma—whatever that means.  A fellow boater has encountered rocks six times in six summers.  In each case the rocks won and his boat lost.  In each case he blamed bad luck that comes his way because long ago he changed his boat’s name.

Each and every one of us can surely examine our own lives for repeating patterns of undesirable events.  The value comes when we then honestly ask ourselves what is really responsible for those things happening.  Examining those repetitive events may reveal something vitally important about the reality you have created in your life.

Through studying Scripture, we are trained to become adept at spotting repetition.  When a word is central to understanding a certain passage, God highlights this for us by repeating the same word seven times. In ancient Jewish wisdom, seven implies a complete unit.  For example, we have seven colors of the rainbow, seven days of the week, seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost, and so on.

Additionally, the number seven in Hebrew is the same word as the Hebrew word for feeling satisfied and complete.

There are literally hundreds of examples of how God inserted the code of sevens into the Five Books of Moses.  Here is an amazing one.

We might think that the number ten reveals an essence of the Ten Commandments. However, an exploration of the sections of the Bible dealing with the Ten Commandments shines a different light on the matter.  

We read about these commandments for the first time in the last verse of Exodus 31. The word ‘tablets’ appears twice in that verse.  The word ‘tablets’ appears five more times as the story unfolds. (Exodus 32: 15-19)  Shortly thereafter, Moses smashed these tablets.

God instructed Moses to prepare another set of tablets and would you believe it! In the account of the second set; the word ‘tablets’ also appears seven times. (Exodus 34)

In the book of Deuteronomy Moses recounts the events of the past forty years in the desert.  Would you be surprised to see that the code of sevens is followed here too?

Sure enough, Moses tells about the first set of tablets mentioning the word ‘tablets’ exactly seven times. (Deuteronomy 9:9-17).  When he recalls how he smashed those tablets and made a new set, he again mentions the word ‘tablets’ seven times. (Deuteronomy 10:1-5)

In Scripture, this Divine Message is seldom referred to as the Ten Commandments but as you can see, it is called the Tablets (implying two-ness) twenty-eight (4 X 7) times.  This tells us that the ‘two-ness’ of the tablets was more important than the ‘ten-ness’ if you get my drift.

Through this method of seven-fold repetition, God directs us to look in a different direction. Focusing on repetition in our own lives can lead us down a more productive path of self-examination.