If Anna the prophetess in Luke 2:36 was alive today and saw the demise of our western nations steadily growing, what would her advice to us be? – taking into account that she too was living in a biblically based nation that had been invaded by foreigners enforcing their pagan culture on the indigenous people as well.
She also knew the solution, and she’d been praying and fasting about it for decades, “looking forward,” like many of her fellow Israelites (38), to the time when God would rescue them from their enemies, heal them as a nation and get them back on the track he’d set them on when changing Jacob’s name to Israel back in Genesis 32:28.
And there’s a hint of that solution back in Luke 2:36, when describing Anna as “the daughter of Phanuel.” Phanuel meant “The face of God,” the Greek version of the Hebrew word Penuel, or Peniel, and Peniel was the name given by Jacob to the place where, he said, “I saw God face to face,” Genesis 32:30.
And now the daughter of Phanuel is seeing God face to face too, when she sees Jesus and immediately recognizes who he was.
But the connection between Anna and Jacob goes one step further, because the reason God changed Jacob’s name to Israel was “because you have struggled with God,” Genesis 32:28. Well, that’s exactly what Anna had been doing for years, struggling with God, praying and fasting nights and days (Luke 2:37), hoping for God to intervene and rescue Israel from its demise.
What would her advice to us be, then, as we find ourselves in much the same situation her country was in? The biblical values and traditions her country had been built on were being threatened with extinction, and revolution was in the air, just like today. But she knew that no populist uprising or civil war would free them from the tyranny of state control. Only God could.
But no leader, governmental or religious, dared admit that. So the oppression and suppression would only get worse, and Anna knew it in her bones. But as a frail old lady what could she do? Well, she did what her country was founded on, good old Jacob who wrestled with God and would not quit until God gave in and blessed him. Was Anna the Asherite, then, the perfect illustration of what Jacob meant when he predicted Asher would provide “Delicacies fit for a king”?….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 