3 Is The Magic Number

First, celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. For seven days the bread you eat must be made without yeast, just as I commanded you. Celebrate this festival annually at the appointed time in early spring, in the month of Abib, for that is the anniversary of your departure from Egypt. No one may appear before me without an offering.

“Second, celebrate the Festival of Harvest, when you bring me the first crops of your harvest.

“Finally, celebrate the Festival of the Final Harvest at the end of the harvest season, when you have harvested all the crops from your fields.  At these three times each year, every man in Israel must appear before the Sovereign, the Lord.  Exodus 23:15-17

For those of you who were children of the seventies, I absolutely loved Schoolhouse Rock!  For those of you unfamiliar with this, it was basically a three to five-minute infomercial about … get this … stuff you learned in school as a kid!  I know it sounds boring but there were really cool jingles that you could recite over and over again.  For example, one was about using conjunctions called, “Conjunction Junction.  What’s your function?”  As you might have figured, it was a train conductor trying to teach you how to use conjunctions in a sentence.  There was another one that talked about the process of making a bill into a law and the difference between the two.  “Oh how I hope and I pray that I will, but today, I am still just a bill.”  There are some of you thinking has Kent lost it, but give me some credit.  I did get ‘hope’ and ‘pray’ in there!  😊  So, there is one of my favorites if not my favorite.  The jingle goes, “A man and a woman had a little baby.  Yes, they did.  There were three in the family.  That’s the magic number!” 

Now I can speak of many things in my life that always had something to do with threes.  A saying like ‘the third time’s the charm’ or ‘once an issue, twice a trend, third time’s a problem.’  However, it has had a significant impact in my walk of faith.  Anytime God has wanted me to pay attention to something, it crosses my path three times.  One could say it is coincidence, but it has never failed to have a significant impact when I listened to that third time.  Most of our greatest significance to the number 3 would be the Holy Trinity of The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  However, is there more to it than that?

God is always giving clear signals as to things we should pay attention to.  Today’s verses focus on the three festivals the Israelites were to have in honor of God according to His law.  It made me ponder beyond my own circumstances and life lessons to the things pointing toward that number 3 biblically.  For instance, Peter denies Jesus three times after Jesus prophesied such.  The significance is not the denial.  The focus should rightfully be on Jesus’s ability to predict, which further underlined His divinity as The Son of God.   Jesus rebuking Satan in the Wilderness three times was not just about Jesus denying him.  It was also to show the tenacity of the devil coming at our weakest moments to tempt us.  Furthermore, it underlined Jesus’s perfection staying to true to His Heavenly Father.  What I’m getting at here is that we should always pay attention to signs of what God is saying.  Ideally, we should answer God whenever He calls, but are we wise to not jump the first time if we are unsure?  If we are hearing His call twice and certainly a third time, we must act and ideally with a high sense of urgency.

God always looks to connect with us.  When we look at the story of Samuel, we noted He answered God the fourth time and not the third.  However, if you read the story it was not that Samuel did not answer God that third time:

 A third time the Lord called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.”

Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy.  1 Samuel 3:8

The calling was not just for Samuel.  It was for his father to tell him for the first time who God was.  Rev, Penny Ellwood, a UMC pastor, wrote, “In our church, we believe (the mystery of the Trinity) happens in another threefold – the use of our head, heart and hands.”   Isn’t that the beauty of how God works in us?  Will you be keen to God’s calling the first, second, or third time?  How can you be comforted by the knowledge of and faith in the Holy Trinity?  My prayer is we pay attention to God’s prompting for I truly believe ‘3 is the magic number.’  Amen.