I love the New Year! I love new beginnings, clean slates, and new plans.  Every year at this time, I enjoy reflecting over the past year, taking note of the lessons learned and rejoicing in the blessings, I have received.  I am not much on New Year resolutions, but I do love to seek the Lord’s direction in my life for any needed changes, goals, or activities I should make a priority in the New Year.

Recently I wanted to look up some spiritual meanings of the number seventeen as we enter into the year 2017. What a great number it is!

Seventeen = 1) The perfection of spiritual order 2) Walk with God

Seventeen is the seventh prime number it therefore intensifies the meaning of the number seven. Seventeen is the sum of ten (complete order) and seven (spiritual perfection).

In Genesis 8:4 the ark rested on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, likewise Christ’s resurrection was on the seventeenth day of Abib.

Two men walked with God. Enoch who was the seventh from Adam (see Genesis 5:22-24), and Noah who was tenth from Adam (see Genesis 6:8). ¹

I love the thought that goes with this! I would love for 2017 to be marked as a year of perfection in spiritual order in my life and a year that I walk with God unlike I ever have before.

Another reference says that seventeen symbolized overcoming the enemy and complete victory. God overcame the sins of rebellious humans when He began to flood the earth through rain on the seventeenth of the second Hebrew month.

Noah’s ark and its eight passengers rested on the mountains of Ararat on the seventeenth of the seventh month (right in the middle of God’s annual Holy period known as the Feast of Tabernacles.

Christ gained a complete victory over death and the grave when resurrected Him near sunset on Nisan 17. ²

I want 2017 to be a great year of victory in my life as well. Are there areas in your life where you need victory?  Romans 8:35-39 lists seventeen things being impossible to separate us from the love of God.  He will enable you to overcome the enemy and walk in victory this year!

35 Who shall ever separate us from Christ’s love? Shall suffering and affliction and tribulation? Or calamity and distress? Or persecution or hunger or destitution or peril or sword? 36 Even as it is written, For Thy sake we are put to death all the day long; we are regarded and counted as sheep for the slaughter. 37 Yet amid all these things we are more than conquerors and gain a surpassing victory through Him Who loved us. 38 For I am persuaded beyond doubt (am sure) that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things impending and threatening nor things to come, nor powers, 39 Nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39 AMP)

I want to encourage you to make midnight tonight a moment of new beginnings, a time to be determined to walk with God unlike any other year, and a year to walk in greater victory than you have ever known.

Happy New Year!

 

 

 

References:

1. Adam F. Thompson & Adrian Beale, The Divinity Code (Destiny Image Publishers, Inc., 2011
2. http://www.biblestudy.org/bibleref/meaning-of-numbers-in-bible/17.html 12/13/16