Something’s Happening When You Sleep

God is a faith God: Our faith in Him will dictate our own personal—and entire—story.  Every minute of our day—even the outcome of every minute lived—is hinged upon our faith in God, and it is only by faith that we can please Him.  Hebrews 11:6:

But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.

When Adam and Eve walked in faith and obedience to God, they were immortal, living in Paradise, awakening every morning to that beautiful postcard sky.  There was no sickness, no sorrow, no pain, no storms, no fear, and no death— nothing short of perfect.  But one deadly day, things changed:  Faith and obedience in God’s Word was rejected and Satan’s word of unbelief and disobedience was embraced.  That day, even though they died physically many years later, Adam and Eve died the second death. They were booted out of Paradise and the reign of the law of sin and death began. 

But, thanks be to God, He has made a way of escape.  That way of escape is Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, who shed His blood upon Golgotha’s cross to break the grip of Satan’s stranglehold upon us and to set our captive souls free—but access is only accomplished by faith.

Have you been born again?  God has dealt every man a portion of faith.  Are you ready to let that seed of faith spring forth into everlasting life?  At this place of born-again, even the worst of times are converted to your good.  Imagine: Today can be the best day of your life and tomorrow even better (Proverbs 4:18, Romans 8:28).  It’s truly a simple combination of faith in Christ Jesus, repentance, and obedience to God’s Word.  Come on in!  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the supernatural Kingdom of God.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Job 33:14-16:

14 For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not.

15 In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed;

16 Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction,

MAN SAID: The God of the Bible doesn’t fit in with our enlightened age.  We’re doing fine without Him. 

Now THE RECORD: Welcome to GodSaidManSaid feature 750 that will once again certify the full inerrancy of God’s Holy Word.  All of these features are archived here in text and streaming audio for the edification of the blood-bought and as ammunition in the battle for the souls of men.  Every Thursday eve, God willing, they grow by one. 

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Thank you for coming today.  May God’s face shine upon you and your house. 

God’s beautiful book of life is laden with marvelous mysteries of life-enriching precepts and commandments that He reveals to His children.  This beautiful Bible offers the very key to life and life more abundantly—even eternal life. 

Students of the Scriptures know to stop, look, and listen when they find strange groupings of words or hard-to-fathom declarations in God’s Word, for in this place is found rich revelation.  Consider the following short list of examples:

• In Genesis chapters 6-10, you’ll find the much-maligned story of Noah’s Ark and the global flood that destroyed all land-life with the exception of the population on the Ark.  In spite of the skeptics’ howling, there are fish fossils on all the world’s mountain peaks. 
  
  
• Psalm 139:13-16, in what was a strange grouping of words, declares the principle of DNA—3,000 years before today’s science began to understand these proprietary insights only man’s Maker could know.
  
  
• I John 1:5 says that the immortal God is light and now science has come to the conclusion that light is immortal. 
  
  
• Romans 1:20 tells us that God, who is a Spirit, created all that you see out of that which is invisible, and now physicists have discovered that all physical things are made out of invisible energy. 
  
  
• In Exodus 12:15-20, God commands an annual seven-day observance called the Feast of Unleavened Bread.  All leaven/yeast products were prohibited, even entirely removed from their coasts.  Modern medicine knows this prohibition as part of the prescribed method of battling chronic yeast infection. 
  
  
• Isaiah 58 is God’s chapter on fasting.  Fasting and prayer unlocks God’s door of plenty and breaks the chains of all devil bondage, bringing the body into a healthy condition.  Verse 8 reads: Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thine health shall spring forth speedily: and thy righteousness shall go before thee; the glory of the LORD shall be thy rereward. Medical research recently discovered that a three-day fast totally renews the human immune system. 
  
  
• In Romans 12:2, God’s Word teaches the principle of renewing—even transforming—the mind.  Neuroscience now knows this strange grouping of words as neuroplasticity. 

God’s Word is always correct.

Something is happening when we sleep.  This strange grouping of words found in Job 33:14-16 now has a host of scientific friends.  GodSaidManSaid published a feature titled, “New Research Says: Let Not the Sun Go Down Upon Your Wrath” that is relevant to today’s article.  A few paragraphs follow:

The Biblical commandment in Ephesians 4:26 (Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath:) is once again in the news.  Several paragraphs from a December 29, 2012 feature in Science News under the heading of “You really can learn while you sleep” follows:

You may think of sleep as a time of repose.  But scientists discovered this year that, under the right conditions, your slumbering brain can sign on for the night shift. 

While visiting the Land of Nod, people might improve their musical abilities, learn to associate a smell with a sound, or solidify negative feelings.  These results, and others like them, are pushing the boundaries of what scientists think the sleeping brain accomplishes. 

“We want to understand where the borders lie between what we can and cannot learn during sleep,” says Anat Arzi of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.  This year, her team described the brain’s ability to learn to associate a particular tone with the smell of rotting fish while fast asleep.  Another study found that people can also sharpen existing skills during a nap.  After listening to a nap-time song, volunteers were better at hitting the right notes on a keyboard. 

The science isn’t clear enough to suggest that students should, for example, play Japanese vocabulary tapes overnight, but the results do show that the sleeping brain assimilates information.  And the implications go beyond cramming for a test. 

Sleeping after a painful experience may lock negative memories into the brain, for instance. Staying awake during a crucial window may help lessen a trauma’s emotional impact. [End of quote]

Science News reported on the latest discoveries concerning the brain and sleep in several features in 2012.  Three sentences from the excerpt I just quoted, for purposes of this discussion, bear repeating:

Sleeping after a painful experience may lock negative memories into the brain, for instance.  Staying awake during a crucial window may help lessen a trauma’s emotional impact. 

While visiting the Land of Nod, people might improve their musical abilities, learn to associate a smell with a sound, or solidify negative feelings. [End of quote]

The more they search, the more they find themselves facing the Words of God.  Thousands of years before man’s vaunted science begins to understand the workings of a particular situation, he is shocked—or at least should be shocked—to discover the Word of God is already there.  [End of quotes]

Don’t go to sleep harboring angry thoughts.  If you’ve had harsh words with your spouse or friend, reconcile before you sleep.  The perfect way to prepare for sleep is first prayer and then reading and meditating on God’s Word. 

God created your brain to do something very necessary when you sleep.  The following paragraphs are from the feature “Wake-Up Call” found in the April 2015 issue of Discover magazine:

Sleep doesn’t just allow the body to focus on rebalancing hormone levels and hunting down pathogens.  It also enables the brain to do some crucial housecleaning—cognitive and otherwise.  Many experiments have shown that when people or animals learn a skill, they perform it better after a good sleep.  Some of this memory consolidation may occur through dreaming.  For example, EEGs indicate that sleeping rats replay the running of a maze in a brain region devoted to spatial learning.  But the brain during sleep also appears to erase some memories to preserve others.  How this might work was first sketched out in 2003 by University of Wisconsin psychiatrist and neurobiologist Giulio Tononi.  He theorized that the brain becomes overloaded with new neuronal connections—or synapses—during waking hours, as an animal absorbs information.  To prune excess connections, the sleeping brain weakens each synapse by a proportional amount so that only the strongest survive, Tononi suggested. 

University of Rochester neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard recently revealed another way the brain tidies up during sleep.  In a 2012 paper, Nedergaard and her colleagues announced the discovery of a waste-disposal system in the brain, in which toxic metabolites such as beta amyloid—associated with Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases—are flushed out by cerebrospinal fluid with the help of support cells called glia.  In 2013, the team released a mouse study showing that this system turns on during sleep. 

“It’s been known for years that diseases like Alzheimer’s are associated with sleep disturbances,” Nedergaard says. “But maybe physicians should be treating sleep to slow the progression of the disease.”  Indeed, she notes, a 2009 study at Washington University found that sleep-deprived mice developed Alzheimer’s-like brain plaques more often that their well-rested cousins.  “Because it fits, right?  If you don’t sleep, you don’t clean your brain.”  [End of quotes]

One short paragraph from Dr. Leaf’s book, Switch on Your Brain, follows:

You are a thinking being.  You think all day long, and at night as you sleep, you sort out your thinking.  As you think, you choose, and as you choose, you cause genetic expression to happen in your brain.  This means you make proteins, and these proteins form your thoughts.  Thoughts are real, physical things that occupy mental real estate. [End of quote]

God said something important happens when you sleep and today’s science once again confirms the inerrancy of Holy Writ. 

GOD SAID, Job 33:14-16:

14 For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not.

15 In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed;

16 Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction,

MAN SAID: The God of the Bible doesn’t fit in with our enlightened age.  We’re doing fine without Him. 

Now you have THE RECORD. 

 

 

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

GodSaidManSaid, “New Research Says: Let Not the Sun Go Down Upon Your Wrath”

Leaf, C., Switch on Your Brain, Baker Books, 2013

Miller, K., “Wake-Up Call,” Discover, April 2015

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