In the summer of 2018, I felt the Lord speaking to me about captivity. Not anyone else’s captivity, but my own. In many ways, I was coming face to face with many specific bonds that were holding me captive: fear, the need for control, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and grief. These bondages that I felt had altered my life in many ways, most notably, my personality. Even to myself, I was noticeably different than I had been some 10 years before. I had not always been in chains to these tools of the enemy; however, as life progressed and I allowed myself to be opened to various demonic elements and influences without the proper armor components that the Word tells us to fight with, I found myself exposed and outside of the saving graces that would have kept me free.

A few years ago, I became fascinated with the word and biblical location of Ramah. At first, it was because of Matthew’s recounting of Rachel weeping for her children through Jeremiah’s prophecy being fulfilled in Matthew 2:17. But later, I realized that it was also a place of captivity for Jeremiah himself before the children of Israel were carried into Babylon (1 Chronicles 9:1; Jeremiah 13:19; Ezra 5:12 ). “Ramah” had several possible locations and the word in the Hebrew language has several different meanings. As Hebrew words often go, our English language falls short in capturing the full meaning of “Ramah.” But what caught my attention were these specific definitions: “high, lofty, proud, haughtiness” and “to beguile, deceive, or mislead.” Another scholar went so far as to say that Ramah was a place of idolatry. You see, I felt that I, myself, had become a captive in Ramah, a place where I had begun to idolize my own personal dreams for my life. I had been deceived into placing these dreams above all else. When those dreams went unfulfilled, rage ensued. My dreams and aspirations became my idols and because of this idol worship, I had become captive much to the detriment of my spiritual freedom.

With this realization, I knew that I needed to leave Ramah, a place of perpetual captivity….a place where my pride had taken me to be deceived….a place that felt comfortable because of my own personal grief….a place where I built an altar of idolatry to what I wanted. I decided to trade my Ramah for rhema, the inspired words of Christ. Bill Harmon stated that a rhema word is “any method God uses to reveal His specific will to an individual, whether by divinely directed desire, illumination, revelation, vision, or dream. ...rhema will be our general term to refer to all of these means of God communicating His specific will to an individual.”

You may also be in your own personal Ramah, a place of mourning and captivity…a place of idolatry. I urge you to take the first step in securing your freedom by committing to journeying with me with devotion and scripture as we together seek to leave Ramah and return instead to Zion, the hill in Jerusalem where the city of David was built and where we will secure our freedom forever.