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2 Peter 1:4
He has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature …. In ancient times in Israel when a young man wanted to marry, he first consulted with the local matchmaker. He then went to the prospective girl’s father or guardian and agreed to a price. Once this agreement was sealed by a glass of wine, the young man went to ‘prepare a place’, or build a house for them to live in. During that whole time the validity of the union was as solid as marriage itself. A ketubah was also written. A ketubah is a legal document written in beautiful calligraphy which outlines the bride-price paid for the girl and incorporates all the conditions of the marriage, especially the responsibilities of the groom towards his wife. It serves as a prenuptial agreement and deterrent in case the husband would leave her as it also mentions of the money owed to the wife in case of divorce, unless of course the divorce was the wife’s fault due to her marital unfaithfulness. During the ceremony held under a ‘chupah’ which is a cloth held by four poles above the couple, the terms of the ketubah/contract are sealed through the sharing of a glass of wine. The glass is then placed at the foot of the groom for him to smash with his foot saying, ‘thus be done to me if I do not honor the words of this contract’. The ceremony is usually followed by a celebration with music, dancing and a copious banquet. When the Almighty wanted to marry Israel He was His own matchmaker. He also had already prepared a place for them: The Promised Land of Israel. He then brought His prospective wife to a solitary place under the shading of Mt. Horeb so He could have her attention and bare His heart to her. After the Heavenly Bridegroom made His proposal, Israel agreed and said, ‘all that God said we will do’. The engagement was then rendered valid. Moses along with seventy-three other people (witnesses) climbed Mt. Horeb to get the ketubah/contract written in stone by the finger of God Himself. The whole thing was sealed in blood and followed by a meal with the Almighty Himself (Exodus 24). When God took Israel.as a bride, He entered a covenant with everlasting legal promises. Whereas it can be agreed that the marriage has been ‘rocky’, God is not a man that He should lie, and unlike many men, He is compassion and forgiveness itself; He repents from the evil He wants to do to His people. We Israel need to cling tightly to that ketubah, to the term of the marriage found in the Torah. We need to study it so we can hold our Bridegroom to His terms and to His promises. On the other hand, we also need to be a faithful wife and hold to our terms of faithfulness and obedience. A very wise mother one day instructed her kingly son in the choosing of a wife and said, An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels (Proverbs 31:10). In his search, her son ended up with almost a thousand women. As the Israel of the end, let us put on the regeneration offered by the Righteous One, Yeshua the Messiah and become the excellent wife so sought after by the Almighty God.
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Luke 6:35
But love your enemies, … and you will be sons of the Most High. Many make fun at Yeshua’s injunction to love our enemy. Even our American President had something to say about it. In an interview where President Obama broaches several Bible passages including the Sermon on the Mount he said that (and he could be right) it is “a passage that is so radical that it is doubtful that our own defense department would survive its application” (see link below). We need to remember that it is not a prophet or an apostle who said that we should love our enemies, but that it is Yeshua Himself who fished the elements of His doctrine from another sermon on another mountain: the Oracle of Mt. Horeb where it says, "If you meet your enemy's ox or his donkey going astray, you shall bring it back to him. If you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving him with it; you shall rescue it with him (Exodus 23:4-5). To comment negatively on these passages is to comment negatively on the very nature and character of God. Reading the passages of the legal terms of the Torah we obtain a formidable peek at the very nature and essence, at the heart of the Almighty. The idea is that He expects these things of us is because they are Him; they are His nature. Just as if someone lived in my house I would expect them to live by the same standards I do, the Father who takes us into His great family expects us to live by the ideals He condones. His commandments reflect His very nature so when He tells us how we should respond to our enemy’s misfortune, we are given a peek at the way God is and He tells us to be like Him. You might say, ‘oh, but when I read the Bible; I see God dealing with His enemies in very harsh manners’. Maybe so, but it is usually after repeated attempts at peace. The story of Jonah is the story of an Israeli politician whom God asked to go as an emissary of peace to Nineveh, a city that was stealing territory from Israel and harassing its northern villages. If Nineveh didn’t change its ways towards Israel, God was going to punish them. Of course Jonah didn’t want to go. He wanted God to punish those who were persecuting his country. Jonah didn’t want them to have a chance at repentance. When people asked Yeshua for a sign of His Messiahship, the only sign He offered was the ‘sign of the prophet Jonah’. Not only did Jonah’s three days and three nights in the belly of the fish represented Yeshua’s three days in the belly of the earth, but through Jonah, this story tells us of the Father sending the Messiah as an emissary of peace to offer us, God’s enemy’s because of sin, a message of repentance before the end comes (Matthew 12:39). Again this is all measure for measure. Yeshua taught us to ask the Father to forgive us our debts (sins against the Father), but only as we forgive our debtors (those who sin against us). So if we can’t have a merciful attitude towards our enemies, how can we expect God to have mercy on us who through sin have set ourselves in enmity against Him? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FCNKwHRCQM) James 2:5
Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom, which he has promised to those who love him? Why does the Torah speak about people selling their daughter (Exodus 21:7-11)? It may sound archaic but we must remember that these laws were given within the context of a M. Eastern society living 3,600 years ago. This text may therefore seem useless to us today, but what about the principle behind the text? This law was formulated as a system of protection towards the vulnerable poor of the land. God created the poor (Proverbs 22:2) and Yeshua said that the poor is always with us (Matthew 26:11). Caused by man’s cruel and unfair economic systems, poverty is part of our present society and whereas the Father does not interfere with the general affairs of mankind, He still desires to protect the poor. This protection is brought about by laws condemning the abuse of the poor. As poverty today forces one out of his home, in these days the practice was that a man would sell his daughter for a price to pay his debts. But because she was a daughter of Israel she was to be respected, and this young girl was not to be used as the buyer’s private property. If he sexually approached her, he was to marry her and automatically grant her the full rights and privileges of a wife. This law and others is part of a sort of ‘Bills of Rights’ for the poor of the land. Solomon wrote much about the poor and of the judgment against those who abuse them. To have mercy and respect towards the poor is as much a part of Torah constitution as the keeping the Sabbath. All the more, we are treated in our time of trouble in the same way we treat others in theirs. Our actions for or against the poor are measured in the heavenly balances of judgment for or against our favor. We cannot do much about the decisions made by selfish and wicked men in power, but we can all share with those in need and we can certainly refrain from abusing them. Let’s remember: we are all poor in the eyes of God. In Hebrew, the words ‘charity’ and ‘righteousness’ are synonymous and James, the brother of the Master gave stern instructions concerning the poor to the Messianic Congregations of his days (James 1:27; 2:2-6). The law of the sold daughter includes another interesting clause. If the buyer abuses the young girl but does not retain her as a wife, the father then retains the right to redeem her back to him. This is eschatological as even though God has sold the Virgin of the Daughter of Zion to captivity and exile, He reserves Himself the right to redeem her if she is abused. Israel therefore having been abused by the nations still retains the right to be redeemed. Romans 11:29
For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. The text of rulings started in Exodus twenty can take us back to a time of cultural irrelevancy to the point that we may wonder about their current usefulness. Somehow though, these things about buying and selling children, slavery and polygamy are part of the great Horeb oracle, so to consider them irrelevant can be, and is in my opinion disrespectful. Let’s look for example at the laws of polygamy. It says that, If he (a man) takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish her (the first wife) food, her clothing, or her marital rights. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out for nothing, without payment of money (Exodus 21:10-11). Read from our modern western cultural viewpoint, these rulings sound barbaric; but let’s give them a fair try. Polygamy was an accepted M. East lifestyle in the days of Exodus. Marriage was a business transaction and if he could afford it, a man could marry a woman for financial, political or just plain lustful selfish reasons. Once she served her purpose, he got himself another to the neglect of the first one. Apparently God did not approve of this practice so He decreed that if a man re-marries, the food, the clothing and the conjugal rights of the first wife are not in any way to be diminished. If the husband doesn’t hold to that, she has automatic legal grounds to leave him and even remarry. In a certain way, that makes polygamy impossible unless you are King Solomon, and even he probably couldn’t live up to it. We now are a far cry from these days of healthy ‘woman’s rights’. Today a man can take a woman, and if he has affairs on the side (in Bible views, a man is joined to a woman through sexual intimacy) that cause him to neglect the first wife (which is inevitable), she has to go through the cruel humiliations of divorce proceedings. This ruling teaches about the heart of the Father against such cruelty as rejecting a wife. A common teaching today is replacement theology: the ideology that because of sin God rejected His first wife Israel in favor of Christianity. For many, this explains our on-going exile, the inquisitions and the Holocaust. People easily understand replacement theology scenario because this is the way they live and we generally understand God through the lenses of our own perverted viewpoint. First, God hates divorce (Exodus 20:14; Matthew 10:2-9), and about Israel Paul explains that, “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:29)”. If God practices the irrevocable putting away of wives because of sin, Christians then are also in danger. Second, even if He did, our relationship with Him was not to be diminished. My point here is that this commandment reveals the true nature and character of the Father. He may chastise us for awhile to help us know and trust Him more, but never in an attempt to drive us away from Him, and He doesn’t go from ‘bride’ to ‘bride’ as mankind seems to enjoy doing today. We can now see not that this seemingly archaic rule teaches us much about our current value system and even our theology. Hebrews 13:8
“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” "For I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6). In his mystical Gospel, John introduces us to the Messiah in the following words, ‘In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). This ‘Word’ John speaks of is actually the ‘Memrah’ presented to us in the Aramaic version of the Pentateuch called The Targum in its attempts to explain the nature of Messiah. John then continues with, “And the Word became flesh …” (John 1:14). By all recognitions, this Memrah that became flesh to dwell among us, is the Torah itself, which is not only a legal document but also the direct revelation of God’s nature and character to mankind. The problem we face today is that the Torah was given about 3,600 years ago to a Semitic nomadic desert tribe of the M. East. Whereas the injunctions concerning slavery, the buying and selling of children, and the vendetta style of justice it promoted consisted of an actual improvement compared to the ways of the nations around them, these rulings seem pretty barbaric to us today. Many have then resolved this problem by adopting the idea that the Torah has since been annulled by Yeshua and is therefore now obsolete. But how does this fit with the words of John? John speaks of this Torah becoming flesh through the Messiah who Himself proclaimed that he came to teach us how to obey it better. How could it then be obsolete? A proper contextual study of these commandments helps us discover the beautiful nature and character of the Almighty Creator. We discover that in fact His rulings constitute the same basic ideals for which we fight today. They include healthy concepts of child protection; women’s and worker’s rights; proper criminal justice; equal opportunity; financial ethics, as well as healthy dietary standards. These are in essence all things we find in the Torah. Why consider them obsolete and then go on re-inventing the wheel by recreating these same laws by our own means? Something is wrong with that picture! However we feel about some of its injunctions, we need to remember that the Torah is the revelation of God’s nature and character. Every commandment is a distillation of His essence, a pure revelation of His person. The study of the commandments is the study of God. When we say then that it is now annulled and obsolete, technically speaking, we abolish God. Maybe this is why the world cannot get control of its social issues. Through their misguided theology, they’ve rendered God obsolete! Our so-called evolution has distanced us from the oracle given on the mountain but without it we are as stars endlessly roaming through space in search of an orbit. It may take a life time, but may we repent from the heresy that denies the value of God’s commandments even in our day. May we also learn to find our orbital stability within the beautiful Words spoken at Horeb. Matthew 5:13
"You are the salt of the earth …” The Heavenly Voice spoke the Ten Statements in a rumbling earth wind and fire show defying any pyrotechnic event (Exodus 20:18). The Almighty Creator of the universe continues expounding on the universal Constitution that until this day forms the basis of the world’s main calendars (the seven day week with one day of rest) as well as defines the basic laws of morality and civil conduct. At that point, the Children of Israel confess their incapacity to hear the Heavenly Voice. They beg Moses to intercede; they ask him to hear the Heavenly Voice and relate to them later what It said. So many people today say, “God told me such and such …” I do not doubt that God still speaks to or through people, but looking at Scriptures, it seems that such events were fearfully awesome. What human indeed can hear the very Voice of God?! The Almighty approved of Israel’s request to ask for an intercessor. Here is what He said through Moses, "The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers--it is to him you shall listen-- just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, 'Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.' And the LORD said to me, 'They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him (Deuteronomy 18:15-18). Maybe God recognized Israel’s leader’s healthy fear of Him which according to Solomon is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10). Because of our sinful nature, we cannot directly hear the Voice of the Almighty God. We need an intercessor. This intercessor is the way by which we enter in the Holy Presence. This Intercessor earned His position by being faithful and obedient unto death. Though His atonement work was finished from the foundation of the world, He was manifested to us in these last days as Yeshua HaMashiach (2 Timothy 1:9-10), One who has delight in the will of His (and our) Father (John 6:38; Hebrews 4:15). Like Moses, this Intercessor helps us hear the Great Voice of God. We understand the message and nature of the Father through His Words, but mostly through the example of His life. Like the High-Priest does in the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonements, Yeshua, our High-Priest in the heavenlies brings our petitions to the Father (Hebrews 9). As He was to the world of His generation, so He sent us to be in the world of our generation (John 17:18). May we then also, as Moses did in His generation and Yeshua does in ours, consider the helpless spiritual state of those around us and bring them the Word in a more palatable form. May we help them ‘see the lightening without feeling the bolt! ‘ Yeshua explained it as being the ‘salt’ of the earth. As salt makes food more palatable and nicer to the taste, so we ought to live in way that the witness of messiah in our life makes the understanding of God’s ways more palatable to people. Matthew 22:37
“And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”. In Deuteronomy, Moses sits on a mountain and exhorts the people who were soon to enter the Promised Land in the following words, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). In Matthew Yeshua, who taught that the Kingdom of God was at hand, also sits on a mountain and exhorts His disciples how to live these higher standards of Torah (Matthew 12:28). The Master warns His friends in the following words, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:20). In other words, the deeds of righteousness of the religious leaders of His days were recognized as righteous acts, but they were not enough. What did Yeshua mean? The Master explains His statement. Let us take a look at the words of the Master of the Sermon on the Mount, but through His own Jewish lenses. In Judaism, prayer is the work of the heart (b.Ta’anit 2a) and fasting is the afflicting of the soul (Leviticus 16:31; Isaiah 58:5). The word ‘might’ in Hebrew is ‘m’od’ which literally means ‘much’. Your ‘much’ is your worth or your substance. In other words to love the God with all your might is to love God with all your substance, in essence: the giving of charity. With these, we can now see that the Sermon on the Mount consisted of instruction on things such as prayer (Matthew 6:7-8), fasting (Matthew 6:17-18), and the giving of charity (Matthew 6:3-4). The Sermon on the Mount therefore represents instructions on how to practice loving God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our might in a higher manner than the religious people of His day.. As we ponder on the Master’s words, we discover that they teach us to obey Torah commands, but with the right motives; not in an outward show in order to earn the respect of men, nor for the social prestige that these actions bring. It is so easy for our ‘righteousness’ to be an outward hypocritical show of religiosity. The Master teaches us instead that whereas we are to ‘let your light shine’ before others (to practice God’s words openly), we are to do it in a way that people see our ‘good works’ (good works = practicing of the Torah) and give glory to our Father who is in heaven (so that people will praise and give glory to God, not to us!) (Matthew 5:16). In other words, whatever we do should be done for the glory of God, not to increase our own value in the sight of men, a sentiment also expressed by Paul, Yeshua’s emissary (1 Corinthians 10:31). As we practice the keeping the Sabbath this week, may we do it in a way that brings praise the Father in the heart of others. Matthew 1:23
"Behold, the virgin (young maiden) shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel" (which means, God with us”). At the onset of his ministry the prophet Isaiah sees an awe-inspiring vision of the throne room of God. Isaiah’s vision is complete with smoke, fire and shaking; it seems reminiscent of the Horeb oracle. Isaiah becomes so overwhelmed by what he sees that he right away confesses his unworthiness. A seraphim (a burning one) then applies a burning coal from the altar of incense in front of God’s throne to the prophet’s mouth in order to remove his iniquity. Thus like others after him, Isaiah is made ready to become one Israel’s main prophets, a messianic prophet at that. Ahaz King of Judah frets like a leave in the wind because Remaliah the king of Israel has allied himself with Pekah King of Aram to fight the realm of Judah. God needs a messenger to encourage King Ahaz (as wicked as he was) to trust Him and Isaiah volunteers even though he is told that he will not be heeded. The Almighty says to Ahaz, "Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be deep as Sheol or high as heaven."(Ahaz could choose whatever sign he wanted to show that God would not let Judah perish. God doesn’t often issue a blank check like that!);. But Ahaz said, "I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test."And he (the Lord) said, "Hear then, O house of David! Is it too little for you to weary men, that you weary my God also? Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. (God chooses the sign anyways; we are not really allowed to refuse God!) Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel (Isaiah 7:11-14). This son was to be born of the young wife of Ahaz and become good king Hezekiah, a prophecy used by Matthew to describe the advent of Messiah. Whereas Hezekiah was not the Messiah, the prophecy does look into the future. Isaiah is asked to take with him his son Shear-Jachub on his visit to King Ahaz. Shear-Jachub in Hebrew means ‘a remnant will return’. Less than a hundred years after the coming of Messiah, Israel was scattered, and like after each dispersion, only a remnant returns. We have in this story a remarkable event confirming to us the Father’s eternal virtue of covenant-loyalty in spite of our sinful rebellious nature. Ahaz who practiced idolatry and even sacrificed his children in high places had become one of the worst kings of Judah. Yet God appealed to him for repentance and trust in Him in order to save Judah. When Ahaz defiantly refused to put his trust in God, God decided to give him a sign of assured victory anyways: the sign of the coming of Messiah. Until this day the sign of the young Nazarene maiden who gave birth is with us. In spite of our wretched nature we can look at it as unto a promise of salvation and restoration. May we not be like King Ahaz though who partook of the grace and compassion of God while all the time despising it. Maybe this story is to remind us that our redemption is purely by virtue of the mercy of "God (who) so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). Mark 3:4
"Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?" The Sabbath is the most repeated ordinance in the Scriptures. Like the wearing a wedding ring informs people that we belong to someone, the Sabbath informs our entourage that we belong to El-Shaddai. People have a wide array of ideas on how the Sabbath should be observed. From a simple mental cognition to a strict and severe application, all aspects of the spectrum of Sabbath application are covered sometimes even at the cost of division between family and friends, but how did Yeshua observe the Sabbath? We are told that the evening the Master’s death was a Sabbath so his disciples went to rest according to the commandments (Luke 23:56). What Yeshua taught his disciples was a healthy respect of the Sabbath and there is nothing in the Scriptures to tell us that He broke it. Remember, Yeshua was without sin and the sin is the breaking of the Torah (Hebrews 4:15; 1 John 3:4). What Yeshua did was argue with was a harsh and burdensome application of not only the Sabbath but of the whole Torah, He Himself said ‘ My yoke is easy’ (Matthew 11:30). In Torah talk, the yoke is the yoke of Torah application in our lives. What Yeshua was in fact saying is that His type of Torah application was easy and light not hard and oppressive, which included His application of the Sabbath. For example: for farmers, a donkey was a precious commodity in Israel so it was agreed by the religious leaders of the day that if on the Sabbath a donkey fell in a well, its masters could rescue it even though it broke the Sabbath prohibition about work. Yeshua then went on to argue that the life of a man was much more precious than that of a donkey and so that if we can rescue a donkey on the Sabbath, it should certainly be permissible to heal a whole man on the Sabbath day. Yeshua was not creating a new law and application but He was arguing from within the contents of the Jewish law of His day. Yeshua tried in fact to teach us that not only the saving of a life was acceptable on the Sabbath, but also the alleviating of human suffering, which is what became a doctrinal point of disagreement. The examples of Yeshua’s handling of the Sabbath should give us a good idea of what is biblically permissible on the Sabbath. Yeshua in fact reminded His audience that by their own teachings it was alright to do good on the Sabbath when He asked them this rhetorical question, "Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill? (Mark 3:4)" May we remember this principle and learn to make our Sabbath observances a blessing to us, and to those around us. 1 Corinthians 15:52
… At the last trumpet. Paul, Yeshua’s emissary speaks to us about the ‘last blow of the shofar’ (1 Corinthians 15:52). If there is a last blow there must also be a first, and in our case the last blow of the shofar is an echo of the first at Horeb through the passage of time. The first shofar is blown at Horeb to herald the grand entrance of the King in the lives of men. God entered the created dimension and His feet touched the mountain (Exodus 19:11). The Almighty Creator of the universe also enjoyed a meal with Israel sitting at His feet (Exodus 24:9-11). In the same manner, the last shofar will herald the arrival of the King whose feet will touch the mountain and who will also recline with His disciples for a meal (Zechariah 14:4; Revelations 19:7-9). In Exodus, while Egypt drowned and licked its wounds from the results of a series of plagues, our fathers were placed under the legislation of God’s eternal Instruction. By these, they were to be a light to the nations. At the last shofar, while the worlds also licks its wounds from the plagues of God’s judgments, those of the nations who remain will also be placed under the legislation of the Light of Torah which is the constitution of the Word to Come. When a man blows the shofar, he starts out strong then grows weaker as he runs out breath. It is not so with the God whose breath (in Hebrew: ruach meaning: spirit or /breath) is infinite. The mighty El-Shaddai doesn’t run out of breath as the text in Exodus tells us, As the sound of the trumpet grew louder and louder …(Exodus 19:19). Looking at our sad world today, it can easily be concluded that all of its problems are the result of breaking the fundamental instruction taught at Mt Horeb. One of the sages of Israel defined that just by keeping the last of Horeb’s Ten Statements we keep all the rest of them. Indeed if we (10) do not covet the things that we do not have or even need, (1) we worship our One God and (2) are not tempted the dainties offered us by idol-worshipping; (3) we do not need to lie so we do not need to take His Name in vain by swearing falsely (Matthew 5:33-37); (4) we do not find it binding to take a day off from lucrative activities to spend it with God and those created in His image such as family and friends, and (5) we have no qualms about morally and financially supporting our aged parents. The absence of covetousness also negates the need for (6) murder, (7) adultery), (8) stealing, and (9) lying. Thus is the legislation of the Messianic Era now and in the World to Come. May it come soon Adon Yeshua, even in our days! |
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