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John 1:18
No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. We all want peace in the world. The Torah tells us that peace comes from studying the Sacred Text. Speaking of studying the Torah in the World to Come, Isaiah prophecies and says, All your children shall be taught by the LORD, and great shall be the peace of your children (Isaiah 54:13) (The Hebrew text uses the tetragrammaton for the word ‘Lord’ in this verse; it therefore refers to seeing God). John says that in this present time, ‘No one has ever seen God’; In fact seeing God leads to death. But Isaiah prophecies that in the established Messianic Age … your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. In another place the prophet adds, And the glory of the LORD (tetragrammaton) shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together … (John 1:18; Isaiah 30:20; Isaiah 40:5).’ When speaking of the dynamics of His relationship with the One whom He called The Father, Yeshua compared Himself to Manna coming from Heaven. In the Talmud, bread and rain from Heaven are parabolic of Torah: the Word of God’s teaching coming to God’s people. Yeshua compared His teaching of God (whom He had seen (John 1:18)) to the manna that came down from heaven to feed the people in the desert. When people who had known Yeshua from a young age challenged His claim of coming from heaven, Yeshua, who is at the Father's side, (John 1:18), answered and said, It is written in the Prophets, 'And they will all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me--not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. … (John 6:45-51)." In essence, Yeshua, said, ’In Me is fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy. Since no-one can see the Father and live, if all God’s children are to be taught of the Father, it needs to be done by proxy. I am the ‘proxy’. This resonates of the words the children of Israel 'Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.' About which Hashem said, 'They are right in what they have spoken’. So He then added: ‘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 18:16-18). May we all be taught the words of the Father through His Messiah. Then will we have peace in our hearts, … and in the world!
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Matthew 6:26
Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? While in the desert Israel was on God’s complete welfare system. Their food and water was miraculously supplied; the clothes on their back did not wear out and their feet did not swell (Deuteronomy 8:4). Every morning as they prepared food, they handled the bounty of Hashem in their hands and even ate it. It was easy then to have the the natural reaction of blessing God after eating (Deuteronomy 8:10). Now they were going to enter the Land and manna would eventually stop. They were going to have to till the land, sow, harvest, dig wells, irrigate, build houses and even train an army to protect their borders. It would then be easy to forget that Hashem is the Great Provider of all bounties and Protector of His people. and think that all they have is due to their own efforts. Moses warned the children of Israel, For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and springs, …, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, …, a land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. "Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, … who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart, 'My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.' … And if you forget the LORD your God and go after other gods and serve them and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish (Deuteronomy (8:7-19). This is the age-old cycle: obedience to Torah brings success, success brings complacency, complacency leads to neglect of Torah, and neglect of Torah brings failure. Nations who once succeeded because they strove to be based on the Word are now falling from very high as they forgot the God who allowed them to exist. Poverty may build character but wealth tests it. It is when we don’t feel so dependant of God that our motives are tested. It is like our grown up kids, once they feel they don’t need us, we sometimes don’t hear from them anymore. Someone told me once that if you want your kids to communicate, tell them you sent them a letter with a small check in it, then send the letter ‘forgetting’ to insert the check. God has the big ‘check’ for us, and He also checks our motives! He knows how to slow the faucet of His provisions and remind us that we are but dust. He wants us to love Him not just because of the ‘check’ though, but because we are grateful and are a bride responding to His loving advances towards us. Matthew 6:33
Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. There are two main ways the Father uses our finances to teach us: He either withholds them or punishes us with abundance. On the second month of their exodus the children of Israel complained about their manna diet. They wanted fresh meat. Our fathers’ desire for meat made them complain about their blessed situation and look back at Egypt with nostalgia (Exodus 16:3). A year later they did it again (Numbers 11:4) and this time the Father from whom all blessings flow did not take too kindly to it and He addressed the issue by punishing them with abundance. Abundance is not always a sign of God’s blessing and approval. Abundance has a tendency to steal our hearts from God. In abundance we spend foolishly, become preoccupied with the things of the world, and find it difficult to dedicate to God in the same proportions as before. Avarice and greed are quick to follow and a society that has too much becomes fat, lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the needs of others. It seems easier to emanate godliness when things are lean. Maybe that is why many of God’s children are blessed with ‘leanness’. Whether we live in leanness or abundance, we should never complain. The apostle Paul was a good example of this. When addressing his own situation he said, I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content (Philippians 4:11). He also taught his disciples to be content with the basics of food and raiment (1Timothy 1:6); housing is not even in the deal. James, the brother of the Master did not hold too much respect for wealth either (James 5:1-6) and the Master Himself encouraged us to not worry about our food and raiment but to busy ourselves with the affairs of the Kingdom (Matthew 6:31-34). May we learn from this lesson from our fathers in the desert and realize that abundance can be a punishment as much as poverty. Poverty usually drives us to desperation and to God; abundance steals our hearts away from He who is the Fountain of Everlasting Life. May we not grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer, but remember that these things happened to them as an example, that they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come (1Corinthians 10:10-11) . May we pray the wise prayer from King Solomon, Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, "Who is the LORD?" or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God (Proverbs 30:8-9). 1 Corinthians 10:11
These things happened to them as an example … were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. It seems that few things exacerbate the Father more than His people griping and complaining. He can freely set before us the best food ever concocted in the kitchens of Heaven, we will still complain and would rather have the dainties bought by slavery. And why do we complain? There is really nothing wrong with the food God gives us except that it is not what we want. Woe unto us and our evil nature! This tendency to complain and always wanting more is the basic lusting nature behind the sin in the Garden of Eden. We want what God in His goodness withholds from us, and like today’s manufacturers of goods, the devil is always happy to oblige. The worst of the story is that today’s worldly merchants know about our natural bend to whine and gripe and they constantly play on it in order to make a profit. They constantly tell people, “Aren’t you tired of this or that, behold I have the solution that will help you not to have work so hard, be more comfortable, or here is the food that will delight your palate. For only $...! How can you live without it?” They make a profit and feed on our complaining nature. It is so easy to look at the Children of Israel in the desert and wonder how they could complain so much, but in reality, we complain as much as they do and about the same things. Food, hard work, leadership, and the sometimes monotonous daily grind of life seem to be our main areas of complaint. We feel that the way God does things is not good enough. We must improve on His plan for us and make every decision in our lives from the color and consistency of our hair to whether or not to have children. We even want to decide the day of our death and call it ‘Death with Dignity’. We always think that we deserve more than the simple life our Father would have us live according to His will, so we enslave ourselves to another master: the Master Card! But Yeshua told that we cannot serve two masters; that we cannot serve God and Mammon (Matthew 6:24 KJV), and serving Mammon is where our complaining takes us. God knows it and He tried to reference the point through the Children of Israel in the desert. The area of complaint that seems the most destructive in the congregational body of Messiah seems to be each other. Whereas we complain about having to put up with others, we seem to forget that also others have to put up with us. We feel that people should have learned certain lessons by now so we show ourselves intolerant in impatient. We forget that in the Father’s eyes, we probably should be a bit more advanced ourselves in our spiritual growth and that we only exist by the mercy of His great compassion. May we learn from the lessons of the Children of Israel in the desert and realize that these things happened to them as an example … were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come (Corinthians 10:11). |
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