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Hebrews 9:28
Messiah, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. The middle verse of the Hebrew version of the Torah, or the ‘Teaching’ says, Now Moses diligently inquired about the goat of the sin offering, and behold, it was burned up! (Leviticus 10:16). To understand what happens in this passage we must go back to chapter 9 when the grand-priesthood inauguration begins. God, being a ‘consuming fire’ (Deuteronomy 4:24) had established a very serious protocol whereby Israel was to approach Him and Moses gave very specific instructions about it. Nadab and Abihu, two of the sons of Aaron were careless in their application of the protocol and were utterly burned by the fire of God as they approached the Sanctuary in an unauthorized manner (Leviticus 10:1-3). Aaron was obviously devastated and in mourning but he and his other two sons were in the middle of the grand inauguration (Leviticus 9) so they couldn’t stop for mourning; Aaron therefore held his peace (Leviticus 10:3). Some may argue that God’s punishment of Nadab and Abihu was out of proportions and to be qualified as the tantrums of a capricious deity, but instead of reviewing God’s actions, maybe we should review our own sense of what is important and what is not. Intersection with God is not to be taken lightly. There may also be more to the event than meets the eye! Part of the priesthood’s inauguration was that Aaron and his sons were to eat sections of the goat offered as a ‘ollah’, burnt offering inside the Tabernacle precinct. Moses couldn’t find that goat so he searched diligently for it until he discovered that it had been fully consumed. The patriarch then got angry and asked for an explanation to which Aaron answered, "Behold, today they have offered their sin offering and their burnt offering before the LORD, and yet such things as these have happened to me! If I had eaten the sin offering today, would the LORD have approved?" (Leviticus 10:19). What happens here is that Aaron reminds Moses that it was unpleasing to God for a priest to do office while in sadness or mourning (Deuteronomy 26:14; 16:11), a theme even found later among Semitic kings (Nehemiah 2:1-2). So because he was uncontrollably saddened at the death of his two sons, Aaron felt he could not do proper justice to that part of the service which he then forewent. Moses was pleased with the explanation (Leviticus 10:20). What is to be noticed here is that this center verse of the Torah verse tells us to ‘search diligently’ for the goat of the sin offering which is an early representation of Yeshua’s atonement. Therefore the central goal of studying to Torah is the search for Messiah. The Talmud explains that the death of Aaron’s sons is not really justifiable, so that it can only be counted as the ‘death of the righteous which creates atonement for others’, a very prevalent theme in Biblical text. Whether we agree or not with the Talmud’s interpretation, since Yeshua is our High-Priest as well as our atonement (Hebrews 9:25), this is an idea that very much fits the theme of the priestly inauguration. May we also spend our lives seeking diligently to approach God through the atonement of Yeshua.
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Matthew 6:10
… on earth as it is in heaven. When Moses met Adonai on the mountain he received the following instructions, And let them (the Children of Israel) make me (Adonai) a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst. Exactly as I show you concerning the pattern of the tabernacle, and of all its furniture, so you shall make it. And see that you make them after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain (Exodus 25:8-9, 40). Moses was the first Biblically recorded prophet to have seen God’s throne room and God required that the Children of Israel build His earthly Sanctuary exactly as Moses saw it on the Mount. If we want to understand Heaven and our relationship with the Almighty, all we have to do is ponder on the picture of Israel’s encampment around the Tabernacle and on the Tabernacle Itself. In essence, the Children of Israel were building Heaven on earth. The dimensions and instructions to build this Tabernacle were very specifics (Exodus 35). This teaches us that God didn’t leave it up to us to decide how to worship and love Him. Of course we are free moral agents, but even as Yeshua said, our love for Him, as well as our unification to Him are measured by our obedience (John 15:10). Spirituality outside of Torah always leads to idolatry and paganism. Torah teaches us the definition and structure of worshipping God; it creates a structure and shape for spirituality to fill. In their attempt to bring divinity into their midst without the parameters of Torah, the Children of Israel built an idol, and rather than bring God close to them, they repulsed Him. Here is something to think about now: how often do we see the same dynamic at work among believers who earnestly desire after God, but pursue Him outside of the good laws of His revealed word? We would like to think that God doesn’t care how we love Him as long as we love Him, but these instructions on how to do so are a testament to the opposite. My wife and I run a small school and youth programs from our house. I have certain behavior rules concerning attitude, language, and general comportment that kids have to uphold while they are within the parameters of my property. I expect them to obey me if they want to benefit of what I have to offer them. They cannot argue with my rules telling me that their parents or their neighbor allows them to do certain things that I don’t. I tell them it is, ‘My house, my rule!’ I guess God is like any father on earth. He establishes the rules and parameters of His Kingdom and anyone living in it has to live by them or incur His displeasure. May we today learn to love the Father as He intended us to do it. Certain things may still be difficult to understand, but the Father in His indulgent love has sent Yeshua to help answer much of our questions. Yeshua in turn has allowed His apostles to give us many specifics on how to live a Torah lifestyle. May we spend our lives living by them and in so doing, build Heaven on earth. Matthew 19:20
“Where do I still fall short?” I find it very difficult to explain to people the idea that I expressed in yesterday’s devotional, that the recipe for Eternal Life as proclaimed to us by the mouth of Yeshua Himself is: to keep the Commandments and follow Him (Matthew 19:16-21). Whereas people may at a later time understand, their mind is usually stuck behind a very strong and tall barrage of ‘Law-phobia’. Since the days of Luther’s Reformation, people have been accustomed to the ‘free-be’ version of the faith. As soon as they hear the slightest mention of ‘Mosaic law’, they suddenly become expert watchdogs of the faith to make sure that you are not teaching the ‘false doctrine’ of a Redemption that would cost them something. Don’t get me wrong here, I do believe that my Redemption cost me nothing, but as far as saying that Redemption is free I would suggest first asking Yeshua about it. The facts are that if it is free, it is because someone else paid the tab, so in essence it is not free. Justice had to be paid for God to be a ‘just’ God. So as the adage says, ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. The other question I want to ask is, ‘And what if it did cost something; don’t you think that the benefits far outweigh anything you can invest for the Kingdom? I know that this is not theologically correct, but I feel that the issue of free redemption is only appreciated for that very reason: because it is free, an attitude which seems to denote of a spirit of calculated self-preservation and selfishness. Didn’t Yeshua teach the parable of the man whom when he found the Kingdom, was happy to invest all that he had to obtain it (Matthew 13:44)’? It seems that this man fell onto the ‘pro version’. The version that requires to pay, but the one which then answers the question of our rich young ruler in Matthew 19, ‘where do I still fall short?’ As we come to the Kingdom through the ‘free version’ program, we are introduced to the pay ‘pro-version’ option which brings us deeper into the Kingdom and closer to the Master, and whereas the entrance is free, the measure of our rewards is estimated by our personal investment, the bread we cast upon the waters and the use of our talents (Ecclesiastes 11:1; Matthew 25:14-30). We are certainly free to remain in the free-version, but wouldn’t we want to get closer to him who gave everything so we could enter the kingdom? Are we just in it for the ‘free stuff’? We are supposed to emulate Him and He did not balk at the cost. Do we? 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) 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. 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. |
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