These are just the main points of the book Garden of Peace by Rabbi Shalom Arush. You should read the book yourself, but for a very quick overview without expanding on any of the points in this book you have come to the right place. May the God of peace grant you all peace and joy in your homes.
Ch 1
-Get married. Man was not meant to be alone. Pray specifically for God to give you a wife.
Ch 2
-The wife is like a mirror. Anything unpleasant you see in her is a reflection of unpleasantness in you. Once you fix yourself she will automatically be fixed as well.
-A husband is like the sun and his wife like the moon. The moon can only reflect the light given to it by the sun.
-Women cannot accept criticism while men can. Don't EVER say anything negative about your wife or her actions.
Ch 3
-The wife has to be first place in her husband's life. First even above his job, his religion, and his own children. If the husband puts his wife first she will also give him room for all those other things.
Ch 4
-Be a man. Men are designed to give while women are designed to receive. A man doesn't desire honor while a woman NEEDS honor.
Ch 5
-A husband must honor his wife. In the home the wife is the general and the husband is the captain.
Ch 6
-A husband must be pure and holy. A husband who lusts after his wife sexually becomes repulsive to her. Also when a husband seeks to receive his own sexual satisfaction rather than his wife's satisfaction he stops fulfilling the male role as the giver and he becomes the receiver. This can also lead to him hating his wife.
Ch 7
-Prayer is so powerful to change a person. Consistent personal prayer can bring a person to repentance, and even give them a distaste for the things of the world and a hunger for the things of God.
Ch 8
-When there is peace in the home God dwells within it. A husband must first show kindness and love to his wife before he shows it to others. The wife's priorities come first.
-A husband must constantly show gratitude to his wife and should even make a notebook to write all the thinks he is thankful to his wife for.
Ch 9
-Without peace being achieved in the home the couple will always feel like they are in need of something.
-A husband must be willing to give up his own honor for the sake of peace with his wife, otherwise he will lose both.
-With disciplining the children a husband must always side with his wife, even if he feels she is being too hard on them. In the end it will be better for everyone.
-A husband must also side with his wife in her complaints about his or her parents. The parents really value their children's happy marriage over their own honor.
-A man may feel constricted by his marriage. This constriction is healthy and a gift from God to help him mature spiritually.
-When a man feels that his wife is distracting him or pulling him away from God he should all the more lavish her with love and seek to fix anything wrong in his own life and pray for her repentance.
Ch 10
-Marriage is a true test of faith.
-We must be happy with our lot. "Who is truly rich? The one who is satisfied with his portion."
-A husband must notice when his wife is not happy and realize that something is not right in the home, even if he thinks everything is going well. The wife is the actual gauge to the peace in the marriage.
-When a husband is kicked out of the house he must see this as a huge gift from God to examine himself and repent. He should not seek right away to be brought back into the home but rather should focus on fixing himself, then his wife will automatically invite him back home.
-When a wife complains to friends or relatives instead of her husband it means she feels she cannot trust him for support. A husband should ensure his wife never feels that way.
-Divorce happens because we lack the faith that God is using our marriage to fix our own character flaws. If we don't fix ourselves no matter how many times we remarry there will never be peace in the home.
Ch 11
-It is a man's duty to provide financially for his wife.
-A man must not burden his wife with the discussion of debts. It's his responsibility, not hers.
-A husband must be generous and give his wife as much money as she wants without asking her to make an account of how she spends it. And he must also give her many gifts.
-A man must trust that God will provide for him everything his wife needs. If she needs "more than he can afford" for some shoes or a new dress he must give her the money for it and trust God to provide him with the way to afford it.
Ch 12
-There are especially trying times in a marriage: first year, pregnancy, monthly period, family crisis, etc. Have faith and don't give up. Learn to recognize when those times are so you can act appropriately.
-The first year of marriage is a special time for a couple to build a strong foundation. Avoid having too many guests or other distractions from each other.
-Husbands need to keep in mind that women are different than men and get enthusiastic about different things than men do. But wives need their husband's full support for their enthusiasm.
-A wife needs to hear her husband praise her multiple times every day.
-A woman can sense when her husband is serving her only out of duty and his heart is not in it. What she really wants is her husband's heart.
-A woman needs her husband to listen to her with his full attention. Even if he's bored or his mind is on something else he must give her his full attention.
-A husband must approach his wife always with a happy face showing how happy he is to see her. Before he approaches her he must clear his mind of all else that may be making him unhappy otherwise she will think that she is the reason for his unhappiness.
-A husband must be quick to lend his wife a helping hand in any task no matter how mundane it may seem to him.
-A husband must always give his wife the benefit of the doubt and realize that there is a good reason she is behaving a certain way.
-A husband must not be lazy. It is not good for his wife to see him around the house too much. He must be up early in the morning and be seen by his wife as ambitious and loving.
-A husband must be careful to never say or do anything that will hurt his wife. He is her security and she needs to trust him as such.
-In an argument you don't have to be right. Having peace in the home is more important than being right.
-To avoid hurting his wife and to maintain peace in the home a husband should never mention to his wife a mistake she made. He must let those things remain in the past.
-A husband must always try to be sympathetic toward his wife and relieve her stress in a sensitive and loving way.
Ch 13
-When looking for your mate first pray that God will bring her to you. God is the one who knows each person's heart, and he will set up the best match.
-Don't expect to find "The perfect girl"; she doesn't exist. Remember that marriage will be difficult and force us to have more faith and patience. It will be a lot of work. But it will be so worth it.
-Don't fool yourself into thinking you have to get to know the person so well before you can marry them. No matter how long you date someone to try to get to know them you will never REALLY start to know them until you are married and building a life together. So as you are dating there is no need to probe so deeply into the person's life. Just keep it simple and basic.
-Don't get hung up on the other person's, or your own, past. Remember there is always grace and repentance. Instead focus on the kind of person she is / you are today.
Ch 14
-The marriage contract says you will be the sole provider for your wife in many matters: financially, emotionally, sexually, etc. Remember you are the giver and she is the receiver. Make sure you are fulfilling your contract to her.
-Your wife is yours alone after you say to her, "you are set apart to me....." Cherish and value her.
-Pray together with your wife. Make your home a holy place so that the divine presence of God may also dwell with you in your home.
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
World views of sexuality and love from TV and from the religious communities
I have a pattern where I go for about a year without watching any movies or TV, and then suddenly I go on a type of binge where I will watch like 1 or 2 movies every night.
What I have noticed from this pattern is how much my world view is affected by the types of media I am consuming. In the Christian and Jewish religious communities there is great value in modest dress and sexual purity. Some people make commitments not to have sex or kiss on the lips or cuddle until they are married. And in some of the Orthodox Jewish communities they don't even touch to shake hands or give hugs. They idea is that a line must be drawn somewhere to make sure people aren't just going around having sex with everybody. Where exactly the line is drawn varies greatly from one community to another.
There is another idea out there in the religious communities that people want to be very careful when searching for a mate and they want to remain completely subjective (without emotions getting in the way) with all candidates until they are married. The idea is that if one can remain completely subjective then they can get the smartest match that will make the most sense logically and economically. The way they go about this also varies by community. Some communities chose to be Shomer Nagiah: to go on a lot of dates but have no physical contact at all with the opposite sex. Others chose to kiss dating goodbye: the man has to decide that the woman is someone he wants to marry and then ask for her father's permission to court her. These are the two most common ways of maintaining objectivity among the most conservative religious groups.
These conservative ideas are very contrary to what the world is saying through television. In the movies we learn that if you like someone you should kiss them, and if you've only known them for 10 minutes it's just that much more romantic. If you really REALLY like them, or if you're just feeling horny, you should have sex with them. You might regret it in the morning but who cares; you are young and have a lot of mistakes to make before you become old and boring. TV might even tell us that we can't help it that we keep having sex with all these people who are basically strangers; it's just hormones that we can't control. And if you've been with lots of partners before that's okay because once you find "the one" they probably have been with lots of other partners too. Just make sure the guys are wearing a condom to prevent disease and unwanted pregnancy.
The world says to go crazy and have fun and be romantic while the conservative religious communities say to stay strong and fight your urges because it will one day pay off.
So in the end what really ends up happening to people? Some people go with the conservative religious practices and the remain virgins until they marry while others go pretty crazy while they are young and eventually marry someone. In the end both end up married. And often times both end up divorced. Statistically the divorce rate of marriages has absolutely nothing to do with religious or secular values.
But what about the overall satisfaction people have with their marriages? There are people who remain married but are miserable, and there are people who never get married but have been living happily with the same partner for years. It almost looks like happiness is not determined by our religious values, or lack there of.
On one hand I see the value of going so far as to be Shomer Nagiah and staying objective to find the right person to marry and be able to say she was the only one I ever touched. But on the other hand I think we shouldn't be so afraid to make mistakes in life. What happens to the guy who has been with other girls and finally marries one who has never touched another man? Will she feel like she was wasting her time by saving herself for a husband who wasn't saving himself for her? Will he feel like he's worthless and not good enough for her? When they have sex will he be thinking to himself of how other women performed better in bed than his wife does? These are all possibilities.
What about love? What exactly does that mean when someone says, "I love you"? Today it gets said a lot. We say we love oranges, we love that TV show, we love our dog, we love our friends, we love our families. But is the love we have for oranges the same as the love we have for our family? I would say it's very different. When we say we love oranges what we actually mean is we like the taste of oranges and the way we feel when we eat oranges. In essence we are saying that we love ourselves and making ourselves feel good. But when I say that I love my parents and my siblings what I mean is that I truly love them for who they are and I would sacrifice my own comfort in order to benifit them. Not only do I feel good around them (and that is not always the case), but no matter what they do or what our differences are they will always be my family and I will always seek their good.
How is love defined in the bible? In 1 Corinthians 13:1-8, 13 it says:
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
The bible definition of love is very different from the TV definition of love. In the movies we see these love stories with people falling in and out of love as if it's just about the feelings. In society we see a mirror of that behavior where a boyfriend and girlfriend will say that they love each other. They are always together and everyone says they are such a cute couple, but then after a year, let's say, they break up and any time they are in the same room together after that puts an awkwardness in the air that everyone can feel. Did they ever really love each other? Or was it more like a persons love for oranges? When they said "I love you" did they actually just mean "I love myself and the way I feel when I'm with you"? I will suggest that what they actually meant was "I am passionate about you". What is passion? When we are passionate about something we give it all of our time and all of our thoughts. We pursue it heavily. But passion doesn't last forever. It can last for a very long time, but it's a fire that will eventually burn itself out. Someone may say they are passionate about their job, but a time will come where they will get burned out and say they need a vacation. After the vacation maybe that passion will be rekindled, but not always.
We get this idea from TV that there is one special person out there for us to marry, we just have to find them. Often times people lose their passion about their spouse and they have affairs and say to themselves that they made a mistake about their "one". The person they picked wasn't the one, so now they need a divorce and they need to keep searching. But what if that's not actually the way it works? What if God didn't create just one specific person for us to be with, like two pieces of a puzzle fitting together perfectly? What if He left it open and up to us to work out our relationships? What if He made it so we have to learn what love really is as opposed to just passion? What about someone who is widowed and then remarries? Could they at the end of their life say there was just one companion for them?
Remember how the Bible defines love? That's not like passion. Love is what I give to my closest friends and my family. Love is a commitment that says I'm with them until the end through thick and thin. Maybe our search for a spouse isn't about finding that "one" other puzzle piece. Maybe it's more about finding someone we will be committed to in true love. Someone who we will go through hard times with, who we will argue with, who we will find at times to be very unpleasant, but who we will still seek their good despite all that. I am saying that there isn't "one" out there that we have to find; but we will some day find one and we will have to commit to MAKING them the "one" who we stick with till the end. I'm not saying just go with anyone and marry them. Find someone you are passionate about, but who you can also commit to. Someone who you can love no matter how many things you disagree about and no matter how passionate or cold you feel toward them at the moment.
Love is what makes the difference between the happy marriages and the miserable ones; between the ones who divorce and the ones who stick together. Saving yourself sexually for your spouse is very beneficial, but that's not what's going to keep you together and happy. My desire for all of you reading this is that you will learn to love others without seeking anything for yourself in return. Inevitably when it's truly love you will get a whole lot in return; much more than passion alone could ever give. Get out there and love. Don't be afraid to make mistakes and don't just give away your passion to anybody.
Peace.
What I have noticed from this pattern is how much my world view is affected by the types of media I am consuming. In the Christian and Jewish religious communities there is great value in modest dress and sexual purity. Some people make commitments not to have sex or kiss on the lips or cuddle until they are married. And in some of the Orthodox Jewish communities they don't even touch to shake hands or give hugs. They idea is that a line must be drawn somewhere to make sure people aren't just going around having sex with everybody. Where exactly the line is drawn varies greatly from one community to another.
There is another idea out there in the religious communities that people want to be very careful when searching for a mate and they want to remain completely subjective (without emotions getting in the way) with all candidates until they are married. The idea is that if one can remain completely subjective then they can get the smartest match that will make the most sense logically and economically. The way they go about this also varies by community. Some communities chose to be Shomer Nagiah: to go on a lot of dates but have no physical contact at all with the opposite sex. Others chose to kiss dating goodbye: the man has to decide that the woman is someone he wants to marry and then ask for her father's permission to court her. These are the two most common ways of maintaining objectivity among the most conservative religious groups.
These conservative ideas are very contrary to what the world is saying through television. In the movies we learn that if you like someone you should kiss them, and if you've only known them for 10 minutes it's just that much more romantic. If you really REALLY like them, or if you're just feeling horny, you should have sex with them. You might regret it in the morning but who cares; you are young and have a lot of mistakes to make before you become old and boring. TV might even tell us that we can't help it that we keep having sex with all these people who are basically strangers; it's just hormones that we can't control. And if you've been with lots of partners before that's okay because once you find "the one" they probably have been with lots of other partners too. Just make sure the guys are wearing a condom to prevent disease and unwanted pregnancy.
The world says to go crazy and have fun and be romantic while the conservative religious communities say to stay strong and fight your urges because it will one day pay off.
So in the end what really ends up happening to people? Some people go with the conservative religious practices and the remain virgins until they marry while others go pretty crazy while they are young and eventually marry someone. In the end both end up married. And often times both end up divorced. Statistically the divorce rate of marriages has absolutely nothing to do with religious or secular values.
But what about the overall satisfaction people have with their marriages? There are people who remain married but are miserable, and there are people who never get married but have been living happily with the same partner for years. It almost looks like happiness is not determined by our religious values, or lack there of.
On one hand I see the value of going so far as to be Shomer Nagiah and staying objective to find the right person to marry and be able to say she was the only one I ever touched. But on the other hand I think we shouldn't be so afraid to make mistakes in life. What happens to the guy who has been with other girls and finally marries one who has never touched another man? Will she feel like she was wasting her time by saving herself for a husband who wasn't saving himself for her? Will he feel like he's worthless and not good enough for her? When they have sex will he be thinking to himself of how other women performed better in bed than his wife does? These are all possibilities.
What about love? What exactly does that mean when someone says, "I love you"? Today it gets said a lot. We say we love oranges, we love that TV show, we love our dog, we love our friends, we love our families. But is the love we have for oranges the same as the love we have for our family? I would say it's very different. When we say we love oranges what we actually mean is we like the taste of oranges and the way we feel when we eat oranges. In essence we are saying that we love ourselves and making ourselves feel good. But when I say that I love my parents and my siblings what I mean is that I truly love them for who they are and I would sacrifice my own comfort in order to benifit them. Not only do I feel good around them (and that is not always the case), but no matter what they do or what our differences are they will always be my family and I will always seek their good.
How is love defined in the bible? In 1 Corinthians 13:1-8, 13 it says:
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
The bible definition of love is very different from the TV definition of love. In the movies we see these love stories with people falling in and out of love as if it's just about the feelings. In society we see a mirror of that behavior where a boyfriend and girlfriend will say that they love each other. They are always together and everyone says they are such a cute couple, but then after a year, let's say, they break up and any time they are in the same room together after that puts an awkwardness in the air that everyone can feel. Did they ever really love each other? Or was it more like a persons love for oranges? When they said "I love you" did they actually just mean "I love myself and the way I feel when I'm with you"? I will suggest that what they actually meant was "I am passionate about you". What is passion? When we are passionate about something we give it all of our time and all of our thoughts. We pursue it heavily. But passion doesn't last forever. It can last for a very long time, but it's a fire that will eventually burn itself out. Someone may say they are passionate about their job, but a time will come where they will get burned out and say they need a vacation. After the vacation maybe that passion will be rekindled, but not always.
We get this idea from TV that there is one special person out there for us to marry, we just have to find them. Often times people lose their passion about their spouse and they have affairs and say to themselves that they made a mistake about their "one". The person they picked wasn't the one, so now they need a divorce and they need to keep searching. But what if that's not actually the way it works? What if God didn't create just one specific person for us to be with, like two pieces of a puzzle fitting together perfectly? What if He left it open and up to us to work out our relationships? What if He made it so we have to learn what love really is as opposed to just passion? What about someone who is widowed and then remarries? Could they at the end of their life say there was just one companion for them?
Remember how the Bible defines love? That's not like passion. Love is what I give to my closest friends and my family. Love is a commitment that says I'm with them until the end through thick and thin. Maybe our search for a spouse isn't about finding that "one" other puzzle piece. Maybe it's more about finding someone we will be committed to in true love. Someone who we will go through hard times with, who we will argue with, who we will find at times to be very unpleasant, but who we will still seek their good despite all that. I am saying that there isn't "one" out there that we have to find; but we will some day find one and we will have to commit to MAKING them the "one" who we stick with till the end. I'm not saying just go with anyone and marry them. Find someone you are passionate about, but who you can also commit to. Someone who you can love no matter how many things you disagree about and no matter how passionate or cold you feel toward them at the moment.
Love is what makes the difference between the happy marriages and the miserable ones; between the ones who divorce and the ones who stick together. Saving yourself sexually for your spouse is very beneficial, but that's not what's going to keep you together and happy. My desire for all of you reading this is that you will learn to love others without seeking anything for yourself in return. Inevitably when it's truly love you will get a whole lot in return; much more than passion alone could ever give. Get out there and love. Don't be afraid to make mistakes and don't just give away your passion to anybody.
Peace.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Evangelism / Proselytizing / Repentance
It seems to me that many Christians focus a LOT of their efforts into trying to make as many converts as possible. And I was just thinking the other day why that is.
In the final verses of Matthew and of Mark Jesus gives the so called great commission to go into all the world preaching the gospel and baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In Luke and at the beginning of Acts He implies that the gospel will spread out to the whole world, but He doesn't command them to do the spreading.
In Mark 6 when He sends out His disciples He tells them to preach repentance and to heal the sick. In Matthew 10 He says the same thing: preach repentance. But this time He specifically says to only go to the Jews; nobody else. In John 10 He says to tell them that the kingdom of God has come near to them. In John 20:21 He says, "As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you."
My point is that there are very few places in the gospels where Jesus says we have to go out and tell people about Him. When He does send out His disciples he tells them to heal the sick and preach repentance, just as He did while He was walking around with them. He wasn't going around saying, "Hey everybody! I'm the Messiah. Believe in me or else you'll go to hell." He did do some of that but it seems that His bigger focus was on repentance and healing.
Really quick I will define repentance for you, because a lot of Christians really don't understand this word. Repentance means you stop sinning. In modern Judaism when we say a Jew repented what we usually mean is that he left his life of doing whatever the hell he felt like doing and he started living according to the Torah. I think that's a very accurate definition of repentance.
In the gospels (I'm particularly thinking of John) Jesus says that if they knew the Torah and the prophets they would know Him; they would have immediately recognized Him as the anointed redeemer of the world. What I'm suggesting now is that rather than making our priority going to all the world to tell them that they are sinners who need Jesus, maybe we should be doing exactly what Jesus did: healing the sick and preaching a return to the lifestyle of the Torah. My theory is that once people have truly repented and gained an understanding of the Torah they will automatically see Jesus for themselves.
But then why aren't all the religious Jews seeing it so obviously? They have been purposely blinded for now and it may be that in all world they will be the last to see it. As it has been said, "the last will be first and the first will be last."
When was the last time you saw someone both preaching repentance and healing the sick? I've never seen it personally. I've heard a few stories from Africa and India, but I've never seen it up close. There are so called healers like Benny Hinn, and there are feel good preachers like Joel Osteen, and there are guys like Paul Washer preaching repentance, and there are theology teachers like John Piper, but why have I never seen anyone preach total repentance AND heal the sick? Isn't that exactly what Jesus told us to do in the gospel accounts I mentioned above? So why aren't we doing it?
I want to remind you that also how well carry out the great commission has no direct connection to our own salvation. In other words our entrance into heaven is not at all based upon the number of people we led to know Jesus. What it IS based upon is that Jesus is able to say to us, "oh yeah, I know you! Well done good and faithful servant!" The way Jesus describes His good and faithful servants is they kept watch for His return, they tended the "vineyard", they visited the sick and imprisoned, they clothed the naked, they fed the hungry, they invested what He freely gave to them so that it grew.
The good and faithful servants' lives show the following characteristics: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. When you look at someone and see that these things are the description of their character you will also notice that it's contagious. Their great character also gives the people around them great character. Now add to that the fact that this guy has the power to miraculously heal people and he does it in the name of Jesus, who he follows with all his heart. After about 10 seconds with this guy you would see others like him who were doing the same things. Because the Holy Spirit doesn't lie dormant; it spreads like fire to all who will receive it.
Now I come to my main thought and question: how did we Christians get our priorities so mixed up? How did we make the great commission mean we just go tell people about Jesus to add them as a number on our list of converts we made? The Gospel is so much more than that! How have we so easily received Christian doctrine and thrown out the Bible? What have we done? We desperately need repentance: to return to God in humility, to study the Bible as is, and to completely rethink what our mission from God is here in this world.
He says if we seek Him we will find Him. If we seek Him with our whole hearts.
In the final verses of Matthew and of Mark Jesus gives the so called great commission to go into all the world preaching the gospel and baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In Luke and at the beginning of Acts He implies that the gospel will spread out to the whole world, but He doesn't command them to do the spreading.
In Mark 6 when He sends out His disciples He tells them to preach repentance and to heal the sick. In Matthew 10 He says the same thing: preach repentance. But this time He specifically says to only go to the Jews; nobody else. In John 10 He says to tell them that the kingdom of God has come near to them. In John 20:21 He says, "As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you."
My point is that there are very few places in the gospels where Jesus says we have to go out and tell people about Him. When He does send out His disciples he tells them to heal the sick and preach repentance, just as He did while He was walking around with them. He wasn't going around saying, "Hey everybody! I'm the Messiah. Believe in me or else you'll go to hell." He did do some of that but it seems that His bigger focus was on repentance and healing.
Really quick I will define repentance for you, because a lot of Christians really don't understand this word. Repentance means you stop sinning. In modern Judaism when we say a Jew repented what we usually mean is that he left his life of doing whatever the hell he felt like doing and he started living according to the Torah. I think that's a very accurate definition of repentance.
In the gospels (I'm particularly thinking of John) Jesus says that if they knew the Torah and the prophets they would know Him; they would have immediately recognized Him as the anointed redeemer of the world. What I'm suggesting now is that rather than making our priority going to all the world to tell them that they are sinners who need Jesus, maybe we should be doing exactly what Jesus did: healing the sick and preaching a return to the lifestyle of the Torah. My theory is that once people have truly repented and gained an understanding of the Torah they will automatically see Jesus for themselves.
But then why aren't all the religious Jews seeing it so obviously? They have been purposely blinded for now and it may be that in all world they will be the last to see it. As it has been said, "the last will be first and the first will be last."
When was the last time you saw someone both preaching repentance and healing the sick? I've never seen it personally. I've heard a few stories from Africa and India, but I've never seen it up close. There are so called healers like Benny Hinn, and there are feel good preachers like Joel Osteen, and there are guys like Paul Washer preaching repentance, and there are theology teachers like John Piper, but why have I never seen anyone preach total repentance AND heal the sick? Isn't that exactly what Jesus told us to do in the gospel accounts I mentioned above? So why aren't we doing it?
I want to remind you that also how well carry out the great commission has no direct connection to our own salvation. In other words our entrance into heaven is not at all based upon the number of people we led to know Jesus. What it IS based upon is that Jesus is able to say to us, "oh yeah, I know you! Well done good and faithful servant!" The way Jesus describes His good and faithful servants is they kept watch for His return, they tended the "vineyard", they visited the sick and imprisoned, they clothed the naked, they fed the hungry, they invested what He freely gave to them so that it grew.
The good and faithful servants' lives show the following characteristics: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. When you look at someone and see that these things are the description of their character you will also notice that it's contagious. Their great character also gives the people around them great character. Now add to that the fact that this guy has the power to miraculously heal people and he does it in the name of Jesus, who he follows with all his heart. After about 10 seconds with this guy you would see others like him who were doing the same things. Because the Holy Spirit doesn't lie dormant; it spreads like fire to all who will receive it.
Now I come to my main thought and question: how did we Christians get our priorities so mixed up? How did we make the great commission mean we just go tell people about Jesus to add them as a number on our list of converts we made? The Gospel is so much more than that! How have we so easily received Christian doctrine and thrown out the Bible? What have we done? We desperately need repentance: to return to God in humility, to study the Bible as is, and to completely rethink what our mission from God is here in this world.
He says if we seek Him we will find Him. If we seek Him with our whole hearts.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Why did Jesus have to die?
Why did Jesus have to die?
Have you ever wondered this? I used to. Wasn’t there any other way for us to come clean before God? Yeshua (Jesus) Himself said in John 14 that he alone was the way to the father and He would give truth and life as well.
First let’s look at God’s relation to His creation. In Genesis 1 and 2 God creates everything that we know as our world, He creates the “Heavens and the Earth”. John 1 shows us that Yeshua also was in the beginning. He did not come out of God because He was one with God, one yet also distinct. Deuteronomy 6:4 says, Hear O Israel! The LORD (YHVH) is our God. The LORD (YHVH) is one. It says He is ONE! How exactly does that work? I don't know, but I don't need to understand how something works to believe it is true.
In Genesis 1 and 2 He creates everything and we forget that He also creates the less tangible things like Math and Physics. I think he created those right after Genesis 1:2 where it says the earth was without form and void. He made what I will refer to now as conformity laws. These are the laws that affect our universe and we have no choice but to live by them, examples are: gravity, time, aerodynamics, light and dark, the periodic table of elements, etc. We may learn to manipulate these laws to our own scientific advantage. For example we can manipulate them to build an airplane and we can in a sense fly. But when we do this we are still conforming to all the laws of physics and we cannot do otherwise no matter how hard we try. God created these conformity laws for the universe to abide by though He Himself is not at all bound by them. Thus we say God is not bound by time or space. He is infinite in every way.
We are stuck in a three dimensional experience of the world. We can only know our three axes of space and we have labeled them x, y, and z. Or they could be thought of as height, width, and depth.
A two dimensional square has only
height and width and
consists of four strait lines making one face.
Now if you turn that square into a cube by giving it depth also,
it will now have twelve lines and six facets. It just got a lot more complex.
Now say as an illustration you were to take a coffee mug and
look at as if it were only a two-dimensional shape. From the side with the handle facing
away from you it looks like a rectangle.
Spin it so the handle is perpendicular to you and you get an oval attached to the rectangle.
Look at it from above and you get a circle with a
line sticking out of it.
If you were stuck in two dimensions and that was all you knew a 3-dimensional coffee mug would be a very confusing object. You would see from one angle and say “that is a rectangle.” Then you would see it again from a different angle and think it was a completely different object when in fact it is not. Now since we are actually limited to a maximum of three dimensions try to imagine what a fourth dimension would be like. Can you even guess what it is like? Now try a fifth, and then a sixth. The nature of an atom (electrons, and neutrons) can be very confusing at times, as can the nature of light (is it particles or waves?). It is likely that they exist in dimensions beyond our understanding and that is why we cannot quite figure them out. String theorists have speculated that there are at least eleven dimensions to our universe and have done their best to explain what each one is. What I'm getting at is that God created all these dimensions and He is more complex than all of them.
Have you ever wondered this? I used to. Wasn’t there any other way for us to come clean before God? Yeshua (Jesus) Himself said in John 14 that he alone was the way to the father and He would give truth and life as well.
First let’s look at God’s relation to His creation. In Genesis 1 and 2 God creates everything that we know as our world, He creates the “Heavens and the Earth”. John 1 shows us that Yeshua also was in the beginning. He did not come out of God because He was one with God, one yet also distinct. Deuteronomy 6:4 says, Hear O Israel! The LORD (YHVH) is our God. The LORD (YHVH) is one. It says He is ONE! How exactly does that work? I don't know, but I don't need to understand how something works to believe it is true.
In Genesis 1 and 2 He creates everything and we forget that He also creates the less tangible things like Math and Physics. I think he created those right after Genesis 1:2 where it says the earth was without form and void. He made what I will refer to now as conformity laws. These are the laws that affect our universe and we have no choice but to live by them, examples are: gravity, time, aerodynamics, light and dark, the periodic table of elements, etc. We may learn to manipulate these laws to our own scientific advantage. For example we can manipulate them to build an airplane and we can in a sense fly. But when we do this we are still conforming to all the laws of physics and we cannot do otherwise no matter how hard we try. God created these conformity laws for the universe to abide by though He Himself is not at all bound by them. Thus we say God is not bound by time or space. He is infinite in every way.
We are stuck in a three dimensional experience of the world. We can only know our three axes of space and we have labeled them x, y, and z. Or they could be thought of as height, width, and depth.
consists of four strait lines making one face.
Now if you turn that square into a cube by giving it depth also,
it will now have twelve lines and six facets. It just got a lot more complex.
Now say as an illustration you were to take a coffee mug and
look at as if it were only a two-dimensional shape. From the side with the handle facing
away from you it looks like a rectangle. Spin it so the handle is perpendicular to you and you get an oval attached to the rectangle.
Look at it from above and you get a circle with a
line sticking out of it.
If you were stuck in two dimensions and that was all you knew a 3-dimensional coffee mug would be a very confusing object. You would see from one angle and say “that is a rectangle.” Then you would see it again from a different angle and think it was a completely different object when in fact it is not. Now since we are actually limited to a maximum of three dimensions try to imagine what a fourth dimension would be like. Can you even guess what it is like? Now try a fifth, and then a sixth. The nature of an atom (electrons, and neutrons) can be very confusing at times, as can the nature of light (is it particles or waves?). It is likely that they exist in dimensions beyond our understanding and that is why we cannot quite figure them out. String theorists have speculated that there are at least eleven dimensions to our universe and have done their best to explain what each one is. What I'm getting at is that God created all these dimensions and He is more complex than all of them.
He is not bound by space as we are; we have now established that. It has been said that as our soul fills our body, in the same way God fills the universe [Talmud: Ber 10a]. I'll give an example of how our soul fills our bodies. We do not think about synapses in our brain firing off in a certain order for our tongue and lips to move while also forcing air out of our lungs through our vocal chords; and all this has to work together for us to say something intelligible. It just happens. Our person completely fills our body and does things without our conscious effort.
God is not bound by time like we are. Jesus’ death was both for us now, after, and also for those in the past: before He walked the earth. We often think of time in a linear way that must be experienced at a certain rate. We can think into the past and relive experiences in our memories at whatever speed we like but the future can only be experienced as it happens: one second at a time. God is so far beyond that dimension that He knows our whole life stories before we are even born (Psalm 139: 2, 4, 16). It may be thought of as a person with perfect memory who has read a novel from cover to cover. They can recall any string of events at any time of the story or even look at the whole story all at once. Jumping from beginning to end is done effortlessly. Now imagine that our universe is a story that God can experience in that way.....
God created the laws of Math and Physics and bound the universe to these laws, but He also created other laws which we can choose to accept or reject: The Torah. The Torah shows us how we ought to live. Aside from just being rules to live by these laws are attributes of God. Or maybe I should say they are primarily attributes of God and He has commanded us to be like Him by living according to these rules. His nature is justice and mercy and love. He has commanded us to be just and merciful and loving. Or to use His own words, “Be holy as I am holy” [Leviticus 11, 19, 20, 21]. Essentially for us to accept or reject these laws (the Torah) is to accept or reject parts of God Himself. Jesus said that He did not come to abolish the law (Torah) but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). Yes they were fulfilled in Him: He lived by them perfectly in His Godly nature.
One of the laws that we were given was the law of firstfruits [Exodus 23,
34]. This law states that the first and best of everything we receive (or earn) is given as an
offering to God. Later we may keep the remains for ourselves. This law was originally
given to the agriculturists of the time so they would bring their first ripe harvest and their
firstborn animals and children into the temple for dedication. The first crops were given
to the priests, the animal was sacrificed if it was a kosher animal, and the children and
had to be bought back from God (because they were already His) [Exodus 13]. God
promises that when we give Him our firstfruits he will bless us with an abundance of
things to come later and the concept applies to much more than just agriculture, it should
encompass your whole life. The law of firstfruits is commonly used in God’s story as a
sign of what is coming, as we will see more of later.
Somewhere in between the laws of physics that bind our universe and the laws of the Torah that give us choice and morality are the spiritual laws. The laws of good and evil are a spiritual law. On one hand evil simply cannot be in God’s presence, just the same way that in physics darkness cannot be where there is light. But on the other hand every person is given the choice of being good or evil from the Torah. So spiritual laws have similarity to both the previously laws but they are also in some ways completely different because they belong to a different dimension than what we are familiar with.
Originally all chose goodness and lived in the divine presence of God [Genesis 1, 2]. But once the first humans did what was evil, their evil spread like a genetically inherited cancer down to the generations of all of mankind, and with that cancer comes separation from God and death for the sinners. So with that cancer that we have genetically inherited we are no longer even capable of choosing to do good to the point of being in God’s presence again like in the Garden of Eden. We can't simply will it to happen, just like we cannot just will ourselves to live forever in this world. We have rebelled against God and as a result have been banished. Evil has won in our lives, but there is hope.
God wants for His creation to be reconciled with Him so He carried out a perfect plan to show us His mercy and justice. He showed us in the Torah that His justice demands our death because we are evil sinful creatures. And He gave us a sign through the slaughtering of a clean, perfect, and very valuable animal as a burned sacrifice to Him that the death we deserve would then be on that animal instead. But animal sacrifice was never really to take away our punishment (Hebrews 10); instead it was a picture of something else that could take away our punishment and restore us to God. For one life to be given in the place of another that being would need the authority to do such a thing. You cannot give your life if it never belonged to you in the first place. Animals can't do it. People can't do it. There is only ONE who is the owner of everything and He owns it because He created it.
Somewhere in between the laws of physics that bind our universe and the laws of the Torah that give us choice and morality are the spiritual laws. The laws of good and evil are a spiritual law. On one hand evil simply cannot be in God’s presence, just the same way that in physics darkness cannot be where there is light. But on the other hand every person is given the choice of being good or evil from the Torah. So spiritual laws have similarity to both the previously laws but they are also in some ways completely different because they belong to a different dimension than what we are familiar with.
Originally all chose goodness and lived in the divine presence of God [Genesis 1, 2]. But once the first humans did what was evil, their evil spread like a genetically inherited cancer down to the generations of all of mankind, and with that cancer comes separation from God and death for the sinners. So with that cancer that we have genetically inherited we are no longer even capable of choosing to do good to the point of being in God’s presence again like in the Garden of Eden. We can't simply will it to happen, just like we cannot just will ourselves to live forever in this world. We have rebelled against God and as a result have been banished. Evil has won in our lives, but there is hope.
God wants for His creation to be reconciled with Him so He carried out a perfect plan to show us His mercy and justice. He showed us in the Torah that His justice demands our death because we are evil sinful creatures. And He gave us a sign through the slaughtering of a clean, perfect, and very valuable animal as a burned sacrifice to Him that the death we deserve would then be on that animal instead. But animal sacrifice was never really to take away our punishment (Hebrews 10); instead it was a picture of something else that could take away our punishment and restore us to God. For one life to be given in the place of another that being would need the authority to do such a thing. You cannot give your life if it never belonged to you in the first place. Animals can't do it. People can't do it. There is only ONE who is the owner of everything and He owns it because He created it.
So now we come back to the main question of why Yeshua had to die. God wanted so badly for all people to live in His presence worshiping Him that He provided for them the only suitable being to take their evil onto itself ::::::: Himself.
He alone was valuable enough, perfect, and able to do it; so he came as Jesus. Why did it have to be Him and not another human? No regular human could do it because all humans had inherited the first man’s evil making them unsuitable for it while, Yeshua was completely without sin. He was not born by normal means so he did not inherit the first man’s evil.
What about the animals sacrifices? Besides not having the authority to give their lives think about the value. How many cow or sheep lives are worth as much as one human life? They are not comparable. Though animals were used as a continuous symbol of God using Himself for the sacrifice, their value just could not cover the cost; while Yeshua’s value is far above our cost for redemption. Yeshua was so valuable that He was able to pay for all of creation to be reconciled with God. Because by Him, through Him, and for Him all things were made (Colossians 1:16-17) He greatly exceeded the value of all things.
Since Yeshua is human and bound by the laws of physics He was then capable of taking our evil and dying with it. But since He is God, the creator of all things, He has the authority and the value to give His own life in our place. He is the only thing that would be enough for us.
Because He is also the creator of life and death He rules over both and is able to come back to life as the firstfruit of the resurrection. Now think about this: if He had stayed dead, He would not be God; death would be. And if He were not God, He would not have been a perfect suitable candidate for all people. But since He is God and outside of the laws of time and space, it did work and He was able to take on the evil of people who lived in the world past, present, and future! Amazing!
Do you believe it? It is the truth. It is THE good news. Jesus was not just a good Jewish teacher. Yeshua was God in human flesh, here for a specific goal and He accomplished it all perfectly. We are all now faced with a choice. We can choose to believe that what God has done is the truth and choose to live in God’s presence again by forsaking our natural evil lifestyle, or we can continue in our rebellion against Him and reject what He has given us. The choice is your and yours only to make, choose wisely.
Wednesday, March 4, 2015
Old Testament Torah for Christians?!
Before I even start off I want to point out that Christian people most often instantly react to this topic by saying that we who keep torah are being legalistic. And I want to first ask those people where it says in the bible that we should NOT go to great lengths to obey what our God has commanded us. On the contrary it is written in Deuteronomy 6 that we are to “love the LORD our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength.” Even Jesus quoted this scripture and said it was the greatest commandment of them all.
I will talk about Common doctrine that all Christians share and I will build off that. First, we all believe that Jesus, the Messiah, took our own sins upon Himself, even though we were not yet born when He did it, so that we could be reconciled to God. This is the bare essence of Christian belief and is what separates the Jews from the Christians today. Now you may never have even thought about it before but Yeshua (Jesus) also took the sins of the people before Him (Abraham, Moses, Adam, Noah, etc). So if He took their sins away also then why did they still make animal sacrifices? Surely then we could say that animal sacrifice was never capable of taking away the sins of the humans. [And by now I have probably crossed into new territory for a lot of you.]
If the animal sacrifices could possibly remove human sins then why would we ever need a messiah? We could have just kept doing it the same old way until the end of time! But the sacrifices could not do it (Hebrews 10). So what were they for then? To teach us that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6), but that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him will not die but will have eternal life (John 3) which is the gift of God in messiah Yeshua our Lord (Romans 6). So then why do we not still do them after Yeshua has come? Because God has commanded that they must be done in a specific place only by the priests who are physical descendents of the tribe of Levi (Deuteronomy 12), and at this point in time there is no temple to the LORD on the temple mount in Jerusalem and the dedicated priesthood (the sons of Aaron) is not organized and ritually clean to act as priests.
But will it ever be reestablished? The prophets say that it will all be restored in the reign of the messiah. Jerusalem and the temple will be rebuilt, all the tribes of Israel will be gathered back in, the priesthood will be restored, and the sacrifices will also continue; but this time God will be sitting on His throne right there with us in Jerusalem. Almost every prophetic book in the bible ends with God restoring Israel and reigning over it as their King (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi). Based on these prophecies I should point out that any teaching that says Israel is no longer God’s chosen people is unbiblical. Now that we have briefly talked about that, let us move on to another subject.
The Torah in general is so much more than just a bunch of rules given to us so that we become “good people.” For one thing we are already by nature evil people, rebellious against God and the only way to really be good again is by the sacrifice of Yeshua, our Passover Lamb whose very name means Salvation. So there is no “becoming good” in God’s sight by obeying rules, it is only by His grace through faith that we can be saved as written in Ephesians 2. We are to follow these “rules” not to be saved but rather BECAUSE HE HAS ALREADY SAVED US.
In James 2 it he says,
But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works and I will show you my faith by my works.” (NASB) He is making the argument that faith without any works as its fruit is worthless and not real faith at all. The do’s and do not’s are God’s way of taking away one thing from us only so that he may give us something so much better in return. It could simply be like a parent telling their child not to put their hand in the fire because it will burn them, and to eat all their food because it will nourish them. Or it is a way of God telling us to enjoy life to its fullest, and His Torah shows us the most fulfilling way to do it. On top of all that, the Torah is also a way of God revealing Himself to us. It shows us what justice and righteousness and sin are, and that God is just and righteous while we are sinful. God gave us the Torah to reveal to us His attributes and who He is. In the book of Leviticus while you are reading through the commandments you will see the phrase, “Be holy as I am holy” (Chapters 11, 19, 20, 21). God is telling us, “This is who I am, be like me!” Even Yeshua said we should “be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5). We can only know true righteousness because God told us what it is, and we could never measure up to it by our own strength. Only by seeing our own failure can we realize our desperate need for a savior: Yeshua.
Another point worth bringing up here is that many times throughout the Torah a commandment is given and with it is the phrase, “This is to be a perpetual statute throughout your generations.” This word that we have translated as perpetual is the Hebrew word עולם (olam) meaning forever or eternity – if that helps give strength to what He means by perpetual. The number of times this phrase is used is phenomenal and sometimes we see it used at the beginning and end of a command to help add emphasis to it. It is found in Exodus 12, 28, 30 and 31, Leviticus 3, 6, 10, 16, 17, 23 and 24, Numbers 18 and 19, and finally in Ezekiel 37 and 46. It is written for us in all these places yet most Christians believe that Torah is no longer relevant and Yeshua abolished it when He died. The text itself explicitly says otherwise. Paul writes in Romans that the law (Torah) is a very good thing, and it was evil that took advantage of the law and put people into bondage (That was the short paraphrased version).
Now since I brought it up I might as well talk about Paul writing that we are no longer under the law (Torah) or slaves to it. Let me use this imagery to try and help my argument: For a man to do the dishes or the laundry for his wife when she asks of him, does that make him a slave to her? Well you could say yes and no I suppose; no because he is doing it out of love for her and not just obligation, and yes because he is bound to love her though their marriage covenant. But are we not also bound to the God of Israel in a sort of marriage covenant?! Now we ourselves are free to accept or reject that covenant but we are not free to change the terms of it. That would be ridiculous, like a wife saying to her husband, “Let’s stay married but I no longer want to do anything you say. And in fact let’s live in separate houses and I’ll come visit on weekends sometimes. Oh but I still want you to provide all of my needs; just don’t expect anything from me. And I will often cheat on you with other men but don’t worry about it, everyone’s doing it these days.” Who would want to be in a relationship like that? And yet that is exactly w what we've always done with God.
But now you might say that the Torah covenant was made with Israel and the Jews only and does not apply to us Gentile believers: we have a different covenant. I just don't believe that. Isaiah 56 says that the foreigner (non-Israelite) who attaches himself the God of Israel is not to say that God has separated him from His people (Israel). And Romans 11 says that we gentiles have been grafted into the inheritance with Israel so that Israel will see their ungodliness and return to their covenant with God. Galatians 3 says that in Messiah there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; all are equally heirs according to God’s promise. Did you know that the term “old covenant” is used only one time in the whole bible (2 Corinthians 3)? You can see from this and from reading all the prophets, as mentioned earlier, that God will never replace Israel with anyone else or make any separate covenant or go back on any old promises. He is the eternal God who loves His people! Now let’s examine some more specific topics.
The Festivals, for one thing, fall under the category of “perpetual statute etc. etc.” and for another, in Colossians 2 Paul talks about the festivals as a good thing: a “shadow” of the things to come. For example, the Passover festival is packed full of symbolism of our Messiah. To celebrate the feast in its fullness one is given a very vivid picture of our own sin and need for reconciliation. One can see how God with a strong arm reached down and pulled Israel out of their slavery in Egypt, just as in Yeshua’s death He pulled us out of our filth of sin and rescued us from death. He redeemed us by taking our sin onto Himself and dying with it then coming back to life, just as the Passover lamb was to killed in place of the firstborn sons on the very first Passover. The festival celebrated in the traditional Jewish fashion has so much meaning and symbolism of our eternal redemption. And it all points to Jesus! That is the whole purpose of the feasts; to reveal to us that God loves us so much that He came as Yeshua to be our Messiah (literally meaning “anointed one”).
Yeshua spent His human lifetime here pointing it out to us even more because we might have missed it.
In John 7 we have record of Yeshua celebrating the Sukkot festival in Jerusalem and on the eighth day (when they did the water cerimony in the Temple) He stands up among the people and says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. Just as the scripture says, ‘From within him will flow rivers of living water.’” (Now he said this about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were going to receive, for the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.) (NET) For some insight on what exactly is going on here, Sukkot is sometimes called the festival of tabernacles and is where everyone stays in a temporary shelter (Sukkah) for the week to remember when Israel wandered the desert for 40 years living in tents and the presence of God physically was there in the center of their camp. And particularly during the water cerimony they pray for God open the heavens and send rain to the earth. So while the people are remembering this time Yeshua in essence says to them, “Hey! I’m right here among you again! Don’t you recognize me?! Come to me and I will give you life and living water and dwell with you and sustain you again just as before!”
Yeshua was always celebrating the feasts. We have record throughout all of gospel writings that He did celebrate them and He never made any indication that we should no longer celebrate them ourselves. Why would he? They point to Him and who He is and why He came, it makes more sense for us to keep the feasts, they bring Him honor. Instructions for how the festivals were to be kept are recorded in Exodus 12 and 13, Leviticus 23, Numbers 28 and 29, Deuteronomy 16, Ezra 45 and 46, Nehemiah 8, and 2 Chronicles 35. The prophets (Jeremiah 14, Ezekiel 43, Isaiah 66, Zachariah 14) also write about celebrating the feasts and making sacrifices even in end times when the temple and Jerusalem has been rebuilt and the dispersed tribes have all been gathered back together in Israel and Yeshua is reigning as the King in Jerusalem and there is peace in all the land. Now why would our God who never changes reinstate an old-time practice in end times, which He had gotten rid of in middle times? It just does not make sense, unless He had never gotten rid of them and they were actually to be forever, just as He had originally commanded that they were to be. If you study Judeo/Christian history you may be surprised to find out that it was powerful wicked men who hated Jews who decided that Christians should no longer do the festivals, and made their observance illegal under penalty of death.
Shabbat (the Sabbath day) could be put under the same category as the other festivals but it is held in highest regard to all others and has a slightly different nature so it has received its own category. Most Christians have especially disregarded the commandment of the Sabbath day because Jesus also broke the Sabbath, right? Wrong. If Yeshua had broken even the least of all the commandments then His death would have been in vain and we would not be a redeemed people!
James 2 says that, For the one who obeys the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. (NET) An imperfect sin offering is not at all acceptable to God! Every time that Yeshua was questioned for healing on Shabbat He would say something like, “Isn’t it better to do good on Shabbat than to do evil?” His point was this, if He had passed by someone who was obviously in need while He had the ability to help them, it would have been sinful for Him not to help them, Shabbat or no Shabbat. And I think that is what James 4 is talking about when it says, Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into this or that town and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life like? For you are a puff of smoke that appears for a short time and then vanishes. You ought to say instead, “If the Lord is willing, then we will live and do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows what is good to do and does not do it is guilty of sin. (NET)
He could not have said, “I will heal you tomorrow when it is no longer the Sabbath”, because tomorrow is never guaranteed for any of us. For us to put off doing good is sin.
The rabbis (Yeshua and Paul included) have agreed that the whole Torah can be boiled down to two commandments: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your whole being, and love your neighbors as yourself. For Yeshua not to help as He passed by would not be loving them and He would be committing the same sin as the one Pharisee who was so zealous about remaining ceremonially clean that he let a woman drown because for him to swim over and pull her out from the water he would risk touching an unclean woman during her monthly period. Yeshua also compared it in Matthew 12 to the priests carrying out their priestly duties on Shabbat. They were doing work on Shabbat because they had to; they were the priests who made the sacrifices. Yeshua is also our high priest as written in Hebrews, and was just carrying out His priestly duties of pronouncing people clean (though He would still send them to the priest to be legally pronounced clean). I do not have all the answers for all the scenarios where Yeshua did something “unacceptable” on Shabbat, but I know that we (even as gentiles) are to maintain it as a holy day of rest. I will point you again to Isaiah 56 and 58 for my evidence. I could even argue that the sabbath commandment made it onto the list of the ten commandments. We are commanded to consecrate Shabbat as a holy day in Exodus 16, 20, 23, 31, 35 and Leviticus 19, 23, 26 and Deuteronomy 5 and Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 17 and Nehemiah 13. And the consequences of not doing it (death, immediate or not) are found in Numbers 15 and Ezekiel 20, 22, 23 and Isaiah 1 and Jeremiah 17. And now I must move on.
The laws of clean and unclean found in Leviticus 11 are next on my list of topics. These have been disregarded by most of the Christians but with more justification than the rest of the laws have been. We have Peters vision of animals in a sheet recorded in Acts 10 (but if you read the whole story you will see that the vision is actually about people, not food), Jesus “declaring all foods clean” in Mark 7 (this one is actually a terrible misinterpretation of the Greek), and Paul brings up the issue of food many times in his numerous writings to the churches. We even have the apostles gathering together as a counsel in Acts 15 and 21 for the specific purpose of discussing what laws should immediately apply to the non-Jewish believers (and which ones they can just start doing as they progress in learning).
“Therefore I conclude that we should not cause extra difficulty for those among the Gentiles who are turning to God, but that we should write them a letter telling them to abstain from things defiled by idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from blood.” Surely that is not all that the Gentiles had to do; what about do not murder or do not steal? So they finish it off by saying, “For Moses has had those who proclaim him in every town from ancient times, because he is read aloud in the synagogues every Sabbath.” (NET) Would this verse in Acts not also imply that the Christians were keeping the Sabbath and gathering in Jewish synagogues with other Jews every week?
What we see in the epistles is that the issue of what may and may not be eaten was a huge issue in the church. The subject was brought up in Corinthians, Romans, Timothy, Colossians, and Revelation. In the Torah we see these laws as making a distinction between holy and profane. God commands His people not to even eat in the same way that the pagans do. We are given this idea of being separate from the rest of this world. Not residing and working in completely separate locations (though maybe living in our own communities separated from them) but living sanctified lives from them.
When the issue is brought up in the epistles most Christians will say, “See, it says we may eat whatever we want.” But when read in context to the rest of that particular letter, you will see that he is not saying, “Eat whatever non-kosher food you want.” He is instead addressing a very specific other issue regarding food, whether it is food that has been sacrificed to idols or vegetarian pagan practices or whatever else comes up. I won't take the time here to get into every specific case.
I must also point out to you that in Isaiah 65 and 66 the prophet is talking about our time today and also the reign of the messiah in Jerusalem which has not yet happened, and he says that God is offended by and hates the deeds and thoughts of those who eat pig’s flesh, among a list of other detestable acts.
65:3 These people continually and blatantly offend me as they sacrifice in their sacred orchards and burn incense on brick altars. 65:4 They sit among the tombs and keep watch all night long. They eat pork, and broth from unclean sacrificial meat is in their pans. 65:5 They say, ‘Keep to yourself! Don’t get near me, for I am holier than you!’ These people are like smoke in my nostrils, like a fire that keeps burning all day long. 66:17 “As for those who consecrate and ritually purify themselves so they can follow their leader and worship in the sacred orchards, those who eat the flesh of pigs and other disgusting creatures, like mice – they will all be destroyed together,” says the Lord. 66:18 “I hate their deeds and thoughts!”
So that makes it nearly impossible to say that now it is okay for us to eat whatever we want when the LORD has clearly said even in end times that He hates such things. And God is the good father; He will not give us a snake to eat when we ask for a fish, or stones when we ask for bread (Matthew 7). He will provide us with what is good so that we do not need to eat animals that eat garbage, feces, and decaying flesh (that is what pigs, shellfish, birds of prey, and most insects eat).
Lastly I will talk about the obscure laws we have been given. Many of them have to do with what seems to us in today’s world would be an unlikely scenario. They say, “If that happens, do this.” In such cases you might want to say they are irrelevant. Or is it possible that there is a perpetual idea that carries over into our world today? One example would be that we are commanded in Exodus 23 to help our enemy when we see his donkey fallen on the road. This concept could be updated to say we should stop and help people whose car has broken down on the side of the road, even if they are our enemy. But rather than focusing on rough “interpretation” I would like to look at the laws that affect our everyday lives. Attaching tzit-tzit (tassels) to your clothing or mounting a mezuzah onto your doorposts have the purpose of being a continuous physical reminder to obey the rest of the Torah; pretty self-explanatory right?
But then there is also the issue of circumcision. Circumcision is again about being set apart from the rest of the world, but more than that it has a symbolism. Performing a surgery that cuts away some of the flesh we have been born with symbolizes our covenant with God saying that even from birth we were not right with God and we have to cut away a part of ourselves in order to make it right. Our rebellion against God is so cancerous to us humans that it has been fused in as a part of us and to get rid of it requires something very painful. Just like there is no way the Hebrews could have freed themselves from their slavery in Egypt that they had been born into. The only way for them all to get out was for the LORD Himself to reach down and pull them out. But they still had to do the work of actually walking out of Egypt too; they did not just sit there to be swept away by the wind. And just as the festivals are a sign of what God has done for us so is the circumcision. It is “the sign of the covenant sealed in our flesh” (Romans 4). Each baby boy is to be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. Biblically the eighth day often represents eternity, so in eternity the flesh is cut away and only the core (or soul and spirit) remain. That person has been made into a new creation by the one who makes all things new.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7, Nevertheless, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each person, so must he live. I give this sort of direction in all the churches. Was anyone called after he had been circumcised? He should not try to undo his circumcision. Was anyone called who is uncircumcised? He should not get circumcised. Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Instead, keeping God’s commandments is what counts. Let each one remain in that situation in life in which he was called. Were you called as a slave? Do not worry about it. But if indeed you are able to be free, make the most of the opportunity. For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave is the Lord’s freedman. In the same way, the one who was called as a free person is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price. Do not become slaves of men. In whatever situation someone was called, brothers and sisters, let him remain in it with God.
So right here he specifically says a man who is not circumcised already should not seek to be circumcised because the act is nothing. But then he follows it up by saying that keeping God’s commandments is what counts. Is not circumcision one of God’s commandments? One interpretation says that he could be talking about ritual conversion to Judaism, which would explain why he says, “do not become slaves of men.” Identity is a huge issue between Jews and Christians in Paul’s letters (Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians are especially good examples) we often find him speaking against the Jews who say that Gentiles can have no share in God’s inheritance unless they ritually convert to being a Jew by race. But of course the truth is that we who believe are of a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one. In the heavenly kingdom all who believe in the name of Yeshua the Messiah are heirs and children of God. That is why he says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Galatians 3).
In closing, I want to help you get away from picking and choosing to follow some of these laws strictly but completely ignoring the others. I believe that is a mistake that the Christian church has made since before the 4th century and it has become engrained in us as our tradition. If we follow the Torah we should follow the whole Torah as being absolute truth. Can a person really say they worship the God of Israel and yet completely disregard most of His commandments? 1 John 2 says it this way: Now by this we know that we have come to know God: if we keep his commandments. The one who says “I have come to know God” and yet does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in such a person. But whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has been perfected. By this we know that we are in him. The one who says he resides in God ought himself to walk just as Jesus walked. (NET)
If you want to make some compromise and accept the God of Israel without accepting His covenant with men you are deceiving yourself. So what it eventually comes down to is this: Who is your god and what do you believe about him? Do you trust Him completely? Do you think he would change his mind about some things? I have heard some people ask, “Why is your Jesus different than mine?” That is an excellent question! You should think about that for a while. What you really believe about God? I write this to you not so I can say that you need to live a Torah observant life or you might not be saved, we know that we are saved only by God’s grace and not by our own works, though James even questions if a person’s faith without works will save them. Only God may be the judge of that.
I write this to you because I have found the Torah to be very good and right. I have seen how far so many Christians have strayed from the truth of our God and I want to help bring them back. There are many great people out there who I highly respect that are missing out on so much that our wonderful God wants to give them. And there are many teachers who are unknowingly leading people astray. James 3 says that a teacher will certainly incur a stricter judgment than the others, so I greave for those teachers who are living and teaching in ignorance. So may you also find the beauty of living life in our Messiah Yeshua according to the Torah of God’s love for humanity. Shalom.
I will talk about Common doctrine that all Christians share and I will build off that. First, we all believe that Jesus, the Messiah, took our own sins upon Himself, even though we were not yet born when He did it, so that we could be reconciled to God. This is the bare essence of Christian belief and is what separates the Jews from the Christians today. Now you may never have even thought about it before but Yeshua (Jesus) also took the sins of the people before Him (Abraham, Moses, Adam, Noah, etc). So if He took their sins away also then why did they still make animal sacrifices? Surely then we could say that animal sacrifice was never capable of taking away the sins of the humans. [And by now I have probably crossed into new territory for a lot of you.]
If the animal sacrifices could possibly remove human sins then why would we ever need a messiah? We could have just kept doing it the same old way until the end of time! But the sacrifices could not do it (Hebrews 10). So what were they for then? To teach us that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6), but that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him will not die but will have eternal life (John 3) which is the gift of God in messiah Yeshua our Lord (Romans 6). So then why do we not still do them after Yeshua has come? Because God has commanded that they must be done in a specific place only by the priests who are physical descendents of the tribe of Levi (Deuteronomy 12), and at this point in time there is no temple to the LORD on the temple mount in Jerusalem and the dedicated priesthood (the sons of Aaron) is not organized and ritually clean to act as priests.
But will it ever be reestablished? The prophets say that it will all be restored in the reign of the messiah. Jerusalem and the temple will be rebuilt, all the tribes of Israel will be gathered back in, the priesthood will be restored, and the sacrifices will also continue; but this time God will be sitting on His throne right there with us in Jerusalem. Almost every prophetic book in the bible ends with God restoring Israel and reigning over it as their King (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Obadiah, Micah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zachariah, and Malachi). Based on these prophecies I should point out that any teaching that says Israel is no longer God’s chosen people is unbiblical. Now that we have briefly talked about that, let us move on to another subject.
The Torah in general is so much more than just a bunch of rules given to us so that we become “good people.” For one thing we are already by nature evil people, rebellious against God and the only way to really be good again is by the sacrifice of Yeshua, our Passover Lamb whose very name means Salvation. So there is no “becoming good” in God’s sight by obeying rules, it is only by His grace through faith that we can be saved as written in Ephesians 2. We are to follow these “rules” not to be saved but rather BECAUSE HE HAS ALREADY SAVED US.
In James 2 it he says,
But someone may well say, “You have faith and I have works; show me your faith without the works and I will show you my faith by my works.” (NASB) He is making the argument that faith without any works as its fruit is worthless and not real faith at all. The do’s and do not’s are God’s way of taking away one thing from us only so that he may give us something so much better in return. It could simply be like a parent telling their child not to put their hand in the fire because it will burn them, and to eat all their food because it will nourish them. Or it is a way of God telling us to enjoy life to its fullest, and His Torah shows us the most fulfilling way to do it. On top of all that, the Torah is also a way of God revealing Himself to us. It shows us what justice and righteousness and sin are, and that God is just and righteous while we are sinful. God gave us the Torah to reveal to us His attributes and who He is. In the book of Leviticus while you are reading through the commandments you will see the phrase, “Be holy as I am holy” (Chapters 11, 19, 20, 21). God is telling us, “This is who I am, be like me!” Even Yeshua said we should “be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5). We can only know true righteousness because God told us what it is, and we could never measure up to it by our own strength. Only by seeing our own failure can we realize our desperate need for a savior: Yeshua.
Another point worth bringing up here is that many times throughout the Torah a commandment is given and with it is the phrase, “This is to be a perpetual statute throughout your generations.” This word that we have translated as perpetual is the Hebrew word עולם (olam) meaning forever or eternity – if that helps give strength to what He means by perpetual. The number of times this phrase is used is phenomenal and sometimes we see it used at the beginning and end of a command to help add emphasis to it. It is found in Exodus 12, 28, 30 and 31, Leviticus 3, 6, 10, 16, 17, 23 and 24, Numbers 18 and 19, and finally in Ezekiel 37 and 46. It is written for us in all these places yet most Christians believe that Torah is no longer relevant and Yeshua abolished it when He died. The text itself explicitly says otherwise. Paul writes in Romans that the law (Torah) is a very good thing, and it was evil that took advantage of the law and put people into bondage (That was the short paraphrased version).
Now since I brought it up I might as well talk about Paul writing that we are no longer under the law (Torah) or slaves to it. Let me use this imagery to try and help my argument: For a man to do the dishes or the laundry for his wife when she asks of him, does that make him a slave to her? Well you could say yes and no I suppose; no because he is doing it out of love for her and not just obligation, and yes because he is bound to love her though their marriage covenant. But are we not also bound to the God of Israel in a sort of marriage covenant?! Now we ourselves are free to accept or reject that covenant but we are not free to change the terms of it. That would be ridiculous, like a wife saying to her husband, “Let’s stay married but I no longer want to do anything you say. And in fact let’s live in separate houses and I’ll come visit on weekends sometimes. Oh but I still want you to provide all of my needs; just don’t expect anything from me. And I will often cheat on you with other men but don’t worry about it, everyone’s doing it these days.” Who would want to be in a relationship like that? And yet that is exactly w what we've always done with God.
But now you might say that the Torah covenant was made with Israel and the Jews only and does not apply to us Gentile believers: we have a different covenant. I just don't believe that. Isaiah 56 says that the foreigner (non-Israelite) who attaches himself the God of Israel is not to say that God has separated him from His people (Israel). And Romans 11 says that we gentiles have been grafted into the inheritance with Israel so that Israel will see their ungodliness and return to their covenant with God. Galatians 3 says that in Messiah there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; all are equally heirs according to God’s promise. Did you know that the term “old covenant” is used only one time in the whole bible (2 Corinthians 3)? You can see from this and from reading all the prophets, as mentioned earlier, that God will never replace Israel with anyone else or make any separate covenant or go back on any old promises. He is the eternal God who loves His people! Now let’s examine some more specific topics.
The Festivals, for one thing, fall under the category of “perpetual statute etc. etc.” and for another, in Colossians 2 Paul talks about the festivals as a good thing: a “shadow” of the things to come. For example, the Passover festival is packed full of symbolism of our Messiah. To celebrate the feast in its fullness one is given a very vivid picture of our own sin and need for reconciliation. One can see how God with a strong arm reached down and pulled Israel out of their slavery in Egypt, just as in Yeshua’s death He pulled us out of our filth of sin and rescued us from death. He redeemed us by taking our sin onto Himself and dying with it then coming back to life, just as the Passover lamb was to killed in place of the firstborn sons on the very first Passover. The festival celebrated in the traditional Jewish fashion has so much meaning and symbolism of our eternal redemption. And it all points to Jesus! That is the whole purpose of the feasts; to reveal to us that God loves us so much that He came as Yeshua to be our Messiah (literally meaning “anointed one”).
Yeshua spent His human lifetime here pointing it out to us even more because we might have missed it.
In John 7 we have record of Yeshua celebrating the Sukkot festival in Jerusalem and on the eighth day (when they did the water cerimony in the Temple) He stands up among the people and says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. Just as the scripture says, ‘From within him will flow rivers of living water.’” (Now he said this about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were going to receive, for the Spirit had not yet been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.) (NET) For some insight on what exactly is going on here, Sukkot is sometimes called the festival of tabernacles and is where everyone stays in a temporary shelter (Sukkah) for the week to remember when Israel wandered the desert for 40 years living in tents and the presence of God physically was there in the center of their camp. And particularly during the water cerimony they pray for God open the heavens and send rain to the earth. So while the people are remembering this time Yeshua in essence says to them, “Hey! I’m right here among you again! Don’t you recognize me?! Come to me and I will give you life and living water and dwell with you and sustain you again just as before!”
Yeshua was always celebrating the feasts. We have record throughout all of gospel writings that He did celebrate them and He never made any indication that we should no longer celebrate them ourselves. Why would he? They point to Him and who He is and why He came, it makes more sense for us to keep the feasts, they bring Him honor. Instructions for how the festivals were to be kept are recorded in Exodus 12 and 13, Leviticus 23, Numbers 28 and 29, Deuteronomy 16, Ezra 45 and 46, Nehemiah 8, and 2 Chronicles 35. The prophets (Jeremiah 14, Ezekiel 43, Isaiah 66, Zachariah 14) also write about celebrating the feasts and making sacrifices even in end times when the temple and Jerusalem has been rebuilt and the dispersed tribes have all been gathered back together in Israel and Yeshua is reigning as the King in Jerusalem and there is peace in all the land. Now why would our God who never changes reinstate an old-time practice in end times, which He had gotten rid of in middle times? It just does not make sense, unless He had never gotten rid of them and they were actually to be forever, just as He had originally commanded that they were to be. If you study Judeo/Christian history you may be surprised to find out that it was powerful wicked men who hated Jews who decided that Christians should no longer do the festivals, and made their observance illegal under penalty of death.
Shabbat (the Sabbath day) could be put under the same category as the other festivals but it is held in highest regard to all others and has a slightly different nature so it has received its own category. Most Christians have especially disregarded the commandment of the Sabbath day because Jesus also broke the Sabbath, right? Wrong. If Yeshua had broken even the least of all the commandments then His death would have been in vain and we would not be a redeemed people!
James 2 says that, For the one who obeys the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. (NET) An imperfect sin offering is not at all acceptable to God! Every time that Yeshua was questioned for healing on Shabbat He would say something like, “Isn’t it better to do good on Shabbat than to do evil?” His point was this, if He had passed by someone who was obviously in need while He had the ability to help them, it would have been sinful for Him not to help them, Shabbat or no Shabbat. And I think that is what James 4 is talking about when it says, Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into this or that town and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life like? For you are a puff of smoke that appears for a short time and then vanishes. You ought to say instead, “If the Lord is willing, then we will live and do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows what is good to do and does not do it is guilty of sin. (NET)
He could not have said, “I will heal you tomorrow when it is no longer the Sabbath”, because tomorrow is never guaranteed for any of us. For us to put off doing good is sin.
The rabbis (Yeshua and Paul included) have agreed that the whole Torah can be boiled down to two commandments: Love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your whole being, and love your neighbors as yourself. For Yeshua not to help as He passed by would not be loving them and He would be committing the same sin as the one Pharisee who was so zealous about remaining ceremonially clean that he let a woman drown because for him to swim over and pull her out from the water he would risk touching an unclean woman during her monthly period. Yeshua also compared it in Matthew 12 to the priests carrying out their priestly duties on Shabbat. They were doing work on Shabbat because they had to; they were the priests who made the sacrifices. Yeshua is also our high priest as written in Hebrews, and was just carrying out His priestly duties of pronouncing people clean (though He would still send them to the priest to be legally pronounced clean). I do not have all the answers for all the scenarios where Yeshua did something “unacceptable” on Shabbat, but I know that we (even as gentiles) are to maintain it as a holy day of rest. I will point you again to Isaiah 56 and 58 for my evidence. I could even argue that the sabbath commandment made it onto the list of the ten commandments. We are commanded to consecrate Shabbat as a holy day in Exodus 16, 20, 23, 31, 35 and Leviticus 19, 23, 26 and Deuteronomy 5 and Isaiah 56 and Jeremiah 17 and Nehemiah 13. And the consequences of not doing it (death, immediate or not) are found in Numbers 15 and Ezekiel 20, 22, 23 and Isaiah 1 and Jeremiah 17. And now I must move on.
The laws of clean and unclean found in Leviticus 11 are next on my list of topics. These have been disregarded by most of the Christians but with more justification than the rest of the laws have been. We have Peters vision of animals in a sheet recorded in Acts 10 (but if you read the whole story you will see that the vision is actually about people, not food), Jesus “declaring all foods clean” in Mark 7 (this one is actually a terrible misinterpretation of the Greek), and Paul brings up the issue of food many times in his numerous writings to the churches. We even have the apostles gathering together as a counsel in Acts 15 and 21 for the specific purpose of discussing what laws should immediately apply to the non-Jewish believers (and which ones they can just start doing as they progress in learning).
“Therefore I conclude that we should not cause extra difficulty for those among the Gentiles who are turning to God, but that we should write them a letter telling them to abstain from things defiled by idols and from sexual immorality and from what has been strangled and from blood.” Surely that is not all that the Gentiles had to do; what about do not murder or do not steal? So they finish it off by saying, “For Moses has had those who proclaim him in every town from ancient times, because he is read aloud in the synagogues every Sabbath.” (NET) Would this verse in Acts not also imply that the Christians were keeping the Sabbath and gathering in Jewish synagogues with other Jews every week?
What we see in the epistles is that the issue of what may and may not be eaten was a huge issue in the church. The subject was brought up in Corinthians, Romans, Timothy, Colossians, and Revelation. In the Torah we see these laws as making a distinction between holy and profane. God commands His people not to even eat in the same way that the pagans do. We are given this idea of being separate from the rest of this world. Not residing and working in completely separate locations (though maybe living in our own communities separated from them) but living sanctified lives from them.
When the issue is brought up in the epistles most Christians will say, “See, it says we may eat whatever we want.” But when read in context to the rest of that particular letter, you will see that he is not saying, “Eat whatever non-kosher food you want.” He is instead addressing a very specific other issue regarding food, whether it is food that has been sacrificed to idols or vegetarian pagan practices or whatever else comes up. I won't take the time here to get into every specific case.
I must also point out to you that in Isaiah 65 and 66 the prophet is talking about our time today and also the reign of the messiah in Jerusalem which has not yet happened, and he says that God is offended by and hates the deeds and thoughts of those who eat pig’s flesh, among a list of other detestable acts.
65:3 These people continually and blatantly offend me as they sacrifice in their sacred orchards and burn incense on brick altars. 65:4 They sit among the tombs and keep watch all night long. They eat pork, and broth from unclean sacrificial meat is in their pans. 65:5 They say, ‘Keep to yourself! Don’t get near me, for I am holier than you!’ These people are like smoke in my nostrils, like a fire that keeps burning all day long. 66:17 “As for those who consecrate and ritually purify themselves so they can follow their leader and worship in the sacred orchards, those who eat the flesh of pigs and other disgusting creatures, like mice – they will all be destroyed together,” says the Lord. 66:18 “I hate their deeds and thoughts!”
So that makes it nearly impossible to say that now it is okay for us to eat whatever we want when the LORD has clearly said even in end times that He hates such things. And God is the good father; He will not give us a snake to eat when we ask for a fish, or stones when we ask for bread (Matthew 7). He will provide us with what is good so that we do not need to eat animals that eat garbage, feces, and decaying flesh (that is what pigs, shellfish, birds of prey, and most insects eat).
Lastly I will talk about the obscure laws we have been given. Many of them have to do with what seems to us in today’s world would be an unlikely scenario. They say, “If that happens, do this.” In such cases you might want to say they are irrelevant. Or is it possible that there is a perpetual idea that carries over into our world today? One example would be that we are commanded in Exodus 23 to help our enemy when we see his donkey fallen on the road. This concept could be updated to say we should stop and help people whose car has broken down on the side of the road, even if they are our enemy. But rather than focusing on rough “interpretation” I would like to look at the laws that affect our everyday lives. Attaching tzit-tzit (tassels) to your clothing or mounting a mezuzah onto your doorposts have the purpose of being a continuous physical reminder to obey the rest of the Torah; pretty self-explanatory right?
But then there is also the issue of circumcision. Circumcision is again about being set apart from the rest of the world, but more than that it has a symbolism. Performing a surgery that cuts away some of the flesh we have been born with symbolizes our covenant with God saying that even from birth we were not right with God and we have to cut away a part of ourselves in order to make it right. Our rebellion against God is so cancerous to us humans that it has been fused in as a part of us and to get rid of it requires something very painful. Just like there is no way the Hebrews could have freed themselves from their slavery in Egypt that they had been born into. The only way for them all to get out was for the LORD Himself to reach down and pull them out. But they still had to do the work of actually walking out of Egypt too; they did not just sit there to be swept away by the wind. And just as the festivals are a sign of what God has done for us so is the circumcision. It is “the sign of the covenant sealed in our flesh” (Romans 4). Each baby boy is to be circumcised on the eighth day after his birth. Biblically the eighth day often represents eternity, so in eternity the flesh is cut away and only the core (or soul and spirit) remain. That person has been made into a new creation by the one who makes all things new.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7, Nevertheless, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each person, so must he live. I give this sort of direction in all the churches. Was anyone called after he had been circumcised? He should not try to undo his circumcision. Was anyone called who is uncircumcised? He should not get circumcised. Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Instead, keeping God’s commandments is what counts. Let each one remain in that situation in life in which he was called. Were you called as a slave? Do not worry about it. But if indeed you are able to be free, make the most of the opportunity. For the one who was called in the Lord as a slave is the Lord’s freedman. In the same way, the one who was called as a free person is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price. Do not become slaves of men. In whatever situation someone was called, brothers and sisters, let him remain in it with God.
So right here he specifically says a man who is not circumcised already should not seek to be circumcised because the act is nothing. But then he follows it up by saying that keeping God’s commandments is what counts. Is not circumcision one of God’s commandments? One interpretation says that he could be talking about ritual conversion to Judaism, which would explain why he says, “do not become slaves of men.” Identity is a huge issue between Jews and Christians in Paul’s letters (Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians are especially good examples) we often find him speaking against the Jews who say that Gentiles can have no share in God’s inheritance unless they ritually convert to being a Jew by race. But of course the truth is that we who believe are of a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one. In the heavenly kingdom all who believe in the name of Yeshua the Messiah are heirs and children of God. That is why he says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female” (Galatians 3).
In closing, I want to help you get away from picking and choosing to follow some of these laws strictly but completely ignoring the others. I believe that is a mistake that the Christian church has made since before the 4th century and it has become engrained in us as our tradition. If we follow the Torah we should follow the whole Torah as being absolute truth. Can a person really say they worship the God of Israel and yet completely disregard most of His commandments? 1 John 2 says it this way: Now by this we know that we have come to know God: if we keep his commandments. The one who says “I have come to know God” and yet does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in such a person. But whoever obeys his word, truly in this person the love of God has been perfected. By this we know that we are in him. The one who says he resides in God ought himself to walk just as Jesus walked. (NET)
If you want to make some compromise and accept the God of Israel without accepting His covenant with men you are deceiving yourself. So what it eventually comes down to is this: Who is your god and what do you believe about him? Do you trust Him completely? Do you think he would change his mind about some things? I have heard some people ask, “Why is your Jesus different than mine?” That is an excellent question! You should think about that for a while. What you really believe about God? I write this to you not so I can say that you need to live a Torah observant life or you might not be saved, we know that we are saved only by God’s grace and not by our own works, though James even questions if a person’s faith without works will save them. Only God may be the judge of that.
I write this to you because I have found the Torah to be very good and right. I have seen how far so many Christians have strayed from the truth of our God and I want to help bring them back. There are many great people out there who I highly respect that are missing out on so much that our wonderful God wants to give them. And there are many teachers who are unknowingly leading people astray. James 3 says that a teacher will certainly incur a stricter judgment than the others, so I greave for those teachers who are living and teaching in ignorance. So may you also find the beauty of living life in our Messiah Yeshua according to the Torah of God’s love for humanity. Shalom.
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