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Sermon: Peter’s vision

Friday, July 1st, 2011

Here is the text of my most recent sermon, delivered in late May at Kehilat Sar Shalom. It’s a message I’d prepared last fall and had in reserve for a while. Enjoy!

Shabbat Shalom.

You know, there are certain passages in the New Covenant writings that present challenges to us as Messianic believers. If we are not careful in our study, they can cause us to question whether what we believe is actually correct. Yet with the prompting of the Holy Spirit, careful study, and some effort to read these writings through first-century Messianic Jewish eyes, there is always an answer to be found.

One such case is the case of Peter’s vision, detailed initially in Acts chapter 10. As this passage has been historically taught, we have come to view it as one of the key moments in which God repealed all the kosher laws, the rules about which animals were either clean or unclean as food for us. It is why so many congregations hold bacon-and-egg breakfasts, pig roasts, and serve Easter ham at gatherings even today.

And whenever any of us finds the Messianic movement and begins to consider observing God’s regulations for what is clean and permissible as food, and what is unclean and ought not be eaten as food, this is one of the first passages we are pointed to by our well-intentioned friends who don’t want to see us “going back under the law.”

But is that what Peter’s vision in Acts 10 is all about? Let’s take a closer look, and see if the traditional arguments of the last sixteen hundred years or so actually hold water.

In Acts 10, there is an important preface that many who study this issue overlook; yet it is critical for understanding the events in this chapter properly. So let’s read what precedes Peter’s vision in:

ACTS 10:1-6
At Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion in what was known as the Italian Regiment. He and all his family were devout and God-fearing; he gave generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly. One day at about three in the afternoon he had a vision. He distinctly saw an angel of God, who came to him and said, “Cornelius!” Cornelius stared at him in fear. “What is it, Lord?” he asked. The angel answered, “Your prayers and gifts to the [Jewish] poor have come up as a memorial offering before God. Now send men to Joppa to bring back a man named Simon who is called Peter. He is staying with Simon the tanner, whose house is by the sea.”

Now, for our purposes here today, I don’t want to spend too much time on Cornelius and God’s selection of him, other than to point out that Cornelius was not a practicing and faithful traditional Jew. He was not a proselyte convert to Judaism, although it is believed he had studied and had, like Ruth, embraced the Jewish people as his people and the Jewish God as his God. This is demonstrated by his compassion and charitable acts on behalf of the Jewish poor, as mentioned in the passage.

But the point is, he had not undergone circumcision, or full conversion to Judaism, at the time this angel appears to him and promises to bring Peter to him. This all happens without Peter’s knowledge, and then what follows next is Peter’s vision. Let’s read on:

ACTS 10:9-16
About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles of the earth and birds of the air. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.” “Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.

Now, certainly it is understandable how this passage might be taken out of context and thought to be a vision concerning the dietary kosher laws. All sorts of animals, both clean and unclean, are part of Peter’s vision, and a voice does instruct Peter to kill and eat three times. It’s certainly a forgivable misunderstanding.

But we must not make the mistake of taking any part of the Bible out of context; whenever we do, bad theology is the result. Wrong thinking about God is where we end up. So let’s challenge ourselves to go against centuries of teaching to the contrary; let’s forget what we may have heard taught elsewhere and examine what the Scriptures really say here. This is not the end of the story.
Now, if anyone other than God was ever going to know the meaning of this vision given to Peter, it would have to be Peter, right? After all, he’s the one God was communicating with.

Initially, Peter is indeed puzzled over the meaning of this vision. Surely the same thoughts we have today must have been going through his head. Could God really be undoing centuries of Torah tradition on what is good for food and what isn’t? Remember, each of the three times this vision was given to Peter, he replied that he had never let any unclean meat touch his lips. This means Peter was indeed devout; he was a Torah-keeper even as a disciple and emissary of Yeshua Himself!

As Peter is puzzling over the meaning of his vision, though, let’s notice that immediately there’s a knock at the door; messengers from Cornelius arrive and ask Peter to come with them, explaining in:

ACTS 10:22
The men replied, “We have come from Cornelius the centurion. He is a righteous and God-fearing man, who is respected by all the Jewish people. A holy angel told him to have you come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say.”

So after inviting the men to stay for the night, they set out in the morning for Cornelius’ house and Peter goes in to meet with him. Let’s read this next bit carefully, as we skip down to:

ACTS 10:27-29A
Talking with him, Peter went inside and found a large gathering of people. He said to them: “You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him. But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection.

This will be the crux of how we should properly interpret Peter’s vision. Right here, in verse twenty-eight, Peter himself explains the interpretation of his vision. He says, “But God has shown me that I should not call any man impure or unclean.”

Where did God show Peter this great message? Just a few verses earlier! Peter is telling us that this is what that vision about clean and unclean animals was all about! You see, if God had not tapped Peter on the shoulder like this, he very likely would have refused to come to the house of Cornelius.

Why? Peter himself tells us why right here. “It is against our law for a Jew to associate with a Gentile or visit him.”

You see, by the very act of visiting Cornelius, Peter was, by the standard Jewish custom of his day, making himself ritually unclean – unfit to visit the Jerusalem Temple and in need of a cleansing – a mikveh – to regain his ritual purity.

Even though Cornelius was a God-fearer whose actions spoke of his love for the Jewish people and their God, he was not yet a convert; he was not yet circumcised; and therefore, he was a source of uncleanness, in the first-century Jewish mindset.

I’d like to read you a passage I found in Stern’s Jewish New Testament Commentary that addresses this issue.

STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, PP. 257
Would God, who established his covenant with the Jewish people and gave them an eternal Torah at Mount Sinai, and who is Himself unchangeable, change his Torah to make unclean animals kosher? This is the apparent meaning, and many Christian commentators assert that this is in fact the meaning. But they ignore the plain statement a few verses later which at last resolves Kefa’s (Peter’s) puzzlement, “God has shown me not to call any person unclean or impure. So the vision is about persons and not about food. God has not abrogated the Jewish dietary laws. Yeshua said, “Don’t think that I have come to do away with the Torah.”

So we have Peter’s own testimony that his vision was not about food at all, but about the inclusion of Gentiles into the first-century congregations of Yeshua. If this is the proper way of understanding Peter’s vision, then there must be some divine confirmation, right?

And are we given any? Certainly. Because as chapter ten continues, Peter begins sharing the good news about Yeshua the Messiah with Cornelius and all of his household, and an amazing, unheard-of thing happens. We read this in:

ACTS 10:44-46
While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God.

Does God pour out his Ru’ach haKodesh – his Holy Spirit – on people He does not bless or accept? Of course not! So a person must believe one of two things here. Either Cornelius and his household faked the gifts of the Ru’ach so ingeniously that they fooled Peter and the other emissaries of Yeshua, or God was indeed speaking to Peter about Gentile inclusion into the communities of Yeshua, and the vision was indeed not at all about food.

Peter’s actions with the household of Cornelius is soon brought under criticism, as we read in:

ACTS 11:2-3
So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him and said, “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them.”

Now carefully notice the objection here. No one is saying that Peter ate pork. No one is suggesting he had a ham sandwich and lobster bisque. The criticism is focused not on what Peter ate, but who he ate it with! He ate with uncircumcised men! The accusation was about his ritual purity because of who he ate with, not what he ate! If what he had eaten had been at issue, it would have been mentioned. The fact that it’s not further underlines the point that this whole episode was not about food, but Gentile inclusion.

Peter goes on to recount everything that happened in detail, and at the end of this, he concludes this way in:

ACTS 11:15-18
“As I began to speak, the Holy Spirit came on them as he had come on us at the beginning. Then I remembered what the Lord had said: ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ So if God gave them the same gift as he gave us, who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to think that I could oppose God?” When they heard this, they had no further objections and praised God, saying, “So then, God has granted even the Gentiles repentance unto life.”

Now, this is great news! When understood properly, it all fits together much more coherently. If Peter’s vision had been about making pulled-pork barbecue sandwiches OK to eat, it would seem out of place in the text of Acts. Properly understood as being a symbolic vision about Gentile inclusion in the first-century communities of Yeshua, the thematic unity of the text is restored.

Now this is where some of us, before we became Messianic, would have begun to get uncomfortable. And it is where, even now, those who know us but do not yet embrace a Messianic understanding, begin to raise questions.

Recently, I had a friend object to our interpretation of this text; he was adamant that it was about doing away with the concept of unclean food because, he reasoned, God would never be so petty as to worry about what we eat and what we don’t eat. It’s all cultural. It’s all about personal tastes.

God doesn’t care about what we eat or don’t eat? Really?

Let me share with you an insight I received while studying through Acts 10 for this very message: Sin entered the world because of a dietary command of God.

Let me say that again: Sin entered the world because of a dietary command of God. Let’s take a look at:

GENESIS 2:15-17
The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

This one, simple command is all Adam was given in the Garden. One simple command, and it was a dietary command. Eat from any tree in the Garden except this one tree. Eat from any tree except from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t eat from that tree.

It was just one command. That’s all Adam had; one dietary command: don’t eat from this one, particular tree. And because Adam and Chaveh couldn’t keep even that one, simple command, sin entered the world. Rebellion against God’s instructions entered the world because we decided that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was “good for food and desirable for gaining knowledge.”

Sin entered the world because we refused to let God tell us what to eat and what not to eat.

Now, is that to suggest that disobeying the clean and unclean dietary laws are more important than the other commands of God? Not necessarily.

If I get absent-minded at a gathering and eat a slice of pizza that looks like a cheese pizza, but turns out to have some sausage in it, does it mean I’m in danger of the fires of hell? No. But it does make me unclean. The solution is not the death penalty; the solution is that I immerse myself and I’m unclean until the start of a new day, at sunset.

So, let’s not go overboard here. Dietary laws are not as critical as His command not to murder. We know this because the penalty is different. But dietary laws are an excellent temperature-taking set of commands when it comes to determining our willingness to accept God’s sovereignty in our lives.

It is easy for anyone to say they want to make God the Lord of their life. Anyone can say that. Yet we all know our actions prove our words, don’t we? And we are all familiar with the first-century Jewish argument style known as kol v’chomer, arguing from the lesser to the greater, correct?

So let’s imagine a scene. You are in your prayer closet and while praying, you say, “LORD, I want you to make my life a testimony to you! I want you to use me in powerful ways! Make me a missionary and anywhere you send me, I will go. Africa, Siberia, anywhere.”

So the LORD replies to your prayer and he says, “Give up your pepperoni pizzas.”

Indignant, you reply, “LORD, I love pepperoni pizza! Let’s not focus on such a trivial thing! You’re missing the point! I’m willing to be your missionary to anywhere in the world you wish to send me.”

And then the LORD replies, “If you cannot obey me in this small, simple command to give up pepperoni pizza, how can you obey me to go into the mission field wherever I wish to send you?”

Are you beginning to get the picture? Dietary laws may not be the most critical laws in terms of the penalty for violating them, but that also makes them the simplest to obey! And if we’re not willing to obey the LORD in the small, easy matters, how can we claim we are willing and able to obey Him in anything bigger and more important?

But let’s focus back on Peter. What we have seen in our look at Acts 10 and 11 is that Peter’s vision was not about food, but about Gentile inclusion.

Another objection to this understanding I was recently challenged with, by a friend, is this. “OK, so even if Peter’s vision isn’t about food, that’s certainly what was going on when Peter was confronted by Paul, as related in the book of Galatians! Peter was eating pork with the Gentiles, and that’s a known, indisputable fact!”

Is it?

Since this ties in directly to Peter’s vision, let’s take a look at this related incident in the book of Galatians. We read this in:

GALATIANS 2:11-12
When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.

Now notice the careful wording here. Paul does not write that Peter ate, “like the Gentiles.” He says that Peter ate “with the Gentiles.”

And why? Because God had shown Peter that it was OK to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles.

There is absolutely no verbiage in this passage that suggests that Peter and the Gentile believers were having ham sandwiches. That would have been the furthest thing from his mind! As a first-century Messianic Jew, the idea of eating anything unclean wouldn’t even cross his mind – it was not something he even considered food.

And when the members of the circumcision group show up, does it say Peter started reaching for the roast beef instead of ham? No, what does it say? It says, “he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles.”

Peter, always rash and eager for acceptance, knew the truth God had shown him in that vision – that it was OK to eat with uncircumcised Gentiles, but he didn’t always live up to that truth. He sometimes would slip up and allow the opinion of others to matter more than God’s opinion of him.

Stern agrees with this interpretation in his commentary, as we read:

STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, PP. 528-529
…it is not to be thought that Kefa (Peter) had abandoned Jewish tradition and now ignored keeping kosher, so that he ate with any and all Gentiles whenever he felt like it. His loyalty to kashrut had been such that nothing treif (unclean) had ever touched his lips prior to his seeing Cornelius; for this we have his word, spoken while he was seeing a vision and reported thereafter by him to other believers. There the meaning of Kefa’s vision was not that the laws of kashrut had been abrogated, but that a new circumstance, the inclusion of Gentiles in the Messianic Community, was to have an impact on Torah, so that keeping kosher became a less important mitzvah than preserving fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers. Accordingly, the laws of kashrut remain; the Messianic Community has not ignored them…

So why did Paul “oppose him to his face?” What made Peter “clearly in the wrong?” Was it all over the food on his plate? Not at all. It was the sudden shunning of the uncircumcised Gentiles he had previously been treating as friends and brothers. And his hypocrisy spread quickly to others, as we read in:

GALATIANS 2:13-16
The other Jews joined him in his hypocrisy, so that by their hypocrisy even Barnabas was led astray. When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not ‘Gentile sinners’ know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by observing the law, because by observing the law no one will be justified.”

So what laws is Paul referring to here? Traditional teaching has been that it is the dietary laws, but that is not the case. After all, the people who show up and cause Peter to start shunning the Messianic Gentiles was known as the circumcision group, not the Clean Meats Only group, right?

We get further verification of this in Stern’s commentary, where he quotes an early Messianic Jewish Rabbi. We read:

STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, P. 529
Daniel Klutstein has offered an alternative understanding: the problem may not have been whether fellowship between Jewish and Gentile believers is more compelling than kashrut but whether it is more compelling than ritual purity. Today it is hard to appreciate how important ritual purity was in first-century Jewish life, although the fact that one-sixth of the Talmud is devoted to this subject ought to give an indication. True, Orthodox Jews go to the mikveh on various occasions. But in the first century, homes of observant Jews frequently had mikveh built in: to be able to maintain ritual purity at all times it was considered normal to have a private mikveh … consider that Kefa (Peter) went frequently to the Temple; he would not have been able to enter in a ritually impure state, but eating with Gentiles and being in their homes could render him impure and thus subject to criticism by the picky.

What we see here, then, is that the source of many of these episodes of controversy is, if not the same individuals, at least members of the same group. The Messianic Jewish Pharisees who insisted that Gentile believers must be circumcised to be genuinely saved first spring to life in reaction to this new work of Gentile inclusion into the Messianic communities of the first century.

After this, they showed up and began “teaching the brothers at Antioch” without authorization, and disturbing the congregation there since their teaching contradicted that of Paul and Barnabas, who were assigned to Antioch at that time. This lead to the Jerusalem Council decision of Acts 15; there, the legalistic interpretations of the Circumcision group was defeated by James and Peter.

Yet the circumcision group did not go away quietly, we can see, because some time after the Jerusalem Council, the circumcision group shows up again, which leads Peter to forget himself and start shunning the Gentile believers, contrary to the truth of his vision.

In these incidents, the real issue at hand has been that uncircumcised Gentiles are no longer considered to be a source of uncleanness. Yet our twenty-first century cultural blinders mislead us so that we miss that truth and assume it’s about whether it’s okay to eat bacon. Can you see now why it’s important to understand these passages properly and in their first century context?

In the first century, the main problem was cultural pressure on Gentiles to conform to Jewish customs and traditions. How unfortunate it is that the far more common problem today is just the opposite: that we as Christians too often put pressure on Jewish believers in Messiah Yeshua to abandon their Judaism and conform to our customs and traditions.

So my prayer today is that God, through Messiah Yeshua and the ministry of his Ruach haKodesh, would bring all of us together to worship the Father in Spirit and in truth. After all, that’s what our Messianic community, Kehilat Sar Shalom, was founded on.

Shabbat Shalom.

Tags: Peter's vision
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What I’ve Been Doing Lately

Monday, February 14th, 2011

The Messianic Musings blog has been quiet since October.

There’s a reason for that. First, I haven’t been doing any sermons or commentaries lately. That’s because our rabbi has been handling all the teaching duties of late with an exciting new series on discovering the Messiah in the Torah, going through all five books of the Torah. It’s shaping up into a great series that you can find here.

Still, that means I’ve been teaching less, at least in public.

But what have I been doing with my time otherwise, from a theological perspective? Well, I’ve been working on a few books that I plan to eventually publish in eBook form on the Kindle and perhaps other formats as well. Some of these books will be based on the very sermons and commentaries you’ll find right here on MessianicMusings, but researched more deeply and greatly expanded.

Other books will be original concepts. For example, one cannot really begin to teach the Messianic perspective without first laying the groundwork of a common understanding of terms, culture, context and the like.

Easy example. If I say, “Sabbath,” most of my Christian readers will automatically think, “Sunday.” However, most of my Jewish and Messianic readers will automatically think, “sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.” Which do I mean? To those who know me, they would immediately understand I mean the latter.

However, to someone picking up a book I’ve written for the first time, who has never attended a Messianic congregation, they might not share that definition.

So, before I delve into the other books I’m planning, I want to compose a “Messianic Basics” sort of book that I can then use as a frame of reference for many of these things.

After all, if you read through my sermons on here, you’ll notice that they were written for an audience that was already part of our faith community. I refer to teachings by Rabbi Stan that we all had heard in previous weeks, so it was a context we all shared.

One cannot do that in a book, because one is speaking to an entirely different audience, many of whom do not share that context. So, that’s probably what my first Messianic-centric book will be… a working definition of the Messianic movement, and the terms, context and understandings that I’d like people to understand when reading my later theological works.

I have no idea, at this point, when the first Messianic theological work will be published and available. Right now, I’m working on a fictional entertainment novel, which has little (if anything) to do with my spiritual views, other than it’s within the realm of what I would consider “clean, family-safe entertainment,” although that terms means different things to different people.

But I do hope to put the Messianic Basics book on the front burner later this year, with an eye toward ePublication before the year is out, or very early in 2012. Once they start rolling out, I hope to ePublish a couple Messianic books per year, as well as a couple fiction novels per year.

But on this blog, the focus of my posts will be on the Messianic titles.

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Sermon: The Jerusalem Council

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Shabbat Shalom.

When I found out I was going to teach today while Stan and several of our members are over in Israel, it didn’t take me long to decide what I wanted to talk about. It is a passage of the New Covenant writings that many of us are familiar with, and one that poses special challenges to our understanding as Messianic believers. I’m speaking of Acts chapter fifteen.

This passage in the book of Acts has become known as the “Jerusalem Council” passage. What we are often taught about the Jerusalem Council is that this is where it was decided that Gentile followers of the Messiah Yeshua can ignore the Torah, because it doesn’t apply to them.

Those unfamiliar with the Messianic viewpoint often use Acts 15 as a basis for labeling us Judaizers. But is that what the Jerusalem Council was all about? Is Acts 15 the chapter that laid the Torah to rest, never to be relevant again?

To find out, let’s take a closer look at this important chapter in the history of the first-century congregations of Yeshua and see if we can determine what’s really going on. We read this in:

ACTS 15:1
Some men came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”

OK, let’s stop right here for a moment because there are many elements to this first verse, and if we misunderstand these elements, we will misunderstand the rest of the chapter that follows.

The first and most natural question that occurs to me is, who were these men referred to in verse one who were teaching the brothers? We get some hints later in the chapter. For example, when they appear with Paul and Barnabas in front of the Jerusalem Council, we read this in:

ACTS 15:5
Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses.”

We learn two key facts about these men from this passage. First, they are believers. Second, they are from the party of the Pharisees.

For some, that might sound almost like a contradiction. Yet it is an accurate way to understand the identity of these teachers: they were Pharisees who believed in the Messiah Yeshua.

The correctness of this interpretation is confirmed by David Stern in his Jewish New Testament Commentary, where we read this:

STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, P. 275
But there were in fact some Pharisees who believed in Yeshua. There were not “former Pharisees” but Messianic Jewish Pharisees, just like Sha’ul. “But,” some may object, “these Pharisees were wrong. Their Judaizing view was roundly defeated.” Yes, but they were still believers; not every believer is right about everything! Further, the text does not tell us that all the Pharisees who were believers took this position; but, on the contrary, it does tell us that Sha’ul, who was a Pharisee, took the opposite stand.

Stern’s insight here is perspective-changing. This passage is often interpreted as being between unbelieving Jewish Pharisees and the believing Paul and Barnabas, who represent early Christianity. But that’s not the case.

This is not a dispute among those outside of the congregations of Yeshua! It’s a dispute among those who are inside it and a part of it!

So now we know these men were Messianic Jewish Pharisees. Does the text reveal anything else about them? It certainly does! Even later in the chapter, in James’ letter to the churches, we read this key passage in:

ACTS 15:24
We have heard that some went out from us without our authorization and disturbed you, troubling your minds by what they said.

So what this letter tells us about these men introduced in verse one is that they were doing their teaching without authorization. In fact, Stern tells us in his commentary that these men were not violating orders not to teach, but had not been commissioned to teach at all.

This happens all the time in congregations even today, doesn’t it? We’ve all seen it, been part of it, even done it ourselves on occasion, right?

People at Oneg or after a service or study will gather people around them and, rather than discussing the sermon given, they start offering up their own ideas; ideas that can sometimes be at odds with what has been taught from the bema.

I’m not talking about those who discuss the sermon or study; I’m talking about those who start teaching their own lessons, without approval, or teach something contrary to what we hold to as a congregation.

So this is a situation we can now begin to understand a little better. We are presented with a few Messianic Jewish Pharisees who have not been authorized to teach, but who show up in Antioch and start teaching the congregation there anyway! And what are they teaching? Let’s read verse one again:

ACTS 15:1
Some men came down from Judea to Antioch and were teaching the brothers: “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved.”

Now, we’re still not done breaking down verse one so that we properly understand it. What are these unauthorized teachers teaching? “Unless you are circumcised, according to the CUSTOM taught by Moses, you cannot be SAVED.”

There are two key words we must notice here to understand this verse, and everything that follows it, properly.

The first key word is the word CUSTOM. That should ring a bell for us right away. If we were talking about the written Torah of God, it would not say “custom” there.

This isn’t always easy to pick out in the text because of the first-century Jewish mindset from which it was written. For the Jewish people of Yeshua’s time, and for many traditional Jews even today, there is no separation between the five books of Moses and the oral traditions of the Pharisees. If you come upon a Jewish person studying the Talmud or the Mishnah and ask him what he’s up to, he’ll reply that he’s studying Torah.

That blending the written Torah and the oral traditions has been part of rabbinic teachings since at least the time of the Mishnah. For we read this in:

MISHNAH, PIRKEY AVOT 1:1
Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the men of the great synagogue. The latter used to say three things: be patient in [the administration of] justice, rear many disciples and make a [protective] fence around the Torah.

In this Mishnaic tradition, it becomes clear that the rabbinic mindset sees the oral traditions as inseparable from the written Torah of Moses. That is the basis of their authority, so that is why they call all of it Torah.

Yet remember, these Pharisees in Acts are believers in Messiah Yeshua. They understand Yeshua made a distinction between what was written down by Moses on Mount Sinai, and the many rabbinic teachings that came centuries later.

And so they don’t call this particular circumcision practice a law, but a custom taught by Moses.

Keep in mind the claim they are making. They are insisting that performing this circumcision in strict accordance with a particular oral tradition is necessary for a person to truly be saved!

You know, it is one thing to embrace the Jewish roots; it’s another thing entirely to embrace Judaism over the teaching of Yeshua. And that is exactly what these teachers are requiring. As Stern comments:

STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, PP. 273-274
These men from Judah are insisting that Gentiles must become in every sense Jews … This condition goes beyond the requirements for individual salvation set forth in the Tanakh, in Judaism or by the emissaries … The Tanakh says, and Peter quotes it at 2:21, “Everyone who calls on the name of The L-RD will be saved.” … The New Testament books of Romans, Galatians and Ephesians have as a central issue the equality of Jews and Gentiles before God, insofar as salvation is concerned; they make it clear that observance of the Torah, as it applies to Jews, is not a condition for the salvation of a Gentile … The correct conclusion is: a Jew who becomes Messianic remains a Jew, and a Gentile who becomes a Christian remains a Gentile.

So these are the stakes at play here. You have a group of Messianic Jewish Pharisees. They believe Yeshua is the Messiah, but they have come to Antioch without authorization to teach and have started teaching something contrary to the teaching of Paul and Barnabas: that Yeshua’s blood sacrifice was not enough to obtain salvation by itself. That obeying not just the direct commands of God in the written Torah, but also the oral traditions of the rabbis – including specific customs about circumcision – was necessary for someone to be saved!

This is what’s at stake.

With all this in mind, what plays out next becomes far easier to understand. Let’s read on in:

ACTS 15:2
This brought Paul and Barnabas into sharp dispute and debate with them. So Paul and Barnabas were appointed, along with some other believers, to go up to Jerusalem to see the apostles and elders about this question.

I think now we can all understand more deeply why Paul and Barnabas had such a deep dispute with these particular Messianic Jewish Pharisees. This was Paul and Barnabas’ congregation that they were discipling, a suddenly along come some self-appointed experts, people who are not ready to teach, and they start contradicting everything Paul and Barnabas have been working so hard to instill in the believers there in Antioch. Of course that would be upsetting.

Moving on to:

ACTS 15:4-11
When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and elders, to whom they reported everything God had done through them. Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to obey the law of Moses.” The apostles and elders met to consider this question. After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of the disciples a yoke that neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear? No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”

So Peter here says that the Torah is done away with and irrelevant and we don’t even need to read it anymore, right?

No, of course not! Because that’s not what’s at issue here, is it?

That may be how we’re accustomed to hearing this passage taught, but through our study today, we know better now, don’t we?

Peter’s ruling is focused; he is saying God makes no distinction between Jew or Gentile when it comes to salvation… the same standard applies to all. And that is, that our salvation comes from God and God alone, though trusting in Yeshua as our Messiah.

So what exactly is this yoke Peter speaks of, that he says, “neither we nor our fathers have been able to bear.” Well, what we often are taught is that the yoke Peter is referring to is the Torah itself!

This is why we hear so many people proclaim, “Praise God, we have been set free from the Law!” The trouble is, that’s not what Peter means here by yoke.

Ask most Jews, and they will tell you that the Torah is not considered a burden, but a joy! That is also how the first-century believers in Yeshua would have seen the written Torah as well, because they understood that Yeshua was Himself the living embodiment of the Torah.

So, again, what is this yoke? Remember, Peter has just stated that God purifies our hearts when we place our trust in Him. So this is a contrasting statement.

What would be the opposite of following God with a purified heart? Well, quite simply, Peter’s referring to those times when we’re just going through the motions, when we’re not really living out our faith by our actions and trusting God.

Whenever we start doing all the ceremonies of our faith because it’s expected of us, but our hearts are cold to God, that’s when our practices become a yoke, a burden. We all go through this at times; the real problems begin when we get stuck there!

Let’s read what Stern had to say about this in:

STERN, JEWISH NT COMMENTARY, P. 276
[Peter] is speaking here of the detailed, mechanical rule-keeping, regardless of heart-attitude, that some (but not all!) Pharisees, including, apparently, the ones mentioned in verse five, held to be the essence of Judaism. This was not the “yoke of the mitzvot” prescribed by God, but a yoke of legalism prescribed by men! The yoke of legalism is indeed unbearable, but the yoke of the mitzvoth has always required, first of all, love of God and neighbor; and it now implies love toward Yeshua the Messiah. But love can never be legalistic.

Do you see the difference now? Obeying God because we’re passionate about our relationship to him is easy! But going through the motions when our hearts are far from him? Insisting others do the same? That’s legalism. And legalism doesn’t save us!

So can we now agree that no one has declared the Torah done away with at the Jerusalem Council so far?

It’s still intact, isn’t it?

What’s being spoken against is false religion and empty rule-keeping. Let’s move on:

ACTS 15:12-19
The whole assembly became silent as they listened to Barnabas and Paul telling about the miraculous signs and wonders God had done among the Gentiles through them. When they finished, James spoke up: “Brothers, listen to me. Simon has described to us how God at first showed his concern by taking from the Gentiles a people for himself. The words of the prophets are in agreement with this, as it is written: “‘After this I will return and rebuild David’s fallen tent. Its ruins I will rebuild, and I will restore it, that the remnant of men may seek the Lord, and all the Gentiles who bear my name, says the Lord, who does these things’ that have been known for ages. “It is my judgment, therefore, that we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

Now here’s a critical point. James is handing down the final decision of the Jerusalem Council, and it’s important we understand it properly. What he says here is, “We should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God.”

From this wording, what are we often taught? “OK, whatever comes next, this is what we Gentiles need to do and understand. Nothing more. Just this. The Jerusalem Council said so.”

But is that the best understanding of the text? Quoting Joseph Shulam, Daniel Stern points out that there is a different rendering for this verse, one that lends deeper insight:

STERN, QUOTING JOSEPH SHULAM
“Or, ‘the Goyim, while they are turning.’ Joseph Shulam expounds the second alternative thusly: Do not put obstacle in the way of Gentiles while they are going through the process of turning away from idolatry to God. Instead, let them use their spiritual energy in repentance. There will be plenty of opportunities later for them to absorb what Moses has to say.”

And that’s the point here! The ruling of the Jerusalem Council is not meant to be taken as a final word on what Gentiles have to observe to please God, now and forever!

It is merely a starting point. A beginning. A minimum standard so that Gentiles turning away from their paganism and coming to worship God can get along with peaceably, and not offend, their fellow brothers and sisters in the L-RD who are coming to Messiah from a Jewish background!

Let’s read what they required to accomplish this:

ACTS 15:20-21
Instead we should write to them, telling them to abstain from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood. For Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

This is what many people mistakenly rally around as the only rules that should ever apply to Gentile believers in the Messiah Yeshua. That they should stay away from sexual sin, from food polluted by idols or the meat of strangled animals, and from blood.

It sounds nice. It sounds Biblical. But I think we’ve explored enough of background on this chapter now to come to an entirely different conclusion than what we are normally taught.

Should we assume, if these are the only rules we Gentiles are to live by, that it is OK to covet?

Is it OK to harbor hatred in our hearts toward our neighbors, in direct violation of Yeshua’s teachings?

Is it OK to steal, since that’s not mentioned either?

I don’t think that’s what Peter and James and the rest of the Jerusalem Council were driving at. If you look at that very next verse again, you’ll notice another key statement.

James says, “For Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.”

Many people wonder what James could have meant here, but I think it’s pretty clear, in context.

He’s saying those who are Messianic Jews have been raised on the laws of Moses! It’s been preached from the earliest times, and still is, every Sabbath!

Understanding all the commands of God found in the five books of Moses comes naturally to them! They were raised on it! It’s what they know, and it’s no burden. It’s second nature!

But is that true of the Gentiles who are just beginning to turn away from their paganism, from their idol worship and from the worship of false gods? Have they had Moses preached to them from the time they were children until now?

No! Of course not! They don’t have the same background! They don’t have the same context! They don’t even have the same language, in some cases!

So the desire of Paul and Barnabas and the Jerusalem Council isn’t to do away with the written Torah of God! It’s to ease the transition of these new Gentile believers into the first-century congregations of Yeshua, to give them a bare minimum, a starting point at which their presence won’t be chaotic and disruptive to the rest of the community!

Remember, this part of the ruling isn’t a salvation question; it’s a question of how righteously they have to live in order not to be disruptive to the congregation of Yeshua they are not a part of, until they learn more about living a God-pleasing life. This is about that next step.

Ultimately these Gentile believers will spend more time with their Messianic brothers and sisters. They will be discipled. Are they never expected to advance in righteous living and deeper obedience to the Torah?

No, of course not! As they grow in maturity, more obedience will be expected of them; not as a means of salvation, but as a means of living a purer life, a life empowered by the Ruach HaKodesh, the Holy Spirit!

God treats all of us the same. He accepts us where and as we are! But He calls all of us to ever-greater obedience, ever-greater trust, as we grow in our knowledge of Him.

I came to know the L-RD personally in college. And I was able to give up some of my sins immediately. But when I look back at how I lived in those first couple years of walking with the L-RD, there was a lot to be desired.

As the years went on, I learned more about prayer, more about distancing myself from various temptations, more about who God really was and what He expected of me. I walked with and grew in the L-RD for almost fifteen years before I ever discovered the Messianic movement.

I’ve been in the Messianic movement for over a decade now. When I first started attending, some things were easy for me to grasp right away, like celebrating the Sabbath on the seventh day.

Others, like avoiding unclean meats or keeping the Festivals of the LORD, took more time for me to get used to. And here’s the thing: both God and the people here at Sar Shalom gave me time and opportunity to grow into greater obedience.

They didn’t chase me off with a stick the second time I walked in the door! They didn’t debate me when I had questions or I stated something that didn’t perfectly line up with our doctrine at KKS. Even after a couple years of coming here, I still had a lot of growing to do! Yet they welcomed me here at Sar Shalom throughout that growing in obedience process, just as God does!

And if God and Sar Shalom were willing to be that patient with me, how can we be any less patient with anyone else coming here for the first time?

See, that’s the real message of the Jerusalem Council! Despite what we may have been taught traditionally, it was not an event in church history where the disciples declared the Torah to be done away with!

It was, more accurately, a ruling against legalism! It was a ruling in favor of patience and tolerance toward all who follow the Messiah Yeshua!

It was a ruling allowing them to grow and mature in trust and love and knowledge and obedience to the L-RD, as He draws us all continually closer to Him, knowing that He will build us always toward a higher standard of obedience, far above the minimum requirements, not a lower standard.

That’s the true heart of the Jerusalem Council. And that spirit of love and mercy, not legalistic observance, is what should be in all our hearts whenever we encounter newcomers. Let’s make them feel at home. Let’s make them all feel as welcome as we did the first time we walked through those doors.

Shabbat Shalom.

Tags: Acts 15, Jerusalem Council
Posted in sermons and commentaries | 2 Comments »

My Nitsavim-VaYelech 2010 Commentary

Thursday, October 28th, 2010

Shabbat Shalom

Today we have two Torah portions to cover. The first is Nitsavim, a Hebrew word that means, “You are standing,” and the second is VaYelech, a Hebrew word that means, “And he went.” Together, these portions cover everything from Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 10 (though some Bibles will number it as verse 9) through all of chapter 31.

You know, this week’s reading brings something to mind. As some of you may remember, I used to teach the bar and bat mitzvah kids here a few years ago. One week we were discussing the Ten Commands, and we had been focusing for a while on, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” One of the boys raised his hand and when I called on him, he asked, “Craig, are there any commands that tell us how to treat our brothers and sisters?” Before I could answer, one of the other boys spoke up and said, “Of course there is! Thou shall not murder.”

Now, of course, the commands of the LORD are not a joking matter. And yet, too often, we as believers do not treat them with the seriousness they deserve.

In this week’s reading, God makes it clear his commands are not to be taken lightly. For example, we read this in:

DEUTERONOMY 29:18-19
Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the LORD our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison. When such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself and therefore thinks, “I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way.”

The passage goes on to say that such stubbornness will only bring disaster on the people and the land. Yes, God is patience; He is gracious and long-suffering; He is certainly not short-tempered. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished so what should that tell the children of Israel? That they do not want to be numbered among the guilty! That they should not persist in going their own way!

Unfortunately, in this week’s reading, God reveals to Moses that despite everything the children of Israel has been through, including losing an entire generation in their time of exile in the wilderness, due to their stubborn rebellion to God, the lesson has not been learned. God confirms this to Moses in:

DEUTERONOMY 31:15-16
Then the LORD appeared at the Tent in a pillar of cloud, and the cloud stood over the entrance to the Tent. And the LORD said to Moses: “You are going to rest with your fathers, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.

Can you imagine the anguish Moses felt upon hearing this prophecy from the LORD? He had dedicated his life to serving the God of Israel to bring them here to the Promised Land, where they might be blessed and serve the LORD, and in his final days in this life, he is basically being told, “Mission Incomplete.”

Now, one can argue that Moses had done all that God had commanded him to do, and that is true. In that sense, Moses had fulfilled his mission – but God’s plan is not yet complete. You see, the fact that the people of Israel will sin and rebel again is not a failure of Moses; Moses was just a man, like any of us. It is not even a failure of the law; for the commands of God are true. What was missing was constant communication between God and his people.

That’s what the Israelites turned down at Mount Sinai; God offered to let them hear from Him directly, but they were intimidated by that and asked for a human mediator instead: Moses. Moses couldn’t be there all the time… and now in this week’s portion, he’s about to not be there at all.

God promised earlier in Deuteronomy a “prophet like Moses” who will restore that constant communication between God and His people, and that prophet like Moses is the Messiah Yeshua. Part of why the law was so hard for the children of Israel to keep is because they were trying to do it on their own. No one can accomplish that apart from God’s help. Perfect obedience requires a lack of sin; and no one lacks sin, except for Yeshua the Messiah, as we read in:

I JOHN 3:5
But you know that he [Yeshua] appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin.

This is the hope we have as followers of Yeshua; yet are those who say that the Torah is too hard to follow, or that it has been done away with because it was fulfilled in Yeshua, correct? Once we have the power of God through His Spirit, the Ruach haKodesh, at work in our lives, are we to continue to regard the Torah as too hard to fulfill, as having no value and as something that is now done away with and irrelevant?

This week’s reading teaches us the correct answer is, “No!” The Torah is not asking us for more than we are capable of. Here is one of the cornerstone verses of this week’s reading, and we find it in:

DEUTERONOMY 30:11
Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.

In this passage, the LORD is speaking through Moses to the people of Israel as they prepare to enter the Promised Land. He has spent time summarizing the entire history of the Exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah, and the laws that shall govern them in the land they are about to enter. And so it is entirely appropriate at this point for the LORD to reassure the people, so that they do not feel overwhelmed by the burdens and responsibilities they have been given and he shares these words. “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.”

As Solomon observed, there’s nothing new under the sun. As it was back in the days of Moses, so it is today. I’m sure many of the children of Israel listened to all these commands, this entire Torah, and found themselves overwhelmed by it, and in their hearts were thoughts that it was too much for God to expect of them. That no one could ever keep it. That’s how many believers still feel about it today.

But is that true? Well, if the Torah is to be believed, and IT IS, then we have to accept as true what we read here. “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.”

This is consistent with the life of Messiah Yeshua. He lived a life far above the standard set down in the Torah, and if He is our example, would he set an example that no one can follow? Of course not! He set one we are capable of following!

We also know there are others who lived at or above the standard set by the Torah. For example, we read this in:

LUKE 1:5-6
In the time of Herod king of Judea there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah; his wife Elizabeth was also a descendant of Aaron. Both of them were upright in the sight of God, observing all the Lord’s commandments and regulations blamelessly.

Blameless is the key word there. And such an achievement is a requirement for leadership in a congregation, as we read in:

TITUS 1:6-7
An elder must be blameless, the husband of but one wife, a man whose children believe and are not open to the charge of being wild and disobedient. Since an overseer is entrusted with God’s work, he must be blameless–not overbearing, not quick-tempered, not given to drunkenness, not violent, not pursuing dishonest gain.

Is blameless keeping of the Torah standard really too hard for any believer to live up to? Notice that these passages do not indicate sin-free living, but blameless living.

I took my examples from the New Covenant writings to demonstrate that this is not only a Mosaic standard: the expectation to live a life blameless according to the written Torah is how Yeshua lived out His example, it is a standard many people are said to have lived up to in both the Old and New Covenant writings, and it was a general expectation for those in leadership in the first-century church.

Would this be expected if it could not be accomplished? The answer, of course, is “No.” It would not be required if it were impossible to do it.

It is important to remember that what the Torah requires is not the LORD’s perfect standard for holy living, but merely the minimum standard for our behavior to be acceptable to Him. In other words, it’s the least anyone could do in gratitude for all He has done.

This is why Yeshua taught things in this style, saying, “You have heard it said, but I say to you.” Each teaching in that style always has Yeshua raising the standards, not lowering them or doing away with them. And He did this to point out that not only was the Torah standard achievable, but much more was possible as well.

It is a myth that no one can live up to the expectations of the Torah. Remember the words from this week’s reading, offered truthfully to the Israelites by God: “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.”

Now, let’s not be deceived. All are subject to sin; all fall short of the LORD’s perfect standard. But there is a vast difference between the occasional slip into sin in a moment of weakness and what Paul identifies in:

GALATIANS 5:21
I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.

That phrase, “live like this,” indicates a state of ongoing, willing, unrepentant sin. It is that point at which one gives up the struggle against fleshly desires, snuffs out the will of the Spirit, and we begins to justify and excuse whatever sinful behavior captures and enslaves them.

That is what the LORD is referring to here as well as he speaks to the people of Israel through Moses in this week’s reading. The LORD is not impatient with those who slip up occasionally; but those who allow their hearts to grow hard and unrepentant will not go unpunished by Him.

That’s our insight for today from Nitsavim and VaYelech; the LORD is and will always be consistent. He is not a God who deals unfairly, making demands that are impossible to meet. Because, “Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.”

Shabbat Shalom.

Tags: Nitsavim, VaYelech
Posted in sermons and commentaries, Torah | No Comments »

My 2010 Ki Tetse Commentary

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Here’s my 2010 take on the Torah portion known as Ki Tetse. Or listen to it!

Shabbat Shalom

Today’s Torah portion is called Ki Tetse, a Hebrew word that means, “When you go out.” The reading covers Deuteronomy chapter 21, verse 10, through chapter 25, verse 19. You know, upon first glance, this week’s portion seems to have little to no unifying theme. It feels like an almost random collection of laws and decrees that the LORD, through Moses, is reviewing for the people before they enter the Promised Land.

It feels random because so many commands are covered in such a brief amount of space. The topics vary widely, ranging from how to properly acquire a bride who is the widow of a defeated foe, to the proper burial timing for bodies hung on trees, to looking out for your neighbor’s property, to what clothing is proper for a man or a woman to wear.

The rulings come rapidly, and in the barrage, barely even thematically arranged, and one can become a bit lost in the riches of so many commands. Yet is it a true observation that Ki Tetse, this portion of the Torah, is without a theme?

To be honest, I think that would be overstating it, because there is a theme, if you pay close attention, and it’s one that’s repeated after many of these commands are given. We read in:

Deuteronomy 22:22
If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. You must purge the evil from Israel.

The key is found in that last sentence. “You must purge the evil from Israel.” It is a phrase that is repeated over and over again in this week’s reading. My count may not be perfect, since wording varies from translation to translation, but I found this phrase, or minor variations on it, no less than five times in this week’s reading alone.

“You must purge the evil from among you.”

It is an important message for the children of Israel, because they have just lost an entire generation wandering in the desert, because that generation did not purge the evil from among them, but allowed evil to grow, take root, even flourish to the point of rebellion – not only against God, but even against their chosen mediator, Moses.

With Moses now at an age where God is about to call him to his ancestors, Moses will no longer be with the people. In the short term, Joshua will take his place; but no mediator who came after Moses matched the dedication to, and intimacy with, God that Moses enjoyed. As the generations spin out from Sinai, those who sit in Moses’ seat will drift further and further away from God’s very words, his very instructions.

So it is heavy on the heart of both God and Moses that the people be warned to avoid the same pitfalls that befell those who came before them, to avoid allowing evil to grow and dwell among them. That is the purpose of this review of the commands; God is reminding them of all sorts of things that can lead to a rebellious spirit. Some of these are dramatic and obvious; others are subtle. Yet they are all important.

Also, many of them have links to the mistakes of those who came before them! To prove this, let’s take a look at one such command. We read this in:

Deuteronomy 21:15-17
If a man has two wives, and he loves one but not the other, and both bear him sons but the firstborn is the son of the wife he does not love, when he wills his property to his sons, he must not give the rights of the firstborn to the son of the wife he loves in preference to his actual firstborn, the son of the wife he does not love. He must acknowledge the son of his unloved wife as the firstborn by giving him a double share of all he has. That son is the first sign of his father’s strength. The right of the firstborn belongs to him.

Now, this is the command the LORD gives, but does this ring any bells for anyone? Does it seem contrary to anything we’ve encountered earlier in the Torah?

Well, the example of Jacob comes to mind. We all know the great love story of Jacob and Rachel. Jacob was so taken with Rachel that when he agreed to work for Laban seven years to earn her hand in marriage, the Torah says that those years of hard labor “seemed like only a few days” because he loved her so. Of course, Jacob is betrayed by Laban, who switches Rachel out for his older daughter Leah at the wedding supper. Laban eventually allows Jacob to have Rachel as well, in exchange for another seven years of labor, but the troubles have just begun.

Even though Jacob accepts Leah as his wife, as a necessary requirement to get the wife he truly loves, he never seems to love Leah. Seeing this, the LORD blesses her with far more children, to give her honor in place of the love Jacob withholds from her. In fact, Jacob gets six sons from Leah – half of the six tribes of Israel – while his beloved Rachel only bears him two sons – Joseph and Benjamin.

Yet despite having ten other sons from Leah, Leah’s maidservant and Rachel’s maidservant, most of them older than Joseph and Benjamin, who does Jacob favor? The sons of Rachel! That favoritism is what leads to the intense jealousy of Joseph’s other brothers toward Joseph; the special coat Jacob made for Joseph was symbolic of that favoritism.

You see, the actual first-born of Jacob was Reuben, the son of Leah. He is the one Jacob should have been favoring, by birthright standards. Yet Jacob did not do this, and it brought much trouble into the lives of both Jacob and Joseph, as well as the lives of his brothers.

Now, God can work miracles, so it is no surprise that Joseph being sold into slavery in Egypt becomes the very instrument by which the LORD rescues Jacob and his sons from a deadly famine in the land, ensuring their survival.

Yet, through this command, the LORD is re-establishing the correctness of the command concerning the rights of the first-born, especially in the case where one wife is loved, the other unloved, and the first-born son comes through the unloved wife. God is a God of justice, and those who are unloved are shown love and given justice by God.

The example of Leah and Rachel’s bitter rivalry for favor in the eyes of Jacob is also believed to be an inspiration for why God commanded, in:

Leviticus 18:18
‘Do not take your wife’s sister as a rival wife and have sexual relations with her while your wife is living.

What God is showing us here is that while the patriarchs are to be admired for trusting the LORD, they were not without sin; they were, like us, merely people, as vulnerable to falling short of God’s standard as any of us.

While some of the commands may remind us of the poor choices of some of the patriarchs, other commands are clarifications of how justice is to be carried out in Israel. Israel is meant by God to be a reflection of the World to Come.

For example, we read of commands where farmers are told not to pick through their harvest fields and vineyards a second time, but to leave what remains for the poor, the widow and the orphan, as well as commands not to charge interest on money loaned to a fellow Israelite.

Why do these commands exist? To show us that in God’s kingdom, no one will go without, no one will go hungry, everyone will be provided for, and no one will be cheated or made to fall into a trap of debt from which there is no escape. As a picture of God’s kingdom, these commands demonstrate in concrete ways what God means by His justice.

Purging evil from the land comes up especially in the commands regarding sexual crimes such as adultery and rape; the penalties are stiff and severe because the LORD wants those who enter into marriage to remain there and to treat their spouses with respect and justice and faithfulness.

Yet there is at least one command that deserves special attention in this week’s reading, because the biggest purpose of the command seems to be a shadow of the future. You’ll see what I mean as I read this passage from:

Deuteronomy 21:22-23
If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not desecrate the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.

On its own, this commandment does not seem to fit, even in a portion as varied in topic as this week’s reading. Whenever the Israelites are commanded by God to put someone to death, it was most commonly by stoning; they were not in the habit of putting people to death by hanging them on a tree.

This, of course, is where God shows His sovereignty, uniformity and consistency over all of Scripture. Now, dates for the Exodus and the entry of Israel into Jerusalem forty years later vary widely, anywhere from 1200 to 1600 years before the time of Yeshua.

However long it may have been, the point is that this command was offered up by the LORD well before His promised Messiah arrived on the scene. And yet, it is because of this command, in part, that Yeshua was able to fulfill his mission as Israel’s Messiah.

You see, to complete His Messianic mission, Yeshua needed to be buried three days and three nights in the earth before rising again, in order to fulfill the sign of Jonah. Yet taking criminals off an execution tree was not the way of the Roman rulers of Yeshua’s time; they preferred to leave such criminals hang there for long periods, the bodies rotting and decaying, to intimidate anyone considering defying Roman rule.

Exceptions, however, were made during Jewish high feast days. Rome was more lenient toward Jewish customs than the Greeks before them had been, and one of the concessions made prior to important feast days like Passover was that they would allow the Israelites’ laws to be observed in deference to the Roman laws on purity matters, mostly because it kept the peace in an occupied territory.

Such was the case when Yeshua was placed on the execution stake; if Passover had not been imminent, it is likely his body would have been left up for days, in accordance with Roman rule. Yet because of Passover, the Jewish law was given deference and the body of Yeshua was allowed to be buried before sundown.

What Jewish law created this provision for Yeshua? This one, given 1200 to 1600 years before Yeshua even arrived, and long before the Roman Empire, which regularly put criminals to death on a tree, even existed.

God knew what was coming, and so we have this command. “If a man guilty of a capital offense is put to death and his body is hung on a tree, you must not leave his body on the tree overnight. Be sure to bury him that same day.”

We can now clearly see that even in this seemingly random collection of rulings for entering the Promised Land, we can find a shadow of God’s plan Yeshua the Messiah, who was in God’s mind and plan from the time of the giving of the Torah, and even from the very beginning of time. And it is ultimately Yeshua who can fully and finally purge the evil from among us.

Shabbat Shalom.

Tags: Ki Tetse
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The road ahead

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Well, it looks like I have some writing to do!

I have two Torah commentaries coming up; one this weekend on Ki Tetse, and one two weeks after that on the double-portion of Nitsavim and VaYelech. That will be nice.

However, I’ve been invited by Rabbi Stan to do one of the two fill-in sermons at Sar Shalom while he is on his Israel trip. That’s quite an honor, and tells me I must have done OK filling in for him back in July. That will come up in mid-October, so there’s plenty of time on that one.

Of course, I have a children’s curriculum I need to finish writing, and then I have six or seven eBooks I’m working on, based on past Torah commentaries and sermons I’ve written, but deeply expanded from what one can find for free here on my blog.

This is in addition to the fact that I’m working on a novel as well. So yeah; I have a LOT of writing to do.

Tags: commentaries, Ki Tetse, Nitsavim, sermon, VaYelech
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My 2010 R’eh Commentary

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

Well, here it is, my 2010 commentary on the parashah known as R’eh. It seemed to go over well. So enjoy the commentary below. Or listen to it!

Shabbat Shalom.

Our parashah for today is R’eh, a Hebrew word that means, “See.” This portion covers Deuteronomy chapter eleven, verse twenty-six through chapter sixteen, verse seventeen. You know, this week’s reading contains what I think is one of the most important passages in the Torah, especially as it applies to believers today. Before I just read it for you, however, allow me to set the scene.

As we have learned the last few weeks, the Book of Deuteronomy is sort of a history lesson, a review of the entire Torah. It is basically an address by Moses to the children of Israel as two eras in their journey are about to come to an end. The first era that’s ending is their time of wandering in the desert, being supernaturally kept there by God. The wicked generation that rebelled against the LORD and against Moses have all died off, just as the LORD promised they would. Those left are a new generation with little to no memory of life in Egypt. Nearly all they’ve known their whole life is being supernaturally kept by God in the wilderness, where all their needs were met by God directly.

The other era that’s coming to an end is Moses’ time as the sole mediator between the LORD and the Israelites. Remember, their fathers had rejected hearing the voice of the LORD directly at Mount Sinai, asking that God use Moses as their mediator.

But Moses was just a man, and now, at nearly 120 years of age, his time with the people of Israel is drawing to a close. Moses has been told by God he cannot enter the Promised Land with his people because of what he did when he struck the rock, rather than speaking to it as God instructed to bring forth water for the people.

And so now, Moses is standing before the people of Israel and addressing them for a final time; that’s what this book of Deuteronomy is all about. He is teaching this generation all that has come before them and brought them to this momentous day, as they are about to inherit a land first promised to them hundreds of years earlier, by God to their father Abraham.

Now, the land they are about to enter, the land of Israel, may be promised to them, but it is not vacant. There are others living in this land, a people God has decided to cast out of the land because they have done detestable things while living in it, as well as because it is promised to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Part of entering and taking over an occupied land, of course, is that even after the military battles are won and they begin to take possession of it, they have a further problem: the land will still be filled with the possessions of the previous inhabitants, and that includes shrines, temples and memorials to the false gods worshiped by the people there that God is casting out of the land.

As our parashah opens, God, through Moses, is offering instructions on how they must tear down all these shrines, temples and memorials and start from scratch, and God shares His reason for this as we pick up in:

Deuteronomy 12:4-5
You must not worship the LORD your God in their way. But you are to seek the place the LORD your God will choose from among all your tribes to put his Name there for his dwelling. To that place you must go;

Let me read verse four again: “You must not worship the LORD your God in their way.”

What did this mean to the early Israelites? It meant exactly what God was instructing them to do in the verses before this statement; they must tear down all the temples, monuments and memorials made to other gods, to completely destroy them and start from scratch. In other words, they were not to come into the land and say, “Oh, here’s a nice little monument to Ba’al. It’s here already. Let’s rededicate it to the LORD, rather than building a new one.”

God makes it clear here; that’s not what he wants the children of Israel to do. “You must not worship the LORD your God in their way.”

If there’s any room left for possible doubt as to the LORD’s meaning, he restates it again in:

Deuteronomy 12:13-14
Be careful not to sacrifice your burnt offerings anywhere you please. Offer them only at the place the LORD will choose in one of your tribes, and there observe everything I command you.

What this verse teaches us is that not only were the children of Israel being instructed not to recycle temples and monuments constructed for other gods, but that God was going to choose a specific place where He wanted to be worshiped in unity by all the people, and they were not to perform their worship just anywhere they pleased. And there are promises and blessings God goes on to make, if they follow his instructions and obey him in this.

And to really underline His point, God repeats this wish a third time, this time with more detail, as we read in:

Deuteronomy 12:29-31
The LORD your God will cut off before you the nations you are about to invade and dispossess. But when you have driven them out and settled in their land, and after they have been destroyed before you, be careful not to be ensnared by inquiring about their gods, saying, “How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same.” You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates.

So is God being vague and speaking in riddles here? Clearly not. He is expressing a very clear wish: He does not want the people who fear and love Him to worship Him in ways that other gods are worshiped, at places and facilities and times that other gods are worshiped. He repeats over and over His desire: that those who love Him obey all His instructions and observe everything He has taught them. That includes where, when and how He is to be worshiped. This includes all the instructions that have come before, which encompasses the Sabbath He created, the monthly New Moon festivals, and all his yearly feasts and festival days.

God asks us to do just a few simple things. When you consider all He has done for these Israelites; bringing them out of bondage in Egypt, giving them the commands and the Torah, supernaturally keeping them in the desert for forty years and delivering them to a land promised to them through Abraham, Isaac and Jacob… or even by extension all God does for us today, through the Messiah Yeshua… considering all of this… is God really being unreasonable and demanding? Is God really asking too much of us, placing a burden on us we cannot bear? Or are his expectations reasonable? Could it be that simply asking us not to worship Him in the way other people worship their gods is really not that overwhelming a request?

Is it too much to ask the Israelites not to use temples to Ba’al as places of worship to the LORD, the one true God? Is it too much to ask that we worship God on the occasions he asks us to, rather than doing “as we do here today, everyone as he sees fit,” as it says in Deuteronomy 12:8?

Perhaps we can begin to understand why God was so opposed to being worshiped in the same places, times and ways as other gods if we look briefly at the practices of one of the chief false gods of those who inhabited Israel whom the LORD was evicting through the children of Israel.

I want to read you a portion from an article I found about Ba’al worship on the:

Jewish Encyclopedia.com
The noxious elements in such Ba’al Worship were not simply the degradation of the LORD and the enthronement in His place of a baseless superstition. The chief evil arose from the fact that the Ba’als were more than mere religious fantasies. They were made the symbols of the reproductive powers of nature, and thus their worship ministered to sexual indulgences, which it at the same time legalized and encouraged. Further, there was placed side by side with the Ba’al a corresponding female symbol, the Ashtoreth and the relation between the two deities was set forth as the example and the motive of unbridled sensuality. The evil became all the worse when in the popular view the LORD Himself was regarded as one of the Ba’als and the chief of them (Hosea 2:16)

So what do we learn here? They memorials, temples and other places of worship are full of what? Statues and carvings depicting male and female genitalia! Walking into the land of Israel when it was under the control of these Ba’al worshipers what probably not vastly different from walking into the average adult bookstore! Can a person dedicated to God lead a life of holiness and obedience to God’s instructions when surrounded by such things? It would be like trying to hold an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in a bar! And just as successful, I’d imagine.

You see, God is not arbitrary. He always has reasons for everything He does, everything He asks of us. We may not always understand it, or know what those reasons are, but he does have reasons!

Yet there are some who demand to know what God’s reasons are for each and every command; it’s like they feel God owes them an explanation for everything. And it’s not an uncommon sentiment; the book of Job revolved around such questions.

In the end, though, does God really owe us reason upon reason upon reason for each of his commands, until we finally run out of questions and agree to obey?

For example, this week’s Torah portion also covers God’s commands for which animals are clean to eat, and which are forbidden as food. For example, as we read in:

Deuteronomy 14:3-6
Do not eat any detestable thing. These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roe deer, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope and the mountain sheep. You may eat any animal that has a split hoof divided in two and that chews the cud.

And what do we often hear? We are trained and taught that this simple instruction of God is part of what Yeshua did away with, something that no longer applies. Or we hear the other side of the coin and come up with all sorts of rationalizations in favor of observing it. We talks about benefits like a longer life, better health and fresher breath! (OK, maybe not fresher breath.) Or we discuss about the lack of refrigeration back in Moses’ day and how the meat of unclean animals spoiled more quickly than the meat of clean animals, which is pure science fiction. You can leave a smorgasbord of clean and unclean meats out in the hot desert sun, and they all start to stink pretty quickly.

I mean, if you can imagine any possible made-up reason why God might command people not to eat unclean animals, someone out there has claimed to figure it out: this is the secret wisdom behind God’s command!

I hope I’m not being too presumptuous if I suggest a simpler reason. The reason we shouldn’t eat unclean meat, the reason we shouldn’t worship God in the same way other people worship false gods, the reason we should worship God on the occasions and in the places He has asked rather than times of our own choosing, all boils down to one simple reason:

The Creator of the Universe, who as done so much for us, has asked us to do these few, simple things. He’s asked us to follow His instructions and obey His commands; not anyone else’s. That’s it. That’s all. It’s that simple.

Shabbat Shalom.

Tags: R'eh
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My R’eh commentary is ready for the weekend!

Friday, August 6th, 2010

I completed my commentary for R’eh (a Hebrew word that means “See” and is the name of this week’s Torah portion) in only a few hours last night; Stan even got his feedback to me shortly after I emailed it to him this morning and I immediately incorporated his suggestions.

It’s becoming really comfortable to write Torah commentaries these days; that’s because I’ve been through all the parashahs several times now as a reader, and at least once each as a commentator, so I’m more at ease with finding my way around each parashah, isolating something of interest, and teaching it as best I’m able.

We’ll see how it goes over this Shabbat; look for it to get added to this space on Sunday or thereabouts.

Tags: R'eh, Torah commentary
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Getting serious about R’eh

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

It’s time to start getting serious about R’eh, which I’ll be commenting on this coming Shabbat. I’ve read through it again and need to start praying through it. I have a R’eh commentary I did last year, but I’d rather not repeat myself; it’s a rich parashah with a lot more to it than one commentary can cover.

Fortunately, my OnlineBible.net software fills the bill most of the time for sourcing material, and there’s always BibleGateway.com. There are some things that are still handy to scan in, but fortunately most print stuff is digital these days. Makes research a lot easier.

Tags: R'eh
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Two commentaries coming up

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

August is going to be a busy month for me; I’ll be doing fill-in Torah commentaries twice!

The parashahs in question are R’eh and Ki Tetse, so that ought to be fun. I’m always honored to fill in for other Torah commentators when they can’t be around. I’ve only tackled these two Deuteronomy portions once before, so there’s plenty of material to mine, definitely some diamonds in the rough.

Plus, since I am now working on a collection of my commentaries into expanded essay for for eBook release, the more time I spend pondering any parashah, the better.

Tags: Ki Tetse, R'eh
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Sermon: Repentance

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

I wasn’t sure how this message would be received when I wrote it, but the response was very encouraging; at least a half-dozen people came forward for prayer during the worship set that followed. Nice to see God move in people’s lives. Enjoy the sermon below. Or listen to it!

Shabbat Shalom.

Today, I’d like to talk about something that is hard to talk about. It’s hard because, whenever to teach about something, you had better be sure you’re living up to what you teach. And this is a hard one to live up to for any of us: repentance. The word repentance comes to us from the Hebrew word:

STRONG’S H8666 תְּשׁוּבַת TESHUBAH
1. Answer, be expired, return.
2. From shuwb; a recurrence (of time or place); a reply (as returned) — answer, be expired, return.

So repentance is an answer to something, and a return to something. It is also an expiration of something. What is repentance a return to? What is repentance an answer to? And what is repentance the expiration of? We’ll get to the answers before we’re done today. Yet before we get there, I believe it’s valuable to take a look at what repentance has come to mean to believers today.

The reason I want to explore our modern context for repentance first, rather than explore this concept’s original context, is because repentance today is primarily considered a “church word.” What is a “church word?” Well, it’s a word that’s largely used in church and not often used outside of it. Therefore, I think it’s useful to look at how this word is understood today, so we can examine if our understanding of repentance matches up with the Biblical understanding of it.

Lately, I’ve come across some rather … unique views on repentance held by various believers. These views concern me.

I recently had a conversation with a person who attends a mainstream Christian church and this is what she told me: She said, “You know, my understanding is that Jesus lives inside us and He does all our repenting for us. He does it better than we ever could, so we don’t have to worry about it.”

Here’s another take someone recently shared with me: He said, “Repentance is valuable when it comes to accepting Yeshua (Jesus) as LORD. But once you’re saved, you don’t need to keep repenting because then it becomes YOUR work, not God’s, and you make repentance something that replaces God’s grace. Jesus forgave us once, for everything, so we only have to repent once when we first come to him.”

Do either of these mindsets sound familiar? Unfortunately, they’re not as uncommon as one might hope. Each of these statements, it seems to me, sprout from the same core mentality. This mentality grows from an extreme emphasis on the concept of grace; one that lacks a balanced view of God. And of course, here at Sar Shalom, we know exactly where to look when we want a balanced view of God. We go to where He defined himself for Moses in:

EXODUS 34:6-7
And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

So, as we read here, God is not all grace, nor is He all judgment and holiness. He is both, at the same time. God, by his very nature, is both completely forgiving and completely holy. And so this should guide us as we look at different views of God; any teaching that does not maintain this definition God gave of Himself is very likely a misleading teaching.

With these outlooks on repentance I’ve heard from various believers lately, the most basic question that comes to my mind is: where is the Scriptural basis for these ideas?

If indeed Yeshua living inside us does all our repenting for us, there ought to be at least a couple verses that describe Him as doing this, shouldn’t there? There ought to be some indication in the teachings of Yeshua, or the letters of the apostles, that we no longer need to repent because Yeshua will do it for us once he lives in us.

Yet there is no such verse to be found. Paul makes reference to Messiah living in us, but he never suggests that Yeshua does our repenting for us so we don’t have to. Can you see how this false teaching is built? It begins with a grain of truth: as believers, Yeshua now lives in us. But then someone comes along and adds human logic, human-invented ideas, to that truth, until it veers off to the right or to the left of exactly what Scripture tells us.

It’s the same with the second mindset on repentance that I described. Yes, it’s true; Yeshua died once for all our sins! But does that, by extension, mean we don’t have to repent from sins we commit after coming to salvation? Does it mean we’re forgiven even before we sin? Does it, therefore, mean that we now have a license to sin because, as Paul seems to indicate when you take him out of context, “wherever sin abounded, grace abounded much more?”

Paul had a response to this very mindset. We find it in:

ROMANS 6:1-2
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?

Yet the objection could be made: Craig, how can you be sure? How can you know that our understanding is more accurate than someone else’s? Well, let’s be like the Bereans today. Let’s take a closer look at what the whole of the Bible teaches us about repentance and its importance and role in the life of a believer. Let’s see for ourselves what Scripture supports and what it does not, and then let’s believe that.

Now that we know some of the mistaken impressions that are circulating among some believers today about the nature of repentance, let’s begin to see what the Bible itself teaches us about it, and cast aside anything that doesn’t fit with that Biblical understanding. One of the earliest occurrences of the concept of repentance comes to us from:

I KINGS 8:46-50
“When they sin against you—for there is no one who does not sin—and you become angry with them and give them over to the enemy, who takes them captive to his own land, far away or near; and if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors and say, ‘We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly’; and if they turn back to you with all their heart and soul in the land of their enemies who took them captive, and pray to you toward the land you gave their fathers, toward the city you have chosen and the temple I have built for your Name; then from heaven, your dwelling place, hear their prayer and their plea, and uphold their cause. And forgive your people, who have sinned against you; forgive all the offenses they have committed against you,

Now, how does that measure up to how we see repentance practiced by believers today? Not very well, right? Too often, our impression of repentance is limited to simply telling God, “Ooops. We messed up. Sorry about that. Thanks for forgiving me through Yeshua!”

But that’s not what we see here, is it? No, this sort of repentance is no simple, “Ooops.” It involves what? First of all, a change of heart. Also, pleading with God from a position of brokenness for His mercy and forgiveness. And importantly, as I think will become clearer by the time we’re done, it involves agreeing with God in detail that He is right, and we are wrong.

Now, this is no attempt to simplify the steps given in I Kings into some formula that we can satisfy in a quick, ninety-second prayer and then move on in our lives like nothing ever happened. Remember, we are called to be in relationship with God, and when we sin, that relationship is broken.

Think about it. How many of us accept half-hearted apologies that only go skin deep, that make it obvious that the same offense is likely to occur again … perhaps the same day… even the same hour? Yes, we’re called to forgive until we lose count, but even if we do accept a shallow apology, do we trust that person has undergone a change of heart? Not likely. If we can know this, limited as we are with our imperfect, human understanding, then how much more must the Creator of the universe not be fooled by shallow apologies?

So repentance is more than a simple, “I’m sorry,” right? But we have more to learn about it. I particularly like this insight found in the book of Job, where it is written in:

JOB 34:31-33
“Suppose a man says to God, ‘I am guilty but will offend no more. Teach me what I cannot see; if I have done wrong, I will not do so again.’ Should God then reward you on your terms, when you refuse to repent?

The reason I like this passage is that this is how many of us would prefer to relate to God. We want the blessings the LORD has to offer, but we want it on OUR terms, not His. We don’t want to have to repent, or even to be told we need to repent. We want simple, uplifting, inspirational messages that can be summed up in bumper-sticker phrases like, “I’m OK – You’re OK,” or “Don’t worry, be happy!”

Does God reward us on our own terms? Does God reward us when we refuse to repent?

To answer this, we have to know exactly how important the concept of repentance was to Yeshua Himself, don’t we? We get a clue to how Yeshua valued repentance in:

MATTHEW 4:17
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

Now this passage comes from early in Yeshua’s public ministry. He began to preach “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” we are told. And is this a one-time message? Not at all, because the passage tells us he did this, “from that time on.” This indicates repentance is a theme that became a hallmark of Yeshua’s ministry, a message he’d return to over and over again. We also learn this from:

MARK 6:12-13
They [the disciples] went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

So repentance wasn’t just a theme of Yeshua’s ministry, but it was the central theme he taught those who followed him to teach as well.

So, was Yeshua unique in his emphasis on repentance? Not really. Jewish tradition tells us that Maimonides the Rambam taught that, “All the prophets preach repentance.” This saying came to be known as Maimonides’ dictum.

Furthermore, Yochanan the Immerser – better known as John the Baptist – also preached repentance as a central theme, and he taught it fearlessly, as we read in:

MATTHEW 3:7-9
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.

Now, this passage is rich with significance. We see here that, unlike our current Western mentality, repentance is not merely agreeing with God for a moment in prayer that He is right and we are wrong. It goes deeper than that, because he tells these Pharisees, “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” So repentance can’t be just a one-time action; it is something that will continue to manifest itself throughout your life, if you continue to walk in it. This passage also indicates to us that our identity – be it as a child of Abraham, or by extension, as a follower of Yeshua – does not make us immune to the need for repentance.

Now, up to this point, what I’ve shared is something most believers would agree with. Most people get this. But the objection that begins to be raised at this point is, “Craig, what you’re saying is fine. But as far as I can see, repentance only applies to sinners, not those of us who are believers, who are already in Messiah.”

John’s words start to break down that concept. Let’s see what else we can find. Here’s what we read in:

ROMANS 2:3-5
So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance? But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.

Is Paul’s letter to the Romans addressed to believers, here, or those who are still lost, still outside of life in Messiah? Traditionally, it is believed that Paul was writing Romans to the first-century Messianic community he’d help establish in Rome, and addressing issues that had popped up in his absence. But if that’s not clear enough, let’s take a look at perhaps the clearest example of repentance being a topic addressed to believers. The author of Hebrews writes this in:

HEBREWS 6:4-6
It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

After reading this passage, can there be any doubt that repentance is a topic that does apply to all of us as believers and not merely those who are still lost in their sin? You see, when someone falls away from Yeshua, or slips back into sin, what’s the first thing most believers say?

“Oh, well, they must never have been saved! They didn’t really know Yeshua anyway, because no one who REALLY knows him could act like that.”

Let me be clear that this idea that believers can never fall away is simply not supported in Scripture. Can you name anyone of whom it can be said that they have been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, shared in the Ruach haKodesh, tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age – and yet still be considered an unbeliever who “was never really saved anyway?”

If so, then was Moses “never really saved” when he struck the rock, rather than speaking to it as commanded? Moses is called God’s friend … was he never really saved? Let me answer that one: No! He was in a relationship with the creator of the universe, and Moses – the friend of God – was still susceptible to sin! So what makes the difference for Moses?

Repentance.

Moses was continually willing to acknowledge when he was wrong and God was right. He never fought with God over it for any length of time. He didn’t let pride get in the way of admitting his sins. And if any man has ever had a reason to let pride get in the way of his humility before the LORD, it was Moses!

I mean, Moses was the person God used to lead the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt! He had a following of over a million people who followed him into a desert for forty years – not even the most popular mega-church leaders today have that kind of following. And yet Moses was willing to repent when he fell into error.

How can any of us, who have accomplished so much less, be any less willing to humble ourselves, set aside our foolish pride, and begin to admit at the core of our being that God is right and we are wrong? It’s essential. It’s so essential that if we’re not willing to do so, we could even miss out on Messiah. We read this in:

ISAIAH 59:20
“The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins,” declares the LORD.

You see, what is true is that God’s spirit, his Ruach, his spirit of truth, is in us; but He is the spirit of truth, so he cannot and will not continue to abide in us if we continue to abide in rebellion and deception, if we continue to embrace pride over truth. He comes for those who repent, not those who justify themselves!

There’s a Jewish tradition I really appreciate that paints a solid picture of this struggle we can go through when it comes to humbling ourselves to the point of real repentance. It comes to us in:

TA’AN 16A
“He that confesses his sin and still clings to it is likened to a man that holds in his hand a defiling object; though he bathes in all the waters of the world he is not cleansed; but the moment he casts the defiling object from him a single bath will cleanse him, as it is said (Prov. 28:13): He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”

You see, to truly be walking in repentance, we can’t hold on to the sins making us unclean. We can’t claim holiness, but continue to walk in rebellion. We have to cast the source of our sinful behaviors from us, in order to truly experience the forgiveness, mercy and grace of God. We have to let go.

You see, God doesn’t play games when it comes to repentance. He’s not fooled by them. This is a concept even the rabbis understood, as we find in another Jewish tradition from:

MISHNAH, YOMA 85B:
If one says: I shall sin and repent, sin and repent, no opportunity will be given to him to repent. [If one says]: I shall sin and the Day of Atonement will procure atonement for me, the Day of Atonement procures for him no atonement.

You know, a lack of repentance can be the cause behind a lot of things that hold us back from truly experiencing and knowing God face-to-face, from truly knowing his joy and seeing that joy manifest itself in our lives.

How many believers do you know, who claim to know and love God, but as you see them interact more and more, it becomes apparent that they are people who are bitter, angry, scared, easily offended, short-tempered, untrusting … the list goes on. Does that sound like the gifts of the Ruach haKodesh to you? Of course not.

So, what’s holding these people back? Well, it can vary from believer to believer. But there are some very common themes.

Sometimes, it can be a wounded spirit from what we perceive to be unanswered prayer.

For example, how many of us have gone through this: There’s something really, sincerely important to us, so we pray God will respond in a certain way. But what we’re praying for isn’t what comes about. Maybe what we prayed about was asking God for something outside of his nature, like bringing a person to salvation who has no interest in God, or making someone love us who doesn’t, or making someone who is leaving us stay, or allowing someone to survive and be healed, but that doesn’t happen.

We tend to treat God like a genie in a bottle sometimes, thinking that anything we pray for, He’ll grant us. But that’s not how Yeshua modeled prayer for us, is it? No, He showed us to pray for His perfect will over our own. But when God’s will doesn’t match ours, do we accept that He knows more than us, or do we begin to blame him? Down that path lies bitterness, anger, rebellion, sin and death.

Here’s another thing that can get in the way, one I know well from my own walk with God: the victim mentality. How often do we refuse to repent of our own actions because we feel we have been wronged and our actions are only in response to that?

How often do we justify what we know deep down to be sin because, “Hey, this other person did it to me first,” or “I’m only doing to them what they did to me.” This attitude builds walls between God and us, because it is literally arguing with God about whether we’ve sinned or not! Does God reward us on our terms when refuse to repent? I wouldn’t count on it.

Sometimes, the barrier can even be justifying current actions because of past actions. This week, as I was preparing this message, I got a call from someone looking for advice. He told me, “I’m Messianic and I want to get a tattoo with the name of God – Y H W H. That’s not going to endanger my salvation, is it?”

I told him, “No, it’s not a salvation issue, but it is an obedience issue.”

He responded, “Leviticus, right? OK, so here’s my other option. I could get a tattoo with my son’s name. Would that be OK?”
I said, “I think maybe you misunderstood me. It’s not the name of God or the name of your son that’s an issue. The Torah forbids getting a tattoo.”

He said, “What if I got the name of God put on me in Hebrew? Yod-hey-vav-hey?”

By this point, the conversation reminded me of Balaam’s experience with Balak… “Well, OK, maybe we’ll get a different response if we go over here and try it from this angle.”

So I told him, “Look, Leviticus 19:28 says, ‘Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.’ You can either obey, or disobey. The choice is yours.”

So finally he told me, “Well, it’s too late for that. I already have a ton of tattoos. And in fact, I’ve used them to start conversations and seen people come to the LORD through them.”

I told him it was never too late to start obeying by not adding more tattoos to the ones he already had, but the conversation was soon over after that.

None of us are all that different when it comes right down to it, are we? We know what God commands, what He asks us to obey … and rather than bring our obedience in line to His word, we would rather justify our rebellion, claiming that what we do now doesn’t matter because we’ve made the same bad choices in the past, or we’ve used our mistakes to share the Gospel with people so they’re not really mistakes and it’s OK to continue making the same mistakes. It’s all deception.

No matter what our roadblocks are, though, we – even and maybe especially we believers – are called to repent. When I began this message we looked at the definition for the Hebrew word repentance comes from – teshubah – and learned that, Biblically, it indicates an answer to something, a return to something, and an expiration of something. In light of our study, I think we can now fill in the blanks here.

Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is the expiration of what? Of our fighting with God over whether something is sin or not; it is the expiration of our rebellion against God’s righteous rulings.

Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is our answer to what? To the conviction that comes from the Holy Spirit – the Ruach haKodesh – the Spirit of Truth letting us know we’ve fallen short of God’s standard.

Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is a return to what? To being in unity with God, placing Him back to His rightful position as the ruler of our lives.

Only when we cast aside that which defiles us can we be made clean once again in God’s sight. If we’re capable and culpable of sin, repentance is required. Only then can it be said of us that we have not treated the grace Yeshua won for us through His death and resurrection like a cheap, dime-store ring made of cubic zirconia and fool’s gold, but have treated it like a ring of great value, made from the finest, purest gold, and the rarest, best-cut diamonds.

Repentance is our reasonable response to the spirit of God when we stray from the truth. Only a fool would refuse that reasonable response. I’ll close with this:

HEBREWS 6:9-12
Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case—things that accompany salvation. God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

That is our prayer for everyone here today, for everyone who hears or reads this message.

Shabbat Shalom.

Tags: repentance
Posted in sermons and commentaries | 5 Comments »

Starting work on repentance sermon

Monday, June 28th, 2010

I’m starting my work on my big upcoming sermon on repentance.

Filling the time up has never been a problem for me; keeping the scope focused enough to stay within the time limit is more frequently a challenge, as I’m a bit wordy… something I’m sure anyone who has read my teachings has noticed.

Another challenge for me is procrastination; as much as I love research and teaching and writing, when the time comes to start writing, just about everything seems more appealing than sitting down and typing it out.

Either way, though, I almost always get the message written and handed in on time. Hopefully this time will be no exception. My desktop PC is finally back up and running; OnlineBible.net software is installed and loaded with all the tools I need.

All I really need to do now is pray and write and pray and write until it’s done.

Tags: procrastination, repentance, sermon
Posted in sermons and commentaries | 1 Comment »

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My R’eh commentary is ready for the weekend!

Getting serious about R’eh

Two commentaries coming up

Sermon: Repentance

Starting work on repentance sermon

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