Light In Torah

We have spent six weeks chasing greater depths to the cross. Thanks for staying with me. We still have more to uncover.  Tradition teaches about the death penalty—that death absorbs God's wrath, that death satisfies punishment, and that the resurrection is like a stamped receipt that says, "OK, the transaction worked." That is what I am challenging. Oh no, I am not in any way minimizing the resurrection or the cross. I am not saying that Christianity ignores the resurrection. It does not. Easter is the highest day on the Christian calendar. The resurrection is central to the Christian faith: worship, faith, hope, and proclamation. But consider how much Christian devotion has been shaped by the suffering itself—the hymns, the altar, the passion plays, God forbid,  The Passion of the Christ . I understand that the suffering is very real, the brutality is real, and the love is out of this world. But when death and suffering occupy the largest part of our devotion, we may mis...

With summer approaching, my mind drifted back to a men's trip I took to Belize—the land with the highest per capita population of the "Lost Sheep of the House of Israel" anywhere in the world (so they say :-). During the rainy season, it is hot, humid, lush, green, with daily showers and fruit produced in abundance. During the dry season, it is hot, arid, the ground is full of cracks, and the landscape is brown and lifeless with no fruit. The wilderness ( midbar ) where God found us needing His presence and where we were guarded as the apple of His eye is likened to the two seasons of Belize (Deut. 32:10): "He found him in a desert land, and in the waste howling wilderness; he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his eye." (Deut. 32:10) This journey is not all that the world imagines it to be. Living a life abiding in Him (John 15:1–7) is not about creature comforts, which I have enjoyed thoroughly here in Belize. In reality, it is a pai...

You are in familiar territory where everyone knows you, but no one notices you. You are standing in line, and a person cuts in front of you, stating that the person ahead of you was saving their spot. You get back to your vehicle only to find that someone has boxed you in, making you fifteen minutes late for your next appointment. You are now stuck in traffic, and a guy cuts you off, causing you to miss your exit, making you even later in your day. Life can be so annoying! And sometimes, without giving it a second thought, you just have to let them know what you think of them. The basis of all anger is conceit. What makes me think that things are supposed to be the way I want them to be? Why do I always have to be emotionally, physically, aesthetically, and in every other way, as I think it should be? We live in a society that programs us to believe that our own success is the yardstick of real success. But nothing could be further from the truth, as the book of  Bamidbar  (Nu...

  In yesterday's study, we found John the Baptist giving people the "Nestea plunge" of repentance in the Jordan River. He tells us that there is One coming after me who will do more than call for repentance. He will bring the deeper cleansing. And then you read the Gospels, right? John is saying this, and here comes Yeshua walking. He appears (John 1:29). What does that cleansing power look like in real life? How did the Gospel begin to show that He is not just another teacher or prophet or rabbi, but the One John was preparing to receive? How did the Gospel begin to show us what Yeshua will do? One of the earliest answers comes in Luke with the cleansing of the man with biblical leprosy (Luke 5:12–14). Just another one of those random miracles—just an example of Jesus being nice, coming along and showing compassion against that old, archaic temple system (I hope you are catching my sarcasm :-). Interestingly, this cleansing connects directly to the sacrificial system, bu...

Jeremiah 17 makes a very interesting statement: "O LORD, the hope  (mikveh)  of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living waters." (Jer. 17:13) "For this cause therefore have I called for you, to see you, and to speak with you: because that for the hope  (mikveh)  of Israel I am bound with this chain." (Acts 28:20) I want you to notice something about that phrase, "the hope of Israel." Do you know what the word for "hope" is?  Mikveh . It is our word for water baptism—the purification bath, the  mikveh . How fortunate are we as Israel? Before whom are we purified, and who purifies us? It is your Father in heaven, as stated: "I will sprinkle pure water upon you and you shall be purified." And then He says, "The hope of Israel is God; just as the ritual bath purifies the impure, so too the Holy One purifies Is...

In our last study, I ended by introducing three clear movements without stating them (mini cliffhanger :-). What was the prophetic hope? What are they actually saying? Because it looks like they are saying something else. First, the prophets know that God can and does forgive sin apart from blood. That, my friends, is a very big statement, and some people get nervous as well-learned scriptures begin to pop into their minds. In our previous study, we already quoted David's deepest heart plea. Micah 7 asks, "Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression?" Why? Because God delights in mercy. Psalm 103: "He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor repaid us according to our iniquities. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us." God's mercy. Isaiah 43: God says, "I am the one who blotted out your transgressions for my own sake." Jeremiah speaks of a time when iniquity will b...

  Before we get into our study, it is that time of the year again when I go through my email list and my "prayer text list" to simplify my life. If you would like to stay on the daily prayer-text list, please RSVP, and I will keep praying for you and your needs. If you stop receiving studies, it is because I did not hear from you. Happy 37th day of counting the Omer. We are getting closer to Pentecost. Over the past several weeks, I have been trying to influence you toward a larger perspective on the blood while eliminating other ideas that do not hold water in Scripture. Speaking of water, let us spend this week talking about it. I hope by now I have clearly established what the sacrificial system was—and was not. We spent a lot of time on this. The system was designed to do something very specific; it was never designed to do everything. Here is a brief recap: Last week, we said that the purification offerings, the blood rites, and the annual deep cleaning associated with Y...

Happy 36th day of counting the Omer! It is the sixth week and the first day. Only fourteen more to go until we celebrate Pentecost. Where will you be? What makes the Shavuot/Pentecost weekend so special? Bonding with people who are pursuing the same outcome. Just as super glue holds things together, bonding is the ultimate emotional connection. Every soul-quality we have been working on over the past five weeks has been based on our individual feelings, but bonding is a reciprocating activity—the fusing of two! It is more than a feeling; it is an attachment of devotion—much more than a token commitment. It develops an everlasting union that lives on forever through the perpetual fruit it bears. Bonding is the foundation of life. It is the emotional spine of the human psyche. Every person needs bonding to flourish and grow: the bonding between mother and child, between husband and wife, between brothers and sisters, between close friends. It is the strong force that allows people to hav...

Shabbat Shalom and happy 35th day of counting the Omer! Time is moving forward quickly, and Shavuot will be here before you know it. There is a strange omission in this week's Torah portion,  Behar  and  Bechukotai , when an individual sells himself because he has hit hard times financially. The text identifies many individuals who are able to bail him out of his challenging situation. Ironically, the "father" of the individual is left out of the mentioned "redeemers" (Lev. 25:47–49). How strange is that? To me, that is where I would go first :-) At first blush, that omission may not make a whole lot of difference to our "hooked on phonics" abilities, but for the Sherlock Holmes investigative reader, that omission will jump off the page. Why? Bottom line: this person would never be in this position if his father had had a good bonding ( yesod ) relationship with his son through the formative years. Yeppers. I know that sounds strange, but the foundatio...

  Do you remember my story of picking up dog doo in the public park? When an Israelite—which is who you are if you have been grafted into the olive tree (Rom. 11)—chooses to disregard the responsibility (that is, to not clean up after their dog in our analogy) or fails to bring the appropriate offering, they must clean up the contamination they introduced, and that is something different. What began as a non-ritual impurity now becomes a willful violation of covenant obligation. In Hebrew, this deliberate rebellion is   pesha ; it means revolt and defiance. It is a breach of trust with God. It is a severe category of sin in the Bible. It describes someone who knows what God requires and instead deliberately chooses to refuse—willful rebellion. These rebellions, along with other grave moral impurities (idolatry, sexual sin, bloodshed), are the things that penetrate all the way into the most sacred space—the Holy of Holies—and take up residence there. There is another Hebrew wor...

Last week we finished perusing the Torah portion   Emor , which included the instructions regarding God's prophetic calendar. These instructions deal with experiencing the holiness of time and space in the 21st century (Lev. 23). From the beginning, God has sanctified time by setting aside a period for us to connect with Him, who is timeless. We see this at the end of the creation story when He makes the Sabbath (Gen. 2:1–3), and we find it as the first command given to His people before they exit Egypt (Ex. 12). Time is the most valuable commodity we have. Once it is used up, it is gone forever. You cannot relive any exact moment in the past. Hence, we must make the most of every opportunity within our grasp (Ps. 39:5). Redeeming the time is a concept familiar to most, but there is much more to time than just a tick on a clock (Eph. 5:16). There is a duality to it that often gets overlooked. As we examine Scripture, the day seems to have two beginnings: one in the morning, when H...

In our last study, I began to introduce a very expanded view of blood: cleansing the sacred space. The accumulated effect of humanity's limitations—we could say the limited life of our death-related impurities—presses against those holy objects. The sacrifice they make after being cleansed purges that accumulated effect and clears God's side of the equation. What does the person get out of the deal? Who is it for? What is the deal? Inquiring minds want to know :-) Namely, they are not considered fully restored until the relationship with God in sacred space has been restored. They are out of fellowship. They are out of the community. After the offering, atonement is made. Atonement allows them to re-enter sacred space, restoring their relationship and purity. They are now in a position to hear—welcome back. That is why in Leviticus 14, when the  chatat  is brought, it is followed by a burnt offering. Remember what I told you about the burnt offering in the  Tamid  of...