2023 Torah Commentary

Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 3

God created all things in 6 days, and He said that what He created was “very good.” He created Man on the 6th day with the beasts of the Earth, which certainly included all of the land animals, from dinosaurs to cattle, but also all of the institutions of men. We later learn from reading Daniel and other prophets that kingdoms are likened to beasts of the Earth. Only one kingdom was meant to stand, even from the beginning, and that is the Kingdom of God. Only Man Himself—male and female—was made in the image of God, and thus He was meant to be a co-creator with God–not apart from Him. This was a higher purpose than what God created for the beasts. Man was given the privilege to name the animals, for God had created Man with curiosity and a propensity to accumulate knowledge of Him and His creation. Yet Man was also created, and was never to be God himself, for like the beasts, he was given a diet of seed-bearing vegetation. There was no death, and so there was no consumption of meat.

We may think of God giving only one commandment in the garden that He made for Man, but in Truth He gave them all, for they are eternal. Man broke one of God’s commandments in the garden, which led to his exile, but it wasn’t long before Man violated one after another after his fall. We see the first commandment in chapter one, and we see how it is designed to be a great blessing to all involved: “God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’” The family and children were designed from God to bring great joy and fulfill our purpose: to be a co-creator in the kingdom God built to share with us. God even tells us: because men and women were designed together to complete the image of God, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.”

After creation, God rested and sanctified the 7th-day Sabbath, which is a commandment for us to also hallow the day. There is little that He gives more importance to than this time to spend exclusively with Him for His glory; to worship Him for all that He created to share with us. Yeshua, our savior, said “I am the Lord of the Sabbath,” for He is the one who created all things. We rest in Him and look forward to the promise of His return to take us into His Kingdom, which we have fallen from. Sabbath is a rehearsal dinner for the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, but it is also a rest from our labor. We see in Genesis 3 that labor is the curse we suffer on account of our disobedience to God. We read: “Cursed is the ground because of you; With hard labor you shall eat from it all the days of your life.” In His Mercy, Yeshua has given us Sabbath as a memorial, to remember the perfection we lost in the Garden and to trust in Him to restore it for those of us who love Him and follow Him there.

God commands Man two more things right away. One is to name every living thing; to be a co-creator with Him and bring stewardship, cultivation and care to all the Earth that He created. Secondly, He gave a food law: Don’t eat from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” In other words: always keep the innocent trust in God that a child has for his mother and father, and never doubt that God has our best interest at heart. He still wants this from us. This is how we can read: “And the man and his wife were both naked, but they were not ashamed.” They were fully exposed before God, vulnerable, without sin, and they knew God intimately. Their relationship was perfect, as it was always intended to be. But God made us in His image with a free will, because He always wanted a voluntary two-way relationship with us. And thus He put the tree in the garden to test us, to see if our love for Him was complete and true, so that He could know that we loved Him like He loved us. We didn’t.

In His infinite wisdom, God would have expected us to fall. And it was for this reason that He designed a way back into the Garden even before we fell so that we could choose to be with Him on account of mutual love. We read Paul’s take in Ephesians 1:3-6: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.” Now all individuals who choose to Trust in this “descendant” who would crush the head of the adversary, yet suffer, would have the opportunity to be restored into His Kingdom, should they choose to follow Him in all His ways on account of the intended mutual love relationship.

And herein lies the dichotomy that we are now presented with in our fallen world, where we are cursed to toil in labor, to labor in childbirth, to suffer from thorns and thistles—the demons and false prophets who attempt to lead us astray—, to challenge each other for dominance, and ultimately to die in our flesh on account of our sin. Do we believe God, who made good on his promise that the “day” we sinned against Him we would die, but also that we might live again with Him if we trust in Him and desire to please Him, or do we believe our enemy who hates us, who lies to us and says that we will not “surely die” if we disobey God’s commandments, but instead we will be blessed—we will be “like God.”

Only Satan could devise such a ploy to convince us we must disobey God to be something that we were already designed to be. Only God can rescue us from this deception by reminding us who He designed us to be, and providing us the one way to return to Him: through Yeshua. Now naked and ashamed, in our vulnerability, with our humble and contrite hearts, we can please God by turning back to Him. In our experience, we can develop the wisdom we lacked in our innocence; namely, to “fear God and keep His commandments—this is Man’s all.” For God wants a relationship based on love and mutual trust and respect. Those of us who “seek Him will find Him when we seek Him with all our heart,” and we will one day return to the Garden with a new appreciation for what is on the outside and a strong desire to cling to the Lord and never look back.

Genesis 4, Genesis 5, Genesis 6, Genesis 7

Murder! Cain violates the not yet written, but eternal, 6th commandment, and Abel’s blood cries up from beneath the altar of God in Heaven. Abel is the first martyr, murdered because he put God first in his life, while Cain put himself first. Revelation 6:9-11 tells the story of Abel and all who would follow him: “When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been killed because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who live on the earth?’ And a white robe was given to each of them; and they were told that they were to rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers and sisters who were to be killed even as they had been, was completed also.”

Abel brought his offering to the Lord from the firstborn of the flock and from the fat portions. He gave God his first and his best. Cain brought his offering “in the course of time.” It was an afterthought for him to serve God, and yet the Lord still called out to Him and tried to bring him to repentance. “The Lord said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry? And why is your face gloomy? If you do well, will your face not be cheerful? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; and its desire is for you, but you must master it.’” We are commanded to follow the will of the Lord, and even when we stumble, we have the opportunity to master the sin through repentance with the help of Yeshua. Cain chose not to; his heart was evil. He murdered Abel out of hatred for his righteousness. Sealing the deal on his dark heart, he asks, “am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer is “yes,” and in fact, if we say we follow Yeshua we must have “love for one another.” It’s how we know that we know Him.

Steve Ryan: “Your second comment: Could also reference forward to James 1:15 "Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”

It’s interesting, we see that Genesis 5 reiterates, “On the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God.” But then we see that Seth was born according to the likeness of Adam, “according to his image.” Seth was born with a sin nature, and like Seth, we too were born with that sin nature outside the Garden of Eden, which is the Kingdom of God. We were born without hope apart from Christ. It is through Messiah alone that we can get back into the Garden. In Christ, we throw off our sin nature and take on the image of Christ. We read about this in Ephesians 4:22-24: “put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.” Colossians 3:9-10 explains this “new self;” it “is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator.”

After Adam and Eve’s disobedience and Cain’s murder of Abel, Lamech commits sexual immorality by marrying two women, and then he reports to his wives that he too has become a murderer because a man wounded him and the man’s son struck him. Things get worse until we read that angels commit fornication with human women, creating a super race of evil beings. According to the Book of Enoch, these beings become the “evil spirits,” and the angels, now demons, are chained up in Hell until the end of days, when they will be released but then destroyed. In the meantime, these angels teach men all manner of corruption, and men fall into total corruption. “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of mankind was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.” The Lord decides to start over with Noah, grandson of righteous Enoch, as well as Noah’s family, because “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.”

Yeshua tells us that the time of the end will be like the “Days of Noah.” He also says, “when the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the Earth?” I pray there are more than eight people in the remnant at the end, but considering the way things are going, I certainly have my concerns. If we aren’t living in the Days of Noah, we will be very soon. To be saved through the one door of the ark, which is Yeshua, we must be like Noah: blameless, righteous, walking with Christ. The endurance of the Saints is to “keep the commandments of God and the faith of Yeshua” (Revelation 14:12). The time is now–the day is today to get serious about our faith–to put Christ first in our lives.

The flood really happened. The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Whatever and whoever is alive on the Earth today is a descendant of the life that was on that ark. The instructions for building the ark were specific, and engineers have deduced that God’s design would work well. We see more evidence that God’s law is eternal, for God instructed Noah in this way: “You shall take with you seven pairs of every clean animal, a male and his female; and two of the animals that are not clean, a male and his female; also of the birds of the sky, seven pairs, male and female, to keep their offspring alive on the face of all the earth.” Our heritage; everything we know about the creation and its aftermath, would have been passed down through Noah. Rain fell in the deluge, and waters came up from the deep as God broke Pangaea apart and moved the continents into their current place. All the formations we know, all the fossil record, was formed during this time period. Thank God Noah obeyed God.

Genesis 8, Genesis 9, Genesis 10, Genesis 11

Read: https://messianicapologetics.blog/articles/Genesis_9_3-7_Why_Meat_MESSIANIC_KOSHER_HELPER.pdf

The word remes (רֶ֙מֶשׂ֙) in Genesis 9:3 properly categorizes herd animals that Noah cared for on the ark in seven pairs; the clean animals that God recognized in Noah’s sacrifice upon leaving the ark. These are not “every living thing that moves” as our English Bible reads, but those animals that run in terror, and in the case of Genesis 9:3, animals that run in herds, fly in flocks, or swim in schools—animals later defined in Leviticus 11 as clean—because they are not predators themselves, but prey. Death was a consequence of Adam’s sin, and thus animals began eating one another after the fall, but blameless Man did not yet eat flesh, for God had not yet given us permission. He did so after the flood, but with distinction. Man was not to eat the life, which is found in the blood, with the flesh. The life was to be poured out into the earth and returned to God, who gave it. Men could only eat the flesh of clean animals.

There was an ecological reason for this as well as a spiritual one: Man was coming out of the ark into a desolate world, and time was needed to plant and harvest agricultural foods. Eating flesh was necessary to sustain life. Additionally, Noah had contributed to the life of these animals. As a co-creator with God, Noah was given the flesh of clean animals, which had been sacrificed to God previously, as food for his own good. The context of the whole story is our last proof that only clean animals could be eaten. Only clean animals were taken onto the ark in greater number, and only clean animals were sacrificed to God, thus only clean animals could also be eaten by man, who was created in God’s image. As a result of eating meat, man would not live as long as he once did. This was just one of multiple factors in the declining lifespan of men, which God had pronounced to be 120 years following the decline of man into sin. A vegetarian diet leads to longer life.

Perhaps a bigger factor in declining lifespans was the loss of the firmament that surrounded the earth. This protective layer had rained down to contribute to the deluge. It was never reestablished to its place, where it had blocked dangerous rays from the sun. Now, these rays would reduce man’s lifespan dramatically. Also lost with this protective layer was oxygen. The atmosphere was not as forgiving and healing as it once was. While man previously lived close to 1000 years, he would now live only 120. This process gradually took place over a few generations. We may wonder what happened to the dinosaurs. Most of them died in the flood, but following the flood, having only two of each kind coming off of the ark, the conditions of the earth would have made it hard to survive, and many of them have gone extinct. We also know from dragon legends that many dinosaurs did survive until not very long ago, but they are certainly among the earth’s rarer species, if any still live today.

We have witnessed extinctions, and some species are on the brink of extinction today. Yet, we also know from Noah’s experience that just one pair can restore a population. I believe, as stewards of the Earth, God commanded us to preserve the ecological diversity He created. However, God also commanded that any animal or human that spills human blood be put to death. This explains additional extinctions. God created man in his image, right below the heavenly beings (Hebrews 2:17). God did not say that he created us above the animals, because we are not meant to be in the same category with them, though we can fall into it. While “a man who sins is like the beasts that perish” (Psalm 49:12), a man with faith is commanded to go forth and multiply and rule with God on the earth. We are not just to multiply in number, but we are also to multiply in our faith, for faith in Yeshua (the saving grace of Yahweh) is what prolongs our lives beyond physical death.

Sadly, God saw that “the intent of man’s heart is evil from his youth,” but with faith and obedience, we have blessing. This is God’s grace that we have in Yeshua. “In this life, you will have tribulation”, Yeshua has told us, but He has “overcome the world” (John 16:33). God will not destroy every living thing again, and He provided the rainbow as a sign for THIS, but He will refresh the earth again with fire. In the meantime, He will use tribulation to steer us back towards Him whenever we stray. And man did stray following the flood. Noah got drunk, Ham made fun of him while he was naked, which symbolizes the exposure we have in our sin. In this, Ham violated the fifth commandment, and rather than receive blessing for honoring his father, he received a curse on his family for cursing his father. From Ham would come Nimrod, and Nimrod repeated the sin of Adam and Eve, but on a greater scale.

Nimrod was “a mighty one on the earth, a mighty hunter before the Lord.” He violated the first and second commandments, putting himself and humanity before God, and creating an idol to take the place of God. Nimrod is the source of many mythologies, and he and his story has persisted to this day, for he was revered as a god. In fact, sacrificing a bore to eat around the winter solstice is a pagan practice that originated with Nimrod’s death. He was killed by a boar, and so every year a boar is sacrificed and eaten to remember him around his birthday in December. It only makes sense that the sacrificed animal would be unclean, because all practices that are against God, our father in Heaven, are meant as an affront to His dominion and authority. I could really write a book about this topic alone. Nevertheless, we are called to be obedient to God in faith; faith that by following Him and His ways, we will be with Him when He returns for us.

Nimrod established the cities Scripture later reveals to be the headquarters for man’s rebellion against God, including Babel and Nineveh. In Babel, which becomes Babylon, man created a tower made of brick to “make a name for ourselves, otherwise, we will be scattered abroad over the face of the earth,“ they said. This is the height of humanism, the false religion of man, a great rebellion against God. God had commanded man to go forth and multiply, and yet man’s desire was to stay put and rebel against God. And so God sent tribulation, a judgment, confusing man’s languages and scattering them, showing His dominion and authority over man. If man would not do what He desired, He would lead them toward this end Himself, a foreshadow of what He would do in Christ. In this, He gave man an opportunity to come to know Him and His ways, which are meant for our good. By dividing humanity, groups of men could choose to reunite with God’s purposes, and eventually return to the promised Garden.

It ought to be terrifying to any man of God to see an effort of man to unite under his own power without God. This is the spirit of Babylon, the spirit of antichrist, which first lived in Adam, then Cain, and then Nimrod, among others. The UN is such an effort, and we ought to see this abomination as a modern day Babel. It presents itself this way knowingly with pride. This is not to say that man is not to have unity, but that man’s unity ought to be faith in Christ with trust in God. Toward the end of our reading, we see one man is about to be called out from among the scattered peoples, for he had obeyed God by going forth into Canaan and multiplying. Terah, a descendent of Shem, and his family would be given the opportunity to know God again. His son Abram and grandson Lot would put their trust in God and not man. Abram’s faith in God would be accounted to him as righteousness, and Lot’s righteousness, the fruit of his faith in God, would save him from the midst of lawless Sodom.

Genesis 12, Genesis 13, Genesis 14, Genesis 15

Abram obeyed the Lord each time God called him to do something outlandish, establishing his faith in God and not in what he knew or felt secure with. He left his land and country, his father’s heritage, and went to a place the Lord called him to go. Lot and Sarai went with him in faith. Do we have this kind of faith? The Lord Yeshua said that we must do the same in order to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the real inheritance God promised to Abraham. One example, in Luke 14:33, says, “whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple.” In Luke 14:26, He said we must love God more than fathers, mothers, wives, husbands, children, brethren and even our own lives. In John 3:8, Yeshua says, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Our calling is to leave everything we know and wander off trusting in the Lord, being led by the Holy Spirit.

We read in Heb.11:8-10: “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed by going out to a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he left, not knowing where he was going. By faith he lived as a stranger in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents …  for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” We see this in Genesis 12 also that Abraham was a sojourner, dwelling in tents, trusting in the promises of the Lord by obeying them, and worshipping God for making those promises, even without their immediate fulfillment. We read: “And the Lord appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your descendants I will give this land.’ So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him. Then he proceeded from there to the mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord.” He trusted in God all His days.

Who are the children of Abraham? In John 8:39, Yeshua says, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would do the works of Abraham.” We want to know who these children are, because to them has been promised the land, a typology for the Kingdom of God, “the city … whose architect and builder is God.” We can see the works of Abraham Yeshua referred to in Gen. 15, when the “Word of the Lord,” the pre-incarnate Yeshua, came to Him and said: “‘Now look toward the heavens and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ And He said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ Then [Abraham] believed in the Lord; and He credited it to him as righteousness.” It is this same belief in God and His promises, with the subsequent action to show that we believe, that bestows righteousness on us. Abraham left Assyria for Caanan, and Abraham made love with Sarah when she was past the age. God has given us Christ and promised His Kingdom, if we believe and then follow Him in obedience, just as Abraham did.

Abraham was not perfect, for there is not a man who ever lived, outside Messiah, who is without sin. Having gone down to Egypt on account of famine, Abram feared Pharaoh and almost gave up the purity of his wife by saying she was his sister. In a prophetic foreshadow of the Exodus story, God sent plagues on Pharaoh on account of his sinful desires for Sarai until he recognized the issue and sent Abraham and her back to the promised land. Not long after, the Lord gave Abraham prophesy: “Know for certain that your descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs, where they will be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. … Then in the fourth generation they will return here, for the wrongdoing of the Amorite is not yet complete.” We see the Biblical principle apply here, that “the deeds of the fathers are a sign for the children.” We should look for such prophetic templates throughout Scripture to teach us more about our Messiah who was yet to come.

We see Abram acting as a righteous man also, for he gave Lot the choice land, and he selflessly risked his life to track down Lot who was captured in battle in the sinful land that he chose to dwell. Lot was not wrong to move there, for we do know that even Yeshua ate with tax collectors and sinners, hoping to bring them to repentance. “Righteous Lot,” as Peter calls him, had been teaching “the way” in Sodom, even though he was not successful. He is later rescued out of the city’s destruction for this. Melchizedek, a prophetic template for Yeshua, the High Priest for El Elyon (God Most High), brings bread and wine to worship God with Abram. He gives all the glory to God for the rescue. Melchizedek prophesies, calling Abram  “possessor of heaven and earth.” Only by faith could Abraham agree with this prophesy on account of his current state of affairs. Abram tithes to Melchizedek, setting another template for giving all we have to Yeshua, expecting nothing from Him but our daily bread.

Genesis 16, Genesis 17, Genesis 18

Sarai and Abram doubt the Lord’s promises, and we are still dealing with the consequences today. This lack of faith is something we all fall victim to from time to time, and every time we do, there are consequences even though the Lord forgives the sin. Abram took the Lord’s promises into his own hand, acting to bring about the son he believes God promised through an unlawful relationship he had with Hagar, Sarai’s servant. Perhaps men do this in the church by trying to advance God’s kingdom through different acts of their own, rather than waiting on God to bring about His Kingdom at the appointed time. We should learn from this story that we need to wait on the Lord, for His promises will come, even if later than we hope for or expect. God is still faithful to Abram, Sarai, Hagar, and even Ishmael, despite their error in faith. God sees them for who they are, and is merciful to them despite this, for their hearts were still to serve Him, even though they did not do so properly.

Thirteen years later, God clues Abram in on his error, as sometimes for us it takes this long for us to recognize our sins. The Lord calls Abram back: “Walk before Me, and be blameless.” He had gone astray, but this is a call for repentance. Now, the Lord promises that through His seed, the promised child, all the nations of the Earth would be blessed. Isaac, born miraculously to a woman who could no longer bear children, becomes the child of promise, a prophetic template for the coming Messiah Yeshua, who was born of the virgin Mary. Abraham, despite laughing at the first, acts on what the Lord has said and enters covenant with God again. He is forgiven for his sin.

Physical circumcision becomes the “sign” of this old covenant between God and Abraham, and circumcision is still a sign of the covenant with God today, but in the New Covenant, we are “circumcised with a circumcision performed without hands” (Colossians 2:11). Circumcision is absolutely required as the “sign” of the New Covenant; however, ours is not a physical circumcision. Our hearts are circumcised in Christ, and the sin nature that we were born with is cut away. In Christ, we are grafted-in as the promised “children of Abraham” into Israel. As Paul writes in Rom. 2:28-29, “For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from people, but from God.” By having faith in Christ, and obeying His commandments on account of our faith, we receive the circumcision made without hands as a sign of our covenant with God.

As the Lord Yeshua appears with two angels before Abraham to reiterate his promise that Sarah would miraculously bear Isaac, Abraham provides his honored guests with both milk curds, milk and beef together, and Scripture records Abraham standing under the Mamre tree while they ate. This is a proof text showing that the commandment, “do not boil a kid in its mother’s milk,” does not mean that we cannot eat milk and meat together, as some have supposed. Some interpret the commandment as prohibiting a pagan fertility ritual where a kid was literally boiled in its mother’s milk, and the Lord did not desire for Israel to practice such idolatry. The verses in Exodus 23:18-19, 34:23-26, and Deuteronomy 14:21, also may actually read, “do not cook a kid in it’s mother’s fat,” which makes sense in the context, for the Lord had just commanded Israel to offer up the fat to Him in sacrifice and not to eat it themselves. To reiterate the commandment in this way is common in the Word and makes sense.

In any case, Abraham here is showing the type of hospitality that we ought to have when strangers come to our door, and as the writer of Hebrews records in 13:2: “Do not neglect hospitality to strangers, for by this some have entertained angels without knowing it.” This hospitality, a sign of a saved man who knows the Lord, is also a foreshadow of how Lot treats the angel who visits him not long after this.

Abraham, again looking out for Lot, asks the Lord whether He will bring His judgment on a whole wicked city and destroy the wicked with the righteous. We ought to pay special attention to this living in our times, for our nation is exceedingly wicked and is getting worse by the day. The Lord says “no,” he will not destroy the righteous with the wicked. We know from all of Scripture that God will either provide the righteous with a means of escape, or delay His judgment to provide the righteous with time to bring the wicked to repentance. Another possibility is that He will protect the righteous ones, in either Body or Spirit, while they bear the judgment that the wicked have brought.

Genesis 19, Genesis 20, Genesis 21

Yeshua said in Luke 17:32-33, “Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” This comment, which was in reference to the End, refers to Gen. 19. What did Lot’s wife do? She looked back at the life she had in this world, where her friends, her home, her provisions, and her memories were located, and she longed for it, even though the Lord had made it clear that He was about to destroy it all, but rescue her. The angels even had to drag Lot out of the city, but then he went willingly. It is difficult for us in the flesh to let go of our wealth, our accumulations, our life and lifestyle, our memories, but all these things are nothing compared with what God has prepared for us in the Kingdom of Heaven. There may come a time in our lives when the choice will be obey God and lose everything in this place but gain eternal life or disobey God and maintain the life you know, for a time. We are warned by Yeshua to choose rightly.

When the angels arrived in Sodom, Lot treated them with complete hospitality, giving up everything (perhaps even his own life) to ensure they were cared for and were not torn apart by the wolves that surrounded his house. He washed their feet, fed them a feast, and offered them shelter. This is how we ought to protect the flock of our churches—to ensure the world does not capture any of them—, and the strangers who are at our gate—to bring them into the faith. Lot even offers his daughters in an often misunderstood passage. He does not offer them to be violated, but rather as wives. He is calling the men of the city to repent from their sin—that they want to commit homosexual acts against the men who were visiting him–and he is reminding them of God’s way, which is for a man to take a woman as a wife. Lot also appeals to the ones he knows with one last effort to save them from God’s judgment. Even though they don’t follow him, the attempt was required. It is the “great commission.”

The analogy to the end times ends once Lot and his family leave Sodom, and tragedy strikes. Lot’s daughter’s take things in the wrong direction. Having lost their mother, their home, their fiancé’s and everything they know, they decided to sin by lying with their father. Instead of waiting on the God who saved them, they turned toward the ways of Sodom, even having escaped from it. As there was when Abraham took Hagar, sin has consequences. We don’t know the end for these women, but we do know Ammon and Moab become enemies to the people of God. Israel, whether it is made up of Jews or Gentiles who follow Messiah Yeshua, are the only people who will ultimately make it back into the Promised Land that is God’s Kingdom, the Garden of Eden.

Meanwhile, Abraham continues to  wander around Canaan preaching to the Gentiles. We wonder why Abraham continues to suggest Sarah is his sister, but we shouldn’t. Is not our wife our sister and our husband our brother if we are both living in the light of Christ? In treating Sarah as both wife and sister, Abraham does not sin, and Abimelech was also prevented by the Lord from commiting adultery, as his heart of flesh desired, because the Lord knew his heart desired righteousness. This is the same reality we face as saved Christians, for our flesh desires to sin, but the Lord will help us walk away from it. There is no temptation common to man that is too great when we are truly living according to the will of the Lord. You can see Abraham and Abimelech becomes brothers in the Lord as they share livestock, overcome difficulties regarding the well of living water, which is both of their share of the Holy Spirit, and they make a covenant in the name of the Lord, and pray for one another.

Finally the day has come for Sarah to deliver Isaac, and the occasion brings laughter to all involved, except perhaps Hagar and Ishmael, who were illegitimate. The son of promise was born, and the illegitimate son is cast out. We can’t allow this to become a stumbling block in our faith. On a human level, the Lord has seen Hagar and Ishmael and provides for them, making Ishmael into a “great nation,” for he is the “God who sees.” He sees all of us in our sin, and still loves us and provides for us. He even shows us the way to repentance and eternal life when we are yet sinners. On the human level, our reading shows that Hagar now finally sees God working in her life and she puts her trust in Him. It is because of this that God gives Hagar a life in Him and helps her raise her son and ultimately find him a wife.

On a Spiritual level, God is separating the son of promise from the son of perdition, and setting up a prophetic template for us to see.

Paul uses this story to teach the difference between physical circumcision and spiritual circumcision in Galatians 4:21-32 (read it). For those of us who are in Christ, we become sons of the free woman Sarah, the sons of promise. While we were barren without Christ, in Christ we bear fruit as great as the stars in heaven. Yet, as sons of promise, we will be persecuted by the sons of perdition, who will be cast out. While Hagar represents the written law and our bondage to sin because of it, Sarah represents the freedom we have in Christ, saved by His grace and released from the bondage of sin, now able to walk according to the law with the help of the Holy Spirit (John 14). As Paul writes in Gal. 5:13, which synthesizes the earlier citation: “For you, brethren, have been called to liberty; only do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” Now, walking in the Spirit through the love of God, we keep God’s commandments by the Spirit, in freedom!

Genesis 22, Genesis 23, Genesis 24

Three times it is said that Isaac is Abraham’s only son, when we know that Abraham has another son Ishmael. The Angel says this to Abraham twice, and then God Most High speaks to Abraham and says this to him, thus establishing it as a spiritual truth. While this is certainly a reference to the “son of promise” that God had given to Abraham, verses the “son of perdition,” it is also a reference to Messiah Yeshua as a prophetic template, who would come to die for our sin, and then rise on the third day in glory. In Hebrews 11:17-19, the Holy Spirit interprets this story perfectly for us: “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, ‘In Isaac your seed shall be called,’ concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.”  

For Abraham’s earlier doubts, God tested his faith, as He will test ours, but when we succeed in our obedience to God, no matter how crazy His narrow way may look to the world, the Lord will reward us eternally. Here is His blessing, which the Lord swears by Himself: “By Myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this thing and have not withheld your son, your only son, indeed I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens and as the sand, which is on the seashore; and your seed shall possess the gate of their enemies. And in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” Consider Heb. 6:13-20, and then notice that Yeshua also swears by Himself in Jn. 8:18: “I am One who bears witness of Myself, and the Father who sent Me bears witness of Me.” God swore to offer His only Son (the seed) to fulfill this promise, and He kept His Word when He came in the flesh. See Gal. 3:15-29.

God provided the lamb, just as Abraham said He would when Isaac asked his father where the sacrifice would come from. In Matthew 21:22, Yeshua says, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer." Abraham believed God provided the promised son, the one who would bring him descendants as numerous as the stars of Heaven. He even believed God would raise him from the dead if he had to go through with the sacrifice. If God could bring a child out of barren Sarah who was past the age of childbearing, He could do anything—and He can. But God provided the lamb, and Abraham’s faith was completely confirmed. He didn’t just provide the lamb for Abraham and Isaac to sacrifice, but He provided the Lamb of God, who would take away the sins of the world, a male ram who’s head was caught in a crown of thorns. It’s so wonderful to see the Lord’s prophetic work acting through our patriarchs; it confirms our faith every single time.

Abraham continues to call on the Name of the Lord all the days of His life, meaning that He served the Lord in everything He did. He would not take land from his neighbors as a donation to bury Sarah his wife, who lived 28 years into her son’s life before she died. He bought the land and insisted on paying for it with 400 silver shekels. In 2 Thessalonians 3:6-15, Paul writes that Christians should not tolerate busybodies who will not work, and even says such people walk “disorderly.” It is our duty as men to provide for ourselves, if we are able bodied, and Paul makes a special note to say, he and his fellow church leaders “worked with labor and toil night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you.” He takes this a step further and says, “we commanded you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.” Abraham is showing us this same principle. By buying the land through the fruit of his own labor, Abraham is ensuring he is a blessing and not a burden to his neighbors.

The marriage of Isaac and Rebecca is yet another story of faith in the life of Abraham, and we see that he has rubbed off on his servants. Rebecca and her family show great hospitality to Abraham’s servant, signifying that they also know the Lord and walk in His ways. The marriage to Isaac is equally yoked, one believer to another, and the whole arrangement is set up by God through faith. Rebecca shows her faith by not even hesitating to go with the man to meet Isaac; she trusts that the Lord is behind the whole situation based on the synchronicity of events that led to Abraham’s servant approaching her at the well. When we notice this type of synchronicity happening in our lives, we ought to turn to the Lord in praise, thanksgiving and worship, just like we see Abraham’s servant doing. It is a time to fully trust in his ways and let God fulfill His will. As we read in Ps. 37:23, “The steps of a good man are ordered by the LORD, And He delights in his way.” Let this also describe you and me.

Genesis 25, Genesis 26

We know the song about father Abraham; that he had many sons. He sent away all of them except for Isaac, and his entire inheritance went to Isaac, the son of promise, while the others he provisioned while he lived but then obeyed the Lord, scattering them abroad so that they might “go forth and multiply.” We know that God gave all things to His Son Yeshua, for when He had risen from the dead, He said, “‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me.” (Matthew 28:18) He received the whole inheritance of God, for He is God, and thus He has the authority to give it to us through our faith and obedience to His will. He asked us to go forth, just as God did at first, to multiply faith in the world, to teach all nations the Gospel, and to teach them to follow all the things that He commanded, and to baptize them according to the three powers of God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Isaac did this. Although the Philistines covered the wells of living water with Earth, as all demons still do today, Isaac instructed his men to dig them up again to make sure the water could flow. This is symbolic for our Christian walk. Did Jesus not go after sinners, bring sight to the blind and heal the lame? He brought the living water that is His Holy Spirit into ground that had been filled in. He found a place to dwell next to the wells of Beersheba and firmly established himself there, as the Lord blessed Him with the same promise He had given Abraham. Abimelech, whose men had attempted to chase Isaac off, now comes to Isaac for guidance in the faith. Abimelech tells him, “We have seen plainly that the Lord has been with you,” and so they make a covenant for mutual peace. And then Isaac made a feast dedicated to the Lord. What a glorious day when sinful men return to the Lord and seek Him during His appointed times. It is our duty, like Isaac, to welcome them and show them hospitality while we teach them the Lord’s will, with prayers that they will continue in their walk with the Lord.

Now in the Rebekah’s conversation with God, He makes it clear that two peoples are growing inside her, and this is the clearest sign in the Old Testament that Israel is not a bloodline-based nation, but rather a spiritual nation made up of those who put their faith and trust in God and obey His commandments. Jacob and Esau were twins. They were literally identical in their physical makeup, and they come from the same father and mother. However, Jacob became Israel, and Esau became Edom. Due to the jealousy Esau had for Jacob, a jealousy that he passed on to all of his children until Edom was destroyed, a jealousy similar to the jealousy of Cain toward Abel, he was cut off from the Lord. Jacob on the other hand sought the Lord first with all his heart and it became the most important thing for him. Later on, he wouldn’t even let the Lord go until the Lord blessed him.

At the same time, Esau was not damned from the womb. The Lord said, “one people will be stronger than the other, and the older will serve the younger.” When Yeshua washed the feet of his disciples, He said, “If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you.” In Matthew 20:26, Yeshua said, “whoever desires to become great among you, let him be your servant.” And so Esau had an opportunity that the Lord gave to him to be greater than his brother in the spirit, for if his heart had been right, from his lower station, he could have served Jacob with love and joy and brought great good into his family. The Lord gives us different stations in life. Some are born into poverty, others are born into wealth, and still others are born into families somewhere in between. God cares about what we do with what we’ve been given, no more and no less.

Unfortunately, Esau cares not for the Lord. Scripture says that Esau was a “man of the field,” but Jacob was “a civilized man, living in tents.” This is key. Esau was a man of the Earth; he had worldly cares and concerns, and he put the world first. When the Word says that Jacob lived in tents, it’s clear that he is a sojourner in the world and he had no concern for it, for he cared about the Kingdom of God and put that first in his life. We read in Hebrews 11:9-10 that Abraham dwelt in the land of promise “by faith … as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs of him of the same promise.” That promise was for “the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God;” a promise made to us as well. …

… It is for this reason that Esau was willing to sell Jacob his birthright to the Kingdom of God for a bowl of red lentils, and Jacob was so eager to buy it. We read, “Esau despised his birthright,” for he said, “I am about to die … what use is a birthright”? God forbid! Yeshua said those who seek to save their life will lose it, and those who give up their lives for the kingdom of God, will find eternal life. This was a choice that Esau made of his own free will. His heart was not right with the Lord, but he had the opportunity to repent and follow after God. His grandfather was Abraham, his father was Isaac and his brother was Jacob. He had every opportunity to repent and walk right with the Lord. He chose not to, and for that he will die the second death. Let us all choose rightly as Jacob did and seek to purchase our birthright  in Heaven no matter what the cost.

Genesis 27, Genesis 28, Genesis 29

Jacob was obedient to his mother, while Esau went out of his way to dishonor both mother and father—he even married sinful women just to spite them. The Lord had given Rebekah His will for both of the children, and Rebekah acted in obedience to God, despite her husband’s stated desire to bless Esau. This is in alignment with what Yeshua taught that God must come first before any family member (Matthew 10:37, Luke 14:26). In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul says that the believing wife should stay with an unbelieving husband, for the unbelieving husband would be made holy by the believing wife, but obey God first. Now, Isaac is not unbelieving; he is the son of promise and the template for our Messiah, but he is not the Messiah. He is a man with flaws, and in this case he is erring, while Rebekah is obeying God.

Make careful note: Rebekah says to Jacob, “So now, my son, listen to me as I command you. … Your curse be on me, my son; only obey my voice, and go…” Jacob did not deceive his father, Rebekah was the deceiver, and her purpose was in service to God’s will. Jacob was blameless in what he did. Not only this, but Esau had already despised his birthright and sold it to Jacob. Not only had God given Jacob the right to Isaac’s blessing, but Esau had sold it to him. Now Esau was attempting to take something back that he had already sold away. Hebrews 6:4-6 says, “For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted the heavenly gift, and have become partakers of the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, if they fall away, to renew them again to repentance, since they crucify again for themselves the Son of God, and put Him to an open shame.” Esau had already despised his birthright. He could not get it back.

Furthermore, once the dust had settled, Isaac called Jacob back in to him and blessed him knowingly, confirming his earlier blessing. Perhaps he had realized the wisdom of his wife? He brought him in and commanded him to take a wife from the daughters of Laban, and then he asked God Almighty (El Shaddai) to bless him, to make him fruitful and multiply him into many peoples. This prayer is realized while Jacob is on his way in obedience to his father and mother, fulfilling God’s fifth commandment. God appears to Jacob in a dream and confirms the blessing he gave to Jacob through Rebekah at the same time he answers the prayer of Isaac, also confirming this prayer. “Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you,” the Lord says, while also promising the Promised Land, spiritually the Kingdom of God, and descendants as numerous as the dust of the Earth.

Jacob observes the Stairway to Heaven in Genesis 28:12, with angels ascending and descending on it. In John 1:51, Yeshua said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, hereafter you shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” We can see in the fullness of Scripture that Yeshua Himself is the stairway to Heaven, and faith in Him gives us His Spirit, who will lead our willing heart the rest of the way. To follow Yeshua, we must do what He did; by studying His Word and consequently listening to His voice and the upward call toward Heaven. Clearly, the context of Scripture identifies Jacob’s full alignment with the Spirit of God, which is one-in-being with Yeshua. Alignment with the Spirit of God requires endurance in the love of God, a Fruit of the Spirt, and the Holy Spirit helps us to ascend this stairway to Heaven, which is our path of sanctification in God as we continue to obey Him and cast off our sins of the flesh. Jacob is on this upward path.

As Jacob meets his mother’s family, he falls in love with Rachel and makes a covenant with Laban to work for him so that he can marry her. But Laban is not God, and as a man Laban goes back on this deal. Rather than rebel against Laban and run off with his rightful wife, he accepts the persecution and trial that life throws at him and loves his enemy, just like Yeshua instructs us. He worked another seven years for Rachel and finally marries the woman he loves. Yeshua also told us in Matthew 5:41, “And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two,” and this is precisely what Jacob has done here. This is one lesson embedded with the story, but there is yet another. Leah was not at fault for being put in this position by her father, and she trusted in God and dutifully obeyed him, despite her circumstances. Even though she was rejected by Jacob, God fully embraces her and uses her to bring about the father of our Messiah Yeshua in the flesh; namely Judah. And this very reality prophetically represents how the leaders of the Jews would reject Yeshua, and yet God would bless the whole world through Him.

Genesis 30, Genesis 31

Recall that Jacob would not have two wives if it had not been for Laban’s deception, so all the strife that results is on Laban, not Jacob. In that strife, Jacob’s wives commit the same sin as Sarah and compete for children by offering their servants as additional wives. The strife is all based on Rachel’s barren womb, and it is her envy that drives this competitive push. At some point, Rachel makes peace with her state and accepts the children of her servant as her own, and this is when God finally opens her womb. It is often when we are not striving after the things we believe we need in this world that the Lord provides them to us. We read: “Then God remembered Rachel, and God listened to her and opened her womb. So she conceived and gave birth to a son, and said, ‘God has taken away my disgrace.’” She had prayed to God for a son, but it was not until her heart was humble that God delivered a son to her. We must wait on the Lord and the Lord’s timing, because it is always exactly right.

Now that Joseph was born, Jacob finally had the son he cherished through the wife that he loved. Laban had put stumbling blocks in his way, mistreated him, and lied to him multiple times. In a prophetic template for the upcoming Exodus story, Jacob fled from the slavery of his overlord, who took on the prophetic template of Pharaoh, but not before God had taken away all the wealth of Laban and given it to Jacob. Just as Pharaoh chased after Israel, Laban chased after Jacob. Just as Israel stumbled in the wilderness with the golden calf, Rachel stumbled by taking her father’s household gods, and later on Jacob commands their destruction. But just as Israel escaped from Pharaoh, Jacob escaped from Laban and entered the Promised Land. It is because God remembered his promise to Jacob/Israel, and came to deliver him from his oppression. If we face persecution in this life, we must remember God’s promises to us and endure with patient joy and thanksgiving. The Day of the Lord will come.

Genesis 32, Genesis 33, Genesis 34

Jacob showed us what it means to love our enemies when he sent gifts ahead of himself as an offering to his brother Esau, who came with 400 men (quite a formiddable army in those days). Only God knows Esau’s true intentions, but the last time he saw Jacob, he wanted to kill him, leading to Jacob’s 20-year sojourn with Laban. As Jacob approached Esau, he led his family and servants, but also strategically separated his family so that some would survive if there was an outright attack. In Romans 12:20, Paul teaches, “Therefore ‘If your enemy is hungry, feed him; If he is thirsty, give him a drink; For in so doing you will heap coals of fire on his head,’” which comes from Proverbs 25:21-22 and was taught by Yeshua in Matthew 5:44. Yeshua also tells us in Matthew 10:16, “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves; therefore be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.” Jacob continues to prove he knows the Lord and does His will.

When Jacob was alone, he wrestled with Yeshua in the wilderness due to his fear of his brother. He struggled to trust the Lord in the face of his enemy. This should comfort us. For such a giant in the faith as Jacob to suffer from fear of man, we know that it is a temptation common to man that we also face. As Paul writes in 1 Corinth. 10:13, we can overcome such temptation with faith in God. Yeshua warned us in Mt. 10:28 “do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” It is good for us to wrestle with God in these scenarios, to get down on our knees and strive to seek Him with everything we have, pleading for His blessing. When we doubt, we must go to war. When we lack faith, we must ask God to increase it. Jacob prevailed over his doubt and Yeshua blessed Him, calling Him Israel, the striver with God and man. We must never ever give up on our faith, for with it we can see God face-to-face and live.

Esau’s heart had melted to the point where he offered to go with him and to send men to help him, but Jacob would not accept his help. He sent him back to his land with the gift he had been given. If Jacob’s love was intended to heap coals of fire on Esau’s head for repentance, it seemed to work. I find this story strikingly similar to when Yeshua healed the demoniac from Gadarenes in Luke 8:26-39. The man wanted to go with Yeshua, but Yeshua sent him back into town. In verse 39, we read, Yeshua tell him: “Return to your own house, and tell what great things God has done for you.” and then we read that “he went his way and proclaimed throughout the whole city what great things Jesus had done for him.” Did Esau do this? Perhaps, but sadly I don’t believe so. There are no more reports about Esau and Jacob fighting, and they later bury their father together, but the stories of Edom are not flattering in their interactions with Israel, and ultimately the people of Esau have the same heart of their father before this encounter. Perhaps the seeds landed in shallow soil?

Meanwhile, Jacob’s intent is to obey God, and so he returns to the land where God commanded him to go and built and altar there dedicated to worship the One True God, the God of Israel. It isn’t long before the world tempts the daughter of Israel to sin, and the peoples who cause her to sin are ultimately destroyed. On a historical level, Simeon and Levi sinned by taking vengeance into their own hands, for vengeance belongs to the Lord alone. Jacob later curses them among his sons on account of their sin. However, there is also a prophetic template here for the times that were to come. The daughters of Israel would sin with the nations, committing fornication with the pagan religions and embracing the practices of the people of the world. This isn’t a problem just for native Israel, but also the followers of Yeshua today. The lesson is simple: Those who cause Israel to sin in this way will be destroyed, but the destruction will come from the Lord. In Christ, through repentance, the daughters defilement can be made clean, but their hearts must change.

Let us learn a lesson from Simeon and Levi not to take the law into our own hands. We read: “Then Jacob said to Simeon and Levi, “You have brought trouble on me by making me repulsive among the inhabitants of the land, among the Canaanites and the Perizzites; and since my men are few in number, they will band together against me and attack me, and I will be destroyed, I and my household!” Note the lesson here: If we become enforcers of the law, like the scribes and pharisees, we will bring trouble upon the Church by making it stink among the inhabitants of the land. In fact, because we are few in number—those of us who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus—it may be that the men of the world will band together and attack us, and perhaps even destroy us and our ability to impact people and turn them toward repentance and toward Christ. Perhaps it will cause our children to turn away from the faith? We must be careful to keep the commandments of God because of love and with love, and while we can teach them and show them to others through our example, we must allow God to judge those in the world who don’t abide by them. We ought to rebuke those within the Church, like Simeon and Levi, who should have known better, but those in the world we leave to God to sort out.

Genesis 35, Genesis 36, Genesis 37

When God called out to Jacob to come and worship before Him in Bethel, Jacob commanded his sons to “remove the foreign gods which are among you, and purify yourselves and change your garments.” This is the formula that all of us must follow in order to stand before God in His Kingdom. We must repent (walk away from our sin and ask for forgiveness in Christ), we must take on Christ and His righteousness through His death on the cross, and walk in His commandments from that point forward (“Go and sin no more”), and then we can worship God, “who answered me on the day of my distress and has been with me wherever I have gone.” God is worthy to be praised! When we walk in “the way” of the Lord, as Jacob and his sons were now doing, the men who are of the world hate us out of fear, for they can tell that God is with us.

It is after Jacob purifies his house that God appears to him again and verifies His earlier declaration: that Jacob is now “Israel,” a striver with God, and God commands Him as He did Adam before the fall to “be fruitful and multiply,” not just in the flesh, but in the Spirit. Israel was to spread His faith and knowledge of God to the whole world, for “a nation and a multiple of nations shall come from [him], and Kings shall come from [him].” Israel was truly a man of God, one who passed on the faith to the whole world through Christ, the King of kings who would come from Him both physically and spiritually. At the same time, this is the God—the pre-incarnate Yeshua—whom Jacob wrestled with who first gave him the name Israel, and now, as Jacob directed his family to repent, obey God and build Him an altar, God promised Jacob a place in His Kingdom.

It wasn’t long after this that God set up a prophetic template for His son, the Messiah son of Joseph, in Jacob’s son Joseph. Like Yeshua, Joseph was loved by His Father more than any of his brothers, he was a prophet, and a High Priest who whore a multicolored tunic, and he gave a bad report concerning his brothers, who were not obeying the Father. He was sold out to pagans by his brothers because of this for the lawful amount of silver, and a male goat was sacrificed so that its blood could cover his garments. It was Judah’s idea to sell him into slavery, just as Judas betrayed Christ, but not all the brother’s agreed with the plan to sell him off. Reuben worried about the impact to his father, just a few years after he had committed adultery with his father’s concubine. Had he come to repentance? It wasn’t enough to save Joseph from a fate of slavery. Wild beasts, those without any fear of God, ended up selling Joseph off. His father wept for him.

Genesis 38, Genesis 39, Genesis 40

When Judah departed from his brothers in Genesis 38, the Hebrew text indicates that he “turned aside to” a certain Adullamite, Hirah. The name in Hebrew is “Chirah (חִירָה),” a name used once in Scripture that is derived from the Hebrew “chavar (חָוַר),” which means to turn pale (implied: from shame). It’s interesting also, Adullam is the city where David fled to live in a cave with his “Mighty Men” when Saul was hunting him down to murder him. David writes about the experience in Psalm 142, perhaps with a better attitude than Judah had at this time: “When my spirit faints within me, you know my way! In the path where I walk they have hidden a trap for me. Look to the right and see: there is none who takes notice of me; no refuge remains to me; no one cares for my soul.” From the context, it seems as though Judah has turned aside from his family in shame. Was it shame on account of his idea to sell his brother Joseph into slavery? I think so.

Judah married a Canaanite woman, the daughter of Shua (שׁוּעַ), meaning “a cry for help.” This was yet another shameful act that we know only Ishmael and Esau have done so far. The children of this marriage are in such rebellion to the Lord that the Lord kills them at a young age. Because the fruit of this union is foul, we can deduce that the union itself is evil. Even the Canaanite wife dies at a young age, further providing evidence for this. Judah is in trouble, but on account of his heart, which must have still loved the Lord, Judah’s rebellious actions should be seen as a cry for help to the Lord. We later see in the text that Judah knows righteousness when he articulates that Tamar, his daughter-in-law, is more righteous than he is. This is repentance. Tamar (תָּמָר) means “palm tree” or “post,” as in signpost. God uses Tamar to help lead Judah back to righteousness.

Within the story, we see humble Tamar, the widow of two of Judah’s sons. God’s law is clear in Exodus 22:22, “You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.” And yet, Judah had mistreated Tamar by not giving her to his third son, as the law requires in Deut. 25:5-10. Tamar knew the law of God, but she took it upon herself to expose Judah’s wandering. At the same time, we know that Tamar should not take the enforcement of God’s law into her own hands. God says, “vengeance is mine, and I shall repay.” Tamar also sinned by making herself “a prostitute,” even though she was right within the letter of the law. There is good news in this: The Lord brought justice to the situation and Tamar bore children, including Perez the forefather of King David and Yeshua Himself. In Rom. 8:28, we read: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” Tamar and Judah were called according to God’s purposes.

The storyline returns to Joseph, a prophetic template of our Lord Yeshua, and he had been sold to Potiphar. Like Christ, everything Joseph does is prosperous. Joseph also shows us what we ought to do in the face of temptation, as Yeshua did in the wilderness as Satan tempted Him. Potiphar was a leader in Egypt. His wife was gorgeous. When she grabbed Joseph and commanded him to lie with her, she most likely was not wearing much. To resist this, Joseph literally had to flee from sexual immorality (1 Corinth. 6:18). Despite his blameless behavior, Joseph was falsely accused of sin, just like our Messiah Yeshua, and he was thrown into prison.

In the depths of the pit—a metaphor for the death that comes on the cross—Joseph is used by God to prophesy the salvation of the humble and the damnation of the proud, just like Yeshua did on the cross. In the two dreams, the cupbearer envisioned himself serving Pharaoh (a metaphor for God), while the baker saw Pharaoh serving himself. The good criminal on the cross asked for Yeshua’s mercy with repentance, while the condemned criminal only wanted his enemies to be destroyed. Yeshua came to save sinners who turn to repentance in Him, and Joseph likewise foretold God’s mercy to those who sought Him in humility.

Genesis 41, Genesis 42

God gave Pharaoh a dream and He gave Joseph the interpretation, because “God uses all things for good for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). God orchestrated this entire episode to rescue Joseph from the punishment he did not deserve. From the pit, Joseph has now risen from death—for his father believed that he was dead—and now he rules over all the kingdoms of the Earth, providing them with the bread of life. We see in Isaiah 53:10, “But the LORD desired To crush Him, causing Him grief; If He renders Himself as a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, And the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand.”

His brothers came before him and worshipped him, just as Joseph had prophesied. This historical allegory will happen, as prophesied in Zechariah 12:10: “And I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and of pleading, so that they will look at Me whom they pierced; and they will mourn for Him, like one mourning for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.”

We see that Pharaoh has given everything into Joseph’s hand, so that only Pharaoh is greater than Joseph, and Joseph has complete authority over all the kingdom so that all of Pharaoh’s men are completely obedient to him, and so is anyone else who wants to eat bread. Yeshua said in Matthew 28:18, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.” In 1 Corinthians 15:25, we read, “For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet.” Yeshua reigns today from the right hand of the Father, and His Kingdom will have no end. Our current reality reflects the prophetic template in the story of Joseph, but there is a second part of this prophesy, when He will return as the Messiah son of David, to rule forever as king. This is prophesied also in Zechariah 14:9, “And the Lord shall be King over all the earth. In that day it shall be—‘The Lord is one,’ And His name one.” In that day, the Father and Son will be One, and His Name shall be Yeshua.

The brothers, who are the sons of Israel, did not recognize their brother, who is now king over them. In like manner, many Jews today do not recognize their own Messiah—only to those He reveals Himself like He did to the men on the Road to Emmaus. And yet, they need Him, and they tremble before Him, not even knowing His name, for they call Him Hashem, which literally means, “the name.” Hashem is Yeshua, the “name above all names.” “And at the name of Yeshua, every knee will bow, every tongue will confess, that Yeshua HaMashiach is Yahweh, to the glory of Elohim” (Phil. 2:10-11). But not yet. First we all must come to repentance. Many, who Scripture calls “Scoffers,” ask why Yeshua is taking so long to reveal Himself. 2 Peter 3:9 explains God’s rationale: “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.” We must repent, and then trust in and wait on the Lord.

Genesis 43, Genesis 44, Genesis 45

The famine is severe in the land, and I’m not talking about Egypt or Canaan. All throughout history, there has been a famine of the Word of God, and only Christ brings His Bread of life for us to eat. As it says in Psalm 1, “Blessed is the man … whose delight is in the law of the Lord and He studies it day and night.” These are the men who know how to live in the way God desires, and this is for their own good. Now, the Word of God is mostly written by prophets who heard Christ speak to them or were inspired by the Holy Spirit in their writing. When God walked the Earth in the flesh, every Word He spoke was the Word of God. In Joseph, God has set up a historical allegory—meaning that the events that occurred really happened historically, and these are all real people being described, but at the same time these events set up a template for something God would do in the future—a prophetic template.

The Old Testament Scripture prophesies Yeshua on every page, but there are two characters who the Jews view as symbolic for the coming of the Messiah; one of them Joseph and the other David. In an article (https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Articles/Mashiach_ben_Yosef/mashiach_ben_yosef.html) on the website, Hebrew4Christians.com, John Parsons describes the tradition in this way (and I’m going to read the whole thing to you, for it paints the picture well:
“Jewish tradition sometimes refers to two redeemers, each being called “Messiah.” Both of these redeemers are involved in delivering the Jewish people from exile and ushering in the long-awaited Messianic era. These two Messiahs are called Mashiach ben David (ָמִשׁיַח ֶבּן־ָדוִד), "the Messiah the  descendant of David," and Mashiach ben Yosef (ָמִשׁיַחֶבּן־יוֵֹסף), "the Messiah the descendant of Joseph," respectively.”

When Jews typically think of "the Messiah” (i.e., ha-mashiach: הָמִּשׁיַח), however, they generally have in mind Mashiach ben David of the tribe of Judah who shall rule in the Messianic age. Mashiach ben Yosef is said to be of the tribe of Ephraim (son of Joseph), and is also sometimes called Mashiach ben Ephraim (Bavli Sukah 52b). Mashiach ben Yosef will come first, before the advent of Mashiach ben David, to prepare the world for the coming of the kingdom of the LORD. He will fight God's wars (against "Edom," collectively understood as the enemies of Israel) in a time preceding the fulfillment of the Messianic Kingdom (this is sometimes referred to as Ikvot Mashiach, the "footsteps of the Messiah”).” The article continues and is worth reading for greater understanding.

And so Joseph, who has figuratively risen from the dead and has control over all of the bread of the Earth, represents the risen Christ, who provides the bread of life to all who believe in Him. This bread of life that He provides is three-fold: It is the Word of God in written form (Old Testament law), which Paul calls “the letter,” but understood through the power of the Holy Spirit in Truth, which Paul calls “the Spirit.” This is the law and the prophets understood how Yeshua described it on the Road to Emaeus, but now we are walking on that road with Him as we read the Word. And it is the Word that He spoke when He walked the Earth, as recorded by the Apostles. Lastly, it is the Word that the Holy Spirit speaks into our hearts to guide us, the living voice of God that we hear as we go throughout our days that aligns perfectly with the Word of God. (We must test the spirits against the Word, the bread of life.”)

To receive this life-giving bread, we must believe in Him and then follow Him. This is no different than what the people of the ancient world experienced during the seven-year famine. They must believe the stories that Pharaoh’s right-hand man Joseph has the only bread in the Earth and then they must get up and go to where He is to get it. We can’t be just hearers of the Word, but we must be doers of the Word. The law should describe the type of people we are becoming in Christ. If we are lacking, then our hearts ought to go to the Lord to ask Him to fill us where we still hunger, and He will do this through His Holy Spirit. But we must go to Him in His Word, and read this Word, which is the Bread of Life that became flesh.

Joseph was interested in Israel and his sons. While he was providing Bread for all the world (the Goyim, the Gentiles, the Nations), what he wants is all of the lost sheep of Israel to come to him for bread and to dwell among him in the best part of the land. “The man specifically asked about us and our relatives, saying, ‘Is your father still alive? Have you another brother?’” Israel is not happy about this. Jacob resists, and he even considers that he is going to die by acquiescing to this strange ruler among the Gentiles, but he knows that he needs the bread that Joseph offers. He must have it to survive, and so he sends his sons out to him, first holding one of them back, but then reluctantly sending them all. He sends gifts to honor the man, as any man of God would, for the Jews are a nation of Kings and Priests for the Lord God.

Joseph told his brothers that they would not see his face again until all of the brothers came before him, including Benjamin. Yeshua told his brothers that they would not see His face again until they said, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord,” or “Baruch Ha-shem Yeshua.” Joseph provides them with bread. He gives them what they need to survive, but he doesn’t reveal himself until they come before him in repentance for what they have done: for rejecting him. Zechariah 12:10 says, “I will pour out on the house of David and on the inhabitants of Jerusalem the Spirit of grace and of pleading, so that they will look at Me whom they pierced; and they will mourn for Him, like one mourning for an only son, and they will weep bitterly over Him like the bitter weeping over a firstborn.” It’s not until Judah offers himself up as a slave in his brother Benjamin’s place that Joseph knows his heart is repentant. When the Jews repent and call out for Yeshua, this is when Yeshua will come.

Genesis 46, Genesis 47

Notice in Gen. 46 that before Jacob went down to see Joseph in Egypt, he went to Beersheba to sacrifice to God and ask for His guidance. There is nothing in the whole world that Jacob desired more than to see Joseph—he thought he was dead, and yet he still went to God first to make sure what he was doing was according to God’s will. In the first layer of meaning, this is the model we should follow in our lives before we do anything. We should bring our living sacrifice before God, offer Him praise and Thanksgiving and prayer, and then wait for Him to lead. In this case, God said go, and I will make you a nation, and then bring your descendants back to Canaan as promised. Jacob went with shalom. In a second layer of meaning, Israel believes that Yeshua is dead, crucified, buried and gone. But there is nothing they desire more than for the Messiah to come, and come He will, when they say, “Baruch Ha-shem Yeshua.” When Israel prays to God to bring “Yeshua,” this is when He will come.

Now, before Israel and His sons come to Egypt, Joseph advises Pharaoh that Israel and his sons are shepherds, and the Holy Spirit points out here that Egypt does not associate with shepherds, for “every shepherd is an abomination to the Egyptians.” Of course they are. The Egyptians represent the pagan world, the Goyim. They have false gods. What do they want to do with the shepherds of God Most High? Shepherds are metaphorically preachers and teachers of the Word of God. Yet, we see on account of Joseph who saved the whole world from famine and preserved the “Bread of Life” that Pharaoh gives these shepherds the best land he has to offer.

Not only that, but he invites them to take care of his sheep: In Genesis 45, Pharaoh says, “The land of Egypt is at your disposal; settle your father and your brothers in the best of the land, let them live in the land of Goshen; and if you know any capable men among them, then put them in charge of my livestock.” God sent Yeshua to bring the whole world into the faith, not just Israel, but also the Nations. Israel is a nation of kings a priests, a holy nation. And through them, all the nations of the world would be blessed. Through Joseph, the prophetic representative of Yeshua, they were indeed.

We also see in Genesis 47 how Joseph bought all of the land for Pharaoh in exchange for the Bread of life. We read: “So Joseph bought all the land of Egypt for Pharaoh, for every Egyptian sold his field, because the famine was severe upon them. So the land became Pharaoh’s.” What did Yeshua say to us in Luke 14:33: “So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.” In order to receive the Bread of Life and follow Yeshua, we must first offer Him everything we have to be used for His purposes. The people of Egypt were doing this for their savior, Joseph, and Joseph did it for Pharaoh, who in this story prophetically represents God Most High. We read about this in 1 Corinthians 15:27-28: “For Yeshua has put all things in subjection under His feet. But when He says, ‘All things are put in subjection,’ it is clear that this excludes the Father who put all things in subjection to Him. When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.” To clarify, again we read in Zechariah 14:9: “And the Lord will be King over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be the only one, and His name the only one.” “Baruch Ha-shem Yeshua.”

Genesis 48, Genesis 49, Genesis 50

Jacob gives Joseph the double portion culturally given to the eldest son, the blessing that he himself had received from his father Isaac when he obeyed his mother Rebekah and went to his father wearing hairy garments with a farmed-goat stew. Yet, that double portion he gives to Joseph’s sons, Ephraim first (the younger), and then Manasseh (the older) in a prophetic manner. We see these two would be considered tribes of Israel, while Levi was spread throughout the tribes as the scribes and priests and the men were not considered among the 12. Manasseh would actually be divided, one half on one side of the Jordan River, the other half on the other side. Ephraim, who receives the blessing, becomes the spiritual representation for Israel as a whole, and when the nation is divided following Solomon’s reign, Ephraim continues to represent the Northern Kingdom, while Judah represents the southern Kingdom and the capital Jerusalem. Both will be reunited in the end, and Israel will be redeemed.

It’s important to note that in the blessing Jacob gives independently to Joseph; to his sons Ephraim and Manasseh, Jacob confesses God’s nature as three distinct powers, and he passes on the blessing that God had given to him. We read: “The God before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked, the God who has been my shepherd all my life to this day, the angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the boys; and may my name live on in them, and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and may they grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth.” The God that the fathers followed is the Father, the God who was a shepherd was the Holy Spirit, and the Angel who redeemed Jacob and His sons from evil is the Son, the pre-incarnate Christ, who appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Moses, among others, and ultimately came in the flesh. All three manifestations of power come from one God, but our one God is multifaceted and the whole idea of a “trinity” is not just a New Testament concept.

After Jacob sets up this prophetic dynamic, he prophetically speaks to all of his sons. We see that Israel offers his sons both blessings and curses, depending on which son he’s speaking to. These blessings and curses are a precursor to what Moses communicates from God in Deuteronomy 28. I like to focus on the prophesies for Joseph and Judah, because they reflect the prophesies of the first and second coming of Christ. Here are some analysis following of each section:

When Yeshua came in the flesh, he served as a fruitful bough, meaning that he fulfilled the prophesy of Isaiah 61:1-2: He preached good tidings to the poor, he healed the brokenhearted, he proclaimed liberty to the captives, and he opened the prison for those who were bound, freeing them from the bondage of sin. Not only this, but the Saints who follow Him bear the fruit of the Spirit in His name; namely, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control,” as we read in Galatians 5:22-23. For this was His very nature; it is what defined Him. Moreover, this fruit would grow by a well or spring, which represents the living water of the Holy Spirit. Yeshua told the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4:14, “the water that I … give … will become … a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.” And these branches growing by that living water would become so bountiful that they would grow over the wall, which is that middle wall of separation that divided Jews from Gentiles in the Old Covenant. In Ephesians 2:11-22, we read that Yeshua, through His sacrifice on the cross, became the peace that made both Jews and Gentiles one new man in Him. At the same time, archers would bitterly grieve him by shooting at Him with hatred, ultimately leading to His execution on the cross. These are “the fiery darts of the wicked one” that “the shield of faith” overcomes in Ephesians 6:16. And faith indeed overcomes these attacks, for “his bow remained in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the Mighty God of Jacob.” Yeshua was resurrected from the dead. He is the good shepherd, who goes after His lost sheep, and He is that mighty stone of Israel, that the builders rejected, that created a stumbling block for some, a rock of offense to His brethren, but He has become the chief cornerstone of the Temple of God that is now being constructed in spirit and in truth. On his head would be the crown of one distinguished among his brothers, just like the Messiah would rise up out of Israel and become the King of kings and the Lord of lords. He has the blessings of all of Jacob’s ancestors “up to the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills,” for they all knew Him and prophesied about His coming. The Messiah would come from the top of the everlasting mountain of God, for He would be God in the flesh, and though He was born among His brethren in Israel, He would rise far above His brothers. This prophesy describes no one other than Yeshua.

Judah represents the second coming of the Messiah, and Yeshua will become “the lion of the tribe of Judah” when He returns. His hands shall be on the neck of His enemies and His father’s sons will bow down to Him, for all of Israel will bow before their King Messiah Yeshua when He returns on the clouds of Heaven. Note how the prophesy explains that “the scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until Shiloh comes, and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples.” And so from Judah would come all of the kings of Israel and Judah, King David, the man after God’s own heart, and King Yeshua, the son of David who would reign forever and ever. Yeshua is Shiloh, the Messiah, who will be the king of all the peoples, and when He came in the flesh the first time, the reign of the kings of Judah had come to an end. Now He reigns from His throne in Heaven forever and ever. While we might assume that the symbology of His garments being washed in wine and his robes in the blood of grapes signifies only the blood Yeshua shed on the cross for our sins, and this prophesy does have that meaning, it more specifically symbolizes the blood of the great winepress at the End of Days, when the cup of vengeance would be released on the sons of lawlessness. In Isaiah 61, the very next line in the prophesy that refers to the second coming, refers to “the day of vengeance of our Lord.” When Luke 4 records Yeshua reading Isaiah 61 in the synagogue and stating that the prophesy had been fulfilled in the listeners hearing, he stopped before reading this line because it refers to His second coming, when He will judge the heavens and the earth. We read about this great winepress of the wrath of God in Revelation 14, when blood will rise up to the horses bridles from all the sinners who will be destroyed. These red stains on the Messiah’s white robe represent the judgement that is coming at the End of the Age. The prophesy continues, noting how his teeth are white from milk, meaning that He is righteous and without sin. A lion destroys his prey with his teeth, and so we see in this judgment that is coming that the Messiah is blameless and just. This prophesy has yet to be fulfilled, but it will be fulfilled very soon, when the brothers of Judah all call out, “Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.”
 
In Genesis 50, we see Joseph’s brothers go through the process of repentance over time. First they send messengers to Joseph to ask for his forgiveness, but in fear for their lives, they don’t go themselves. This causes Joseph to weep. He’s not weeping in joy, but in sorrow. Why after all he had done for them, would his brothers think Joseph would destroy them? Yeshua has the same mindset about his brothers in Israel today. Once they realize Yeshua is the Messiah they have slain, Yeshua wants them to enjoy the bounty He promises to all who call upon His name, He doesn’t want them to hide themselves in guilt and shame. Ultimately, Joseph’s brothers go themselves before their brother and ask for his forgiveness. While they had intended evil to Joseph, God used it for good in the same way that the Jews crucifixion of Christ was meant for evil, but God used it to save the whole world. Ultimately, all of Israel will be saved on account of this.

Exodus 1, Exodus 2, Exodus 3

Exodus happened, and there is great evidence of it in archeological findings, but you have to look past the secular archaeologists who are trying to obscure it. “Patterns of Evidence: Exodus” is an amazing documentary that presents the facts in a balanced and unassuming manner. See for yourself. Exodus is also a story of how the Lord God intends to rescue His people from the World and bring us into the Promised Land, which represents His Kingdom of Heaven. You will notice that Moses, who brought the law to us in written form, does not bring Israel, the people who are “strivers with God,” over the river into the Promised Land. Only Joshua (Yeshoshua, which is Yeshua for short) can do this, because he presents a faith in God’s promises against all odds. We must combine our faith in God’s promises and what He has done for us through the death and resurrection of our Yeshua on the cross with an obedience to God’s commandments out of our love and trust in Him, and then we will make it into the land.

In the first chapter, it is true that Israel had obeyed God; they were fruitful and increased abundantly, they multiplied and grew exceedingly mighty and they filled the land. This obeys one of the first commandments of God: to go forth and multiply. This was a physical multiplication, as in the number of people and how widespread they live, but it was also a spiritual multiplication. They were shepherds over Pharaoh’s flocks as well as over their own, if we recall from our story of Joseph. They spread knowledge of God and His promises to all who would listen. This is why we read that the new king over Egypt “did not know Joseph.” Joseph is our prophetic representation of Yeshua’s first coming, and to not know Joseph means that He didn’t know about the salvation that God brought through Him. He rejected Messiah. But on top of this, he also rejected the faith that Messiah possessed, which was a faith in God Most High. He hated Israel on account of their faith.

In the story of the midwives who disobeyed Pharaoh, we have an example of what a woman of God ought to do in the face of tyranny, particularly tyranny that is opposed to the will of God. These midwives “feared God,” and so they were willing to risk their careers, their lives and everything they had in order to put God’s commandments first in their lives, and granted, God’s commandments were not yet written down; they were written on their hearts. The king gave them a chance to succumb to his will and forsake God’s will, but even then they refused to go along with it. God rewarded the midwives obedience and provided for them, so Pharaoh had to seek to do evil another way. Rather than coax the Israeli women to forsake their own, they had to bring the violence themselves. This is the pattern of every tyranny ever to increase in the Earth. First there are voluntary carrots to comply and special favor offered, and then there is force.

Moses was likely born three months early, it seems from the context, for he was quiet for three months, the text says. Premie babies are quiet until their due date, and then they make a lot of noise. Pharaoh’s daughter had mercy on the baby floating in the Ark (Tebah תֵּבָה), which is the word used here, and thus we know that her heart was pure. What besides Moses was put into the Tebah? Later in Torah, we see the Covenant of God written on the tablets of stone and the manna that fell from Heaven put into the Ark of the Covenant, and we know that Yeshua was “a prophet like unto Moses.” We also see Noah constructing a Tebah to escape from the destruction of the whole world, with one door in to salvation, also representing Yeshua. She had faith in Israel and God’s promises, and thus she even paid Moses’s mother to nurse him until he was weened and then made him her own son rather than report the male child to her father, who would have put him to death.

Moses’s journey from here is one of discovering who he is and growing in his own faith. With the law written on his heart, he took the law into his own hands and even murdered a man for his violence against Israel. Yet even the very next day he withheld his hand and simply brought the Truth, rather than enforce it himself. He would pay the consequences for his sin and have to run from his luxurious life, to humble himself into the form of a servant, a shepherd. His first act in humbling himself was to save the seven daughters of the Man of God Jethro from false shepherds who tried to keep them from the well of water. Moses chased the false teachers of God’s will away and watered Jethro’s flock from the well of living water. He would marry Zipporah, a name that means bird (think dove—i.e., Holy Spirit), and in this new marriage relationship would shepherd the Gentiles in the faith as a stranger in a strange land for a time, until God called him to return to rescue the children of Israel.

When God called Moses, he had learned the lessons of how to properly apply God’s commandments in his life. Now that he has been faithful in little, God would show him how he was to be faithful in much. But Moses was not ready for this kind of calling. He gave every excuse in the book until God grew angry at him. God, who Was, who Is and who Is to come, who Created the Heavens and the Earth and everything in them, who makes the mouths mute and then gives them words to speak, to show His strength in weakness, can do whatever He says He is going to do. Despite Moses’s initial doubts, God was about to do great things through him, and God was going to show the whole world who He is, despite anyone’s doubts. By the time He finished with the Exodus from Egypt, no one would doubt that God has power, vision and knowledge to address everything we face in this life, but some would still rebel against this Truth that cannot be denied. Why? To show God’s glory!

Exodus 4, Exodus 5, Exodus 6

Moses’s pushback against the Lord can be seen two ways: 1) As obstinance and disbelief, worthy of death. Is this why the Lord tried to kill him? 2) As humility. A prophet like unto Moses was humbled unto death on the cross, and thus God highly exalted Him and gave Him a name above every name—Yeshua. And so when Zipporah circumcised Moses’s son and throws the bloody flesh at his feet, saying, “you are a husband of blood to me,” we see here a prophetic template of that prophet like unto Moses. Blood is needed for atonement. God was trying to kill Moses. Was it for Moses’s disbelief or for his humility? In either case, we read in Isaiah 53:10, “Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, And the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand.” God would make Yeshua, like Moses, a sacrifice for the people, to give the people the opportunity to atone for their sin and be healed.

When Moses goes before Pharaoh, Pharaoh says something very particular that we ought to focus in on. After Moses tells Pharaoh that Yahweh has commanded Israel to celebrate a feast in the wilderness with Him, Pharaoh says, “Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and besides, I will not let Israel go.” Note that this statement is made prior to the Lord hardening Pharaoh’s heart. At this point, Pharaoh had an opportunity to melt his heart toward the Lord, to repent of the evil he had done against the Israeli male babies, as well as the slavery he has imposed on the adults, to repent of his hatred of Israel and Israel’s God, and make all things right. We all have that opportunity when the Lord confronts us with His Truth, or convicts us of our sins. The question is: What do we do with it? Do we repent and turn toward Him and obey His ways, or do we harden our own hearts and set ourselves up for judgment, as Pharaoh did. The Lord later hardens Pharaoh’s heart to show His glory, but not before Pharaoh fully rejected the Lord.

Instead of repent and allow Israel to celebrate a Sabbath feast to the Lord in the wilderness, Pharaoh lashes out against Israel and accuses them of laziness on account of their wanting to keep this Sabbath rest. He says in verse 17: “You are lazy, very lazy; for that reason you say, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.’ So go now and work.” It is with extreme sadness that we have seen false early “Christian” teachers use the same rationale as Pharaoh to take Christianity off track from the teachings of Christ and the commandments of God. Consider Ignatius of Antioch in his Epistle to the Magnesians, when he said, “Let us therefore no longer keep the Sabbath after the Jewish manner, and rejoice in the days of idleness; for he that does not work let him not eat,” taking 2 Thessalonians 3:10 out of context, of course. Keeping Sabbath isn’t Jewish, per se, it’s a commandment of God, one that He gave to the Jews first, but meant for all the world to obey.

From this rationale, Ignatius, like Pharaoh, led Christians into worship of pagan gods, and the sun-god worship of Rome eventually was overlaid with Christian imagery, mixing the Holy with the profane as Solomon had done in Jerusalem. Solomon’s sin of mixing pagan symbology with worship of God Most High led to the division of Israel into northern and southern kingdoms. Likewise, Christianity suffered schism after schism on account of these false teachings that unfortunately still have their place in Christian denominations today, and now pastors teach that you can be a proud transgender homosexual and still know God. We are called to “come out of her, my people;” to come out of the false religious beliefs of “Mystery Babylon.” Interestingly, this clear lesson from God that showed its face in the antisemitism of the early church is also very present here in the Exodus story, when God also told Moses to tell Israel, “come out of Egypt, my people.”

God commanded all of His followers to celebrate each Saturday as a Sabbath rest, and each of the seven Holy Convocation Days, including Passover, is a Sabbath rest. Israel ultimately celebrated the Sabbath in this story, as God brought them out of Egypt with an outstretched arm (that right arm, which is Yeshua). Pharaoh, in response to God’s commandment for Israel to worship Him during a Holy Convocation Day—essentially to do no work and set the day apart as Holy—forced Israel to work. This is what the enemy—Satan—does over and over again, all throughout history to the present day. When God has set a day apart as Holy and commanded us to sanctify it to spend with Him, Satan will do everything He can to steal, kill and destroy that honor.

God won’t let Pharaoh have the pleasure. While he wins for a time, he eventually loses because he rebelled against God. Anyone who rebels against God and His commandments will be destroyed, and Pharaoh is among those caught up in this eternal Truth. In this instance, Pharaoh is representative of Satan and every antichrist who has ever walked the Earth. This story repeats over and over, and not just in the Bible. Hitler, Stalin, Che, Mao—all evil dictators who think their way is better than God’s way will be destroyed. It’s terrifying to stand up to a person like this, but this is what God has asked Moses to do. He doesn’t want to, but ultimately he obeys. Those who obey the Lord, like Moses, in the face of potential humiliation, torture or death, will be used by Him to bring freedom to God’s people by introducing them to the salvation that only comes through Christ. They’ll be saved themselves in the process.

Exodus 7, Exodus 8, Exodus 9

We saw in earlier chapters and now see in Exodus 7-9 that Pharaoh hardened his own heart as God brought plague after plague against Pharaoh’s obstinate hatred of Israel and Israel’s God through the hand of Moses. To Pharaoh, God has made Moses “as God.” For a man who believes himself to be god, this was a direct head-to-head battle, but it wasn’t. Satan has this same mindset as does his followers, thinking that good vs. evil is an equal playing field, the ying and the yang, if you will. This is false and untrue (See Ezekiel 28:1-19), and God shows this to us in the story of Pharaoh, also. We haven’t gotten to the part where God hardens Pharaoh’s heart; Pharaoh still has a chance to repent. But once a certain point is reached that only God knows, God will harden Pharaoh’s heart for the purpose of showing His glory to those who still have a chance to repent. Pharaoh, like Satan, will be destroyed. Read Deuteronomy 28 and you will see how God works in this way. See also Revelation 20:10.

We see a prophetic template in the plagues of Egypt representing the plagues that will be poured out on the world in the Last Days (See Revelation 16). Israel, those who “strive after God,” do not suffer from the plagues, but those who are of the world experience the wrath. In the story of hail, there were Egyptians who brought their livestock into the barns. We read: “Everyone among the servants of Pharaoh WHO FEARED THE WORD OF THE LORD hurried to bring his servants and his livestock into the houses.” These among the Gentiles were spared, and they later became the “mixed multitude” who went with Israel out of Egypt. It’s essential for us to see this metaphor, because it’s probably the most relevant to us in these days we’re living in; for those of us who trust Yeshua. The hail didn’t strike Israel, even though they were present in the land, but the hail struck the Egyptians who did not prepare for the judgment of God. This is how it will be when the wrath of the Lamb comes to pass.

We see in the waxing and waning of Pharaoh’s mercy the same lack of progression in people of the world who will not relinquish their rebellious heart against the Gospel. They see signs and wonders—even miracles—they may endure suffering—and yet they refuse to turn to the Lord. They blame God, instead of repent and turn their hearts to Him for mercy. Their heart tugs at them—and Yeshua Himself says He stands at the door and knocks—but only the ones who humble themselves and surrender will have a chance to escape destruction. We read in Revelation 16:21: “From the sky huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, fell on people. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible.” But we also read in Revelation 14:12, which I will paraphrase: Here is how the Saints will endure: they will keep the commandments of God and their faith in Yeshua. The Lord’s people make it by faith out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and to the Promised Land.

Exodus 10, Exodus 11, Exodus 12

In Exodus 10:3, God gives Pharaoh his last chance to repent, saying: “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before Me? Let My people go, so that they may serve Me.” God had reached his limit with Pharaoh’s rebellious heart and no longer offers him any chances to repent. There comes a time when a rebellious heart will be destroyed and there is no going back. We read about this in Hebrews 10:26-26, “For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries.” Pharaoh reached this point, and even his false cries for forgiveness in Exodus 10:16-17 were followed with half-hearted obedience. The Lord doesn’t buy it, and thus we read in Exodus 10:20, “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” He will now use Pharaoh’s utter destruction to show His glory to those who obey Him.

In the final plague against Pharaoh’s Egypt, God establishes the Passover Holy Convocation and the Feast of Unleavened Bread as “‘a memorial” that ought to be celebrated “as a feast to the Lord throughout your generations … as a permanent ordinance” (Exodus 12:14). Importantly, we read in Exodus 12:47-49, we read: “All the congregation of Israel are to celebrate this. But if a stranger resides with you and celebrates the Passover to the Lord, all of his males are to be circumcised, and then he shall come near to celebrate it; and he shall be like a native of the land. But no uncircumcised male may eat it. The same law shall apply to the native as to the stranger who resides among you.” This law does not say that Gentiles should not keep the Passover, but on the contrary, it extends the blessing of keeping the Passover to all Gentiles, so long as they are circumcised. With this, it is critically important to understand what “circumcision” means.

First of all, we know that the Passover Lamb was slain and its blood was spread on the doorposts using hyssop, and this represents in every way the crucifixion on the cross of our Lord and Savior Yeshua. On account of His death, our sins are “passed over,” so to speak, and do not lead to our soul’s eternal death. As Yeshua celebrated a Passover Seder with His disciples, He said, “do THIS in memory of me.” It is critical to note that Yeshua was referring to the memorial of Passover, which He commanded His followers to keep every year, one week per year as the Bible indicates, as a memorial to Him, our Passover Lamb. In 1 Corinthians 11:23-34, Paul explains that we ought not eat the Passover in an unworthy manner, but rather that we ought to come together with understanding of the holiness of the annual event. This includes not coming up with our own ceremonies after the commandments of men, but rather obeying God and the way He has called us to worship Him.

Also, in 1 Cor. 5:8, Paul writes, “Therefore let’s celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Paul directly refers to keeping Passover; not just Jews, but all Gentiles also. Of critical importance, he reinterprets Ex. 12:47-49, noting that any sin in us must be rooted out prior to the feast. If we have sin, we must repent before coming to the feast. And this is a direct interpretation of what it means to be circumcised in the heart. Read Colossians 2:11-15. Here’s verse 11: “in [Christ] you were also circumcised with a circumcision performed without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ,” By throwing off all unrighteousness by His blood, the blood of the Passover Lamb of God, we invite the Holy Sprit in to us to circumcise our hearts and sanctify us by removing all sin, and then this same Spirit helps us walk in righteousness.

With the glory of our New Covenant interpretation of Torah, we now understand that the Lord commands us Gentiles and Jews alike (Read Colossians 2), to keep the Passover in memory of our Passover Lamb Yeshua as well as the Passover Lamb that freed Israel from Egypt. Both lambs help those who both believe and trust in God—what He has done for us as well as what He promises to do—and then do what He commands us to do—to be cleansed, so we can walk in righteousness. We cannot be righteous without His grace. Because of His grace, we must choose to be righteous on account of our love for Him first before all else, and He will help us, just as He brought Israel out of Egypt with His outstretched arm. Pharaoh, who represents Satan, cannot hold us in bondage if we trust the blood of the Lamb. We are freed by the blood, by His body being hung on that tree, that doorpost between Heaven and Earth, and God’s Angel of Death will passover our sins on account of this. Let us keep the feast in faith.

Exodus 13, Exodus 14, Exodus 15

From the blood sacrifice of the lamb and the exodus of Israel from Egypt begins a new historical allegory that ends when Joshua conquers Jericho. The blood of the lamb frees us from the bondage of sin, and we are to leave this sin behind us and not go back to it. Upon our faith in the blood for salvation by grace, we are baptized in the Sea of Reeds and come out the other side into the wilderness, which is the rest of our lives. Now we praise the Lord and worship Him, and He goes with us. However, we face trial and tribulation all along the way. Do we look back at our life of bondage to sin and return to it? Do we grumble against the Lord? Or do we trust Him and believe in His promises, enduring whatever confronts us in this life, knowing the Lord will fulfill His promises? If we keep our faith—and this is an “IF” proposition; not a guarantee—then we can go with Yeshua into the promised Land when He returns. If we do not, then we die in the wilderness and suffer the second death.

The Lord continues to emphasize the Passover celebration with importance to anyone who believes in Him, and I point out again that Yeshua has commanded us to keep the Passover Seder and the Feast of Unleavened Bread in memory of Him. The Lord says, “you shall keep this ordinance at its appointed time from year to year.” Paul writes, “Therefore, keep the feast” (1 Corinth. 5:8). Not only are we to keep the feast, but we shall teach our sons and daughters why we keep the feast. It is because of what the Lord did in Egypt when His “powerful hand” brought Israel out of bondage. It is also because of what the Lord did at Calvary when His powerful hand was sacrificed to free us from the bondage of sin and death. Look at Deuteronomy 6 where the Lord says to teach the Word of God to our children and to meditate on it no matter where we are or what we’re doing. Every word we speak and every action we take should be aligned with it, and that alignment, as Yeshua taught us, begins in our hearts.

Keeping the Passover is seen “as a sign on your hand and a memorial between your eyes,” which is on your forehead. This is the MARK OF GOD. I can’t emphasize enough how important this is. Keeping Passover, as Jesus commanded us to do, is a sign that we are doing what He asked us to do, and a memorial of remembrance for what He did for us. He commanded this for us, and Paul, speaking to Gentiles, also commanded this. Not only this, He said not to keep the Passover improperly, as MOST Christians do today on account of the great evil that Constantine imposed on the Gentile church. On account of his hatred of the Jews, he moved the feast of Passover from the way it was intended to be aligned with the Pagan Easter celebration, which worshipped the goddess of fertility. Christians who continued to practice the commandments of God were murdered.

The mark of the beast also appears on the right hand and the forehead. We can choose which mark to take: We either obey God and bear His mark by doing, saying and thinking the things He has commanded, or we obey Man and bear the mark of the beast by doing, saying and thinking the things he has commanded. There is no in between. In Revelation 3, Yeshua says He will spit the lukewarm out of His mouth. We must choose to either obey God or not, but to say we obey God while we are mixing His worship with the profane rituals of pagan religions that sacrifice to demons is even worse than not believing at all, according to Yeshua. Paul writes in 1 Corinth. 10:21-22: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? We are not stronger than He, are we?” Choose life, and obey our Lord alone.

Ultimately, when the Lord commands Israel to turn back and wait for the Egyptians to come to bring them back, this is his first test of their obedience. Satan comes after us even harder right before we’re going to be baptized and right after it. He does not want to lose any person to salvation, for his goal is to destroy each and every one of us in our sins. God asks us to wait on Him and the salvation that He brings mightily, without doing anything ourselves. We just simply need to believe and trust Him. He parts the waters for us, He makes a way for us, and we just need to put one foot after another and walk along the path He has prepared for us. “The Lord will fight for you, while you keep silent.” Do we believe this? In the midst of spiritual attack, it is our only option. We must pray and fast and trust in the Lord alone, and He will get us through. The Lord really did part the waters of the Sea of Reeds, and He really did bury Pharaoh’s army.

Historically, there is record of a Pharaoh who follows the patterns of Exodus. This Pharaoh watched much of his army die in the sea, and he watched his slaves escape. He had to go into the lands of Canaan and the lands of the Philistines at an unusual time of year to replace them. History also shows a massive decline in the kingdom of Egypt following this time period. Pharaoh didn’t go into the sea after his men, but his kingdom was left in a shambles after Israel left. In the land of Goshen, there is evidence of a Semitic people living in luxury, and then declining into slavery. There is even a record of there being a disproportionate number of females in the later population. And there is a record of 12 graves, with one of those graves made to be more noble than the rest. This grave, the grave of Joseph, does not have a body in it, for Moses carried it with him when he left Egypt and brought it up to the Promised Land. Watch “Patterns of Evidence: Exodus” to learn more.

The Song of Moses was sung with celebration following the victory of God over Pharaoh. Moses sang, “I will sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted; The horse and its rider He has hurled into the sea. “The Lord is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation; This is my God, and I will praise Him; My father’s God, and I will exalt Him. … In Your faithfulness You have led the people whom You have redeemed; In Your strength You have guided them to Your holy habitation. … The Lord shall reign forever and ever.”  In Revelation 15:3-4, we see that the Saints of Yeshua will sing the Song of Moses and the Song of the Lamb on the Last Day as God brings His wrath on the wicked: “Great and marvelous are Your works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of the saints! Who shall not fear You, O Lord, and glorify Your name? For You alone are holy. For all nations shall come and worship before You, For Your judgments have been manifested.”

The Israelites quickly fear the world following their magnificent deliverance; in just three days they realize they don’t have water to drink in the desert wilderness, something that would bring death very quickly to them in the flesh. Having just witnessed one of the greatest miracles of all time, they doubt the Lord’s provisioning. We must be careful not to do this, for after we are saved by the Lord Yeshua, we will face many trials and tribulations in our lives. Will we trust the Lord to get us through them? Moses does the right thing by crying out to the Lord. Prayer is the answer to any trouble we face in this life. It ought to be our first answer. First the Lord responds by instructing Moses to purify the water with a specific tree branch, prophetically representing the cross of Christ giving us access to the living waters of His Holy Spirit.

The Lord takes the opportunity to remind Israel about the need for faith: “If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in His sight and listen to His commandments and keep all His statutes, I will put none of the diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I, the Lord, am your healer.” God will heal us of all disease and forgive us of all our sins as long as we have faith in Him and do as He has commanded. He will separate us as a people away from those who are perishing, as Israel, the strivers with God, as opposed to Egypt, those who are of the world. If we go with Him, He will lead us to springs of living water, where there is fruit to eat and enjoy, everything we need to sustain us.

Exodus 16, Exodus 17, Exodus 18

The people grumble in the wilderness, much like so many of Christians grumble against the Lord when things don’t go our way. This angers the Lord. It shows that we do not trust Him, and neither are we grateful for what He has done and what He has promised. In Psalm 116:17, we see the proper approach: “I will offer to You the sacrifice of thanksgiving, And will call upon the name of the LORD.” Yeshua gives us the same guideline in Matthew 6:10-13. Despite their grumbling, the Lord still brings blessing to them. And the Lord will do this for us, too, but He will not do this forever. At some point, we do have to trust Him and be grateful for what we have. We can see this play out here in our story, because the Lord indeed blesses them, but then He also tests them to see if they will follow Him with trust. In this test, He brings them supernatural provision but commands them to rely on it a particular way, by keeping His Sabbath Day holy, the day that He consecrated in the Garden.

We can see throughout Exodus 16 the whole of the Christian experience with the Lord. Here we are in the world, during which we have six days to work for food, which the Lord provides (the manna from Heaven). On the sixth day, preparation day, we are to prepare food for two days so we can rest with the Lord and celebrate with Him through thanksgiving and praise and worship. He literally commands us to set the Sabbath Day (Saturday) apart to rest and be grateful toward Him. We see clearly that the Sabbath is a gift: “the Lord has given you the Sabbath,” we read. It is a gift for us to be able to spend a day with the Lord, a day of thanks and praise. If we go out on the Sabbath looking for food, the Lord will be angry. If we try to cook or prepare food on the Sabbath, the Lord will be angry. We are not to go out and work on the Sabbath Day in any way.

To make the Sabbath commandment more clear to us than ever to Christians, Yeshua tells us in John 6:57-58, “Just as the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, the one who eats Me, he also will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.” If Yeshua is the manna from Heaven that we must eat—meaning to take into ourselves and make a part of our own being—so that we can live forever, then we clearly must celebrate the Sabbath by taking in the double portion He has prepared for us on that day, setting aside the day as “a Sabbath observance, a holy Sabbath to the Lord.” Yeshua said in Matthew 11:28, “Come to me, all you who are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He wants us to do this for Him. He commands us repeatedly, just like He did the Israelites in the wilderness. Why is it so hard for His people to obey this light yoke?

Read through Exodus 16 carefully. We can clearly glean what is required of us and why right here. This is not just for the Israelites in the desert. God gives commandments as everlasting statutes for all of His people who follow after Him. We can see that the Sabbath is among these everlasting commandments by reading Exodus 20, Deuteronomy 5, and Leviticus 23. God couldn’t possibly give this commandment more emphasis, and never does He ever do away with it. Nor does the Apostle Paul, who lacks the authority to do so anyway. Only God can give commandments, and Yeshua has done nothing but explain that His commandments are eternal. Just read Matthew 5:17-20, and this could not be more clear. For six days we labor, for six days we do charitable works, for six days we go out and spread the Gospel, but on that seventh day, Saturday, we ought to be doing one thing and one thing only: resting in the Lord, at church, at home, celebrating the Lord’s eternal Holy Convocation.

The battle against Amalek has significance beyond what I can get into today, but note that Joshua leads the battle with Moses standing on the mountain worshipping. Note that Haman is an Amalakite in the story of Esther. There are many other references throughout Scripture. Keep this in mind as we read this year: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Write this in a book as a memorial and recite it to Joshua, that I will utterly wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.’” Then, Moses said, “Because the Lord has sworn, the Lord will have war against Amalek from generation to generation.” According to Chabad.org, “Eliphaz, son of Esau (the patriarch Jacob’s brother and sworn enemy), and his concubine Timna had a child named Amalek. Amalek grew up in Esau’s household, imbibing Esau’s pathological hatred of Jacob’s descendants along the way. His offspring became the nation of Amalek, and they lived to the south of the Land of Israel, in what is now known as the Negev Desert.”

Exodus 18 is also of critical importance for our understanding of Church leadership and is analogous to what we read in the Book of 1 Timothy regarding overseers, deacons and elders as well as several other New Testament chapters on church leadership. Churches ought to have leaders of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens, and here’s the awesome part: They will all judge the minor matters themselves, but they will bring every major matter to the prophet like unto Moses, who is Yeshua the Messiah. Yeshua is the people’s representative before God, who sits on His right hand. He admonishes us about the statutes and laws, and Has instructed us in the same, and He has made it known to us the way we ought to walk and the work we are to do. But the leaders of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens that HE selects, are to lead the flocks and help them navigate through life, with the Word of God and the Holy Spirit helping them. The point is so that all the people of God can go to their places in peace.

Exodus 19, Exodus 20, Exodus 21

I’ve wondered at Ex. 19 for a while. It reads, “In the 3rd month after the sons of Israel had gone out of the land of Egypt, ON THAT VERY DAY they came into the wilderness of Sinai. …  ‘Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and have them wash their garments; and have them ready for the 3rd day, for on the 3rd day the Lord will come down on Mt. Sinai in the sight of all the people.” Jewish tradition holds that God gave the 10 Commands to Israel on Shavuot (Pentacost), which is the 7th day of the 3rd month following Nisan/Aviv 1 this year, or 50 days starting from First Fruits (Resurrection Sunday), which is the day after the Sabbath (Sunday) during the week of Passover. But Israel didn’t leave Egypt on the first day of Nisan. Passover is the 14th day at evening, which begins the 15th day of Nisan. The only way to parse this is that God spoke to all Israel on the 3rd day, but handed the commandments to Moses on the 7th day (Shavuot), which gives him 4 days to climb.

Yeshua said that not one jot or tittle of the law would be done away with until Heaven and Earth are done away with, and He also said that Heaven and Earth may be done away with, but His Word will never be done away with. In other words, the commands of God are eternal. We read them, as God gave them to all humanity, in Exodus 20. They are simple, elegant and good. They are the “perfect law of liberty,” as James writes. The people were so terrified at hearing them spoken, they asked Moses to intercede on their behalf. The Lord says this is good, for He planned to do just that on the cross at Calvary. We can’t possibly keep these commands on our own, for our spirit may be willing, but the flesh is weak. However, with the help of the Holy Spirit, not only can we keep the commandments, we can be perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. Thank God for the gift of grace from our Lord, for we can know the law and keep the law in spirit and truth when we have total faith and trust in Yeshua.

Exodus 22, Exodus 23, Exodus 24

I am still unclear about the timing for Shavuot. I will need to devote more study to it. It may be a symbolic timing. I do know that Shavuot celebrates the Holy Spirit coming before Israel, and the Holy Spirit “finger of God” wrote the 10 commandments on tablets of stone. It also represents when the Holy Spirit fell on the Apostles and Disciples following Christ’s Ascension, writing the law on their hearts. Both happened on Pentecost, but the Bible’s chronology doesn’t make it clear in this section.

NOTE: Within today’s reading, the Lord sends His Angel with Israel on their journey, and the Name of the Lord is “IN” this Angel. This is the pre-incarnate Christ.

The Lord continues to illuminate His commandments to His people, and they are far more detailed than the 10 given in Exodus 20. These commandments answer all of the specific questions that might have been raised from the first 10, which are general. Restitution is big in Exodus 22, and it answers the question in detail, what does it mean, “thou shall not steal.” Also, we can see that just sleeping with a woman (or man) while unmarried constitutes a marriage in the eyes of God, and to violate this marriage is to commit adultery. There are far more adulterers out there than often assumed. Justice is evident in these commandments, and if the whole world followed them, it would be a much better place. Thank God Yeshua washes us clean of our sins against these commandments so that we can devote ourselves to keeping them from the moment of our cleansing without guilt. God is long-suffering and merciful, and forgives those who turn to Him in repentance.

In Exodus 23, some highlights are that we are to love our enemy by helping him with his ox or donkey, which is just an example. Yeshua clarifies these laws further in Matthew 5. We see that the Sabbath rest is not just Saturday, but also during the appointed times that God has ordained, the seven consecrated days He innumerates in Numbers 23 and begins to point out here.

In Exodus 24, we see that the First Covenant was solidified with blood, and the people agreed to it, but then later broke it. This set the stage for the New Covenant to be made through the coming of our Lord Yeshua HaMashiach, and that Covenant was also sealed with blood. Hebrews speaks about this prolifically, particularly in chapters 8-10. It’s interesting to point out that Moses, Nadab, Abihu and seventh of the elders of Israel saw God and ate and drank with Him at the setting up of this covenant, similar to how Yeshua and His apostles ate and drank together during the inauguration of the New Covenant. Moses and Joshua then go up alone to commune with the Lord for 40 days and 40 nights.

Addendum:

Dad says: “Do not allow a sorceress to live.”  With the exception of direct communion with His very self, through Christ and His own Holy Spirit, there can be no doubt that God is displeased with people who seek to communicate with the spirit world.  That much is irrefutable. The so called “black arts” are also held to be reprehensible in New Testament teachings but the admonitions stop short at enforcing a death sentence for the practice. Not all of the laws that God gave the Israelites are appropriate for believers who preceded the ancient tribes.  Still, some like this one, were unjustly and inappropriately enforced.

My response:
I’d invite you to reconsider your thinking. You only need to look at King Saul’s excommunication of witches from Israel, which was a direct obedience to the commandment, to know that we are not supposed to interpret the “letter of the law,” but the “Spirit of the law,” as Paul later explains. You cannot take one verse out of context, “Do not allow a sorceress to live” or more accurately, “You shall not permit a witch to live,” and believe that this means we need to put all witches to death. It doesn’t mean that, although a death sentence is certainly permissible if executed by civil law. Still, Saul in his case obeyed the commandment fully, by excommunicating the witches and thus not permitting them to live among the people of God. This is the spirit of the law. We are not to allow witchcraft or paganism to “coexist” among us in the Church, but we are to excommunicate them from the church and to not allow their pagan practices within our holy convocations or even within our lives.

You see Paul give a different example than you have chosen. He cites in 1 Corinthians a man who is committing adultery with his father’s wife. The punishment in Torah for this sin is death, just like the punishment for witchcraft. Paul actually instructs the Corinthians to put the man to death using the exact language of Torah, but he instructs them to do so through excommunication, rather than execution. If the civil laws allowed for execution, such a penalty could be executed. The government is one of God’s tools for bringing justice into the world, and judgment, also. However, by no means does the law give indivduals the authority to execute judgment. God says also, “Vengeance is mine. I shall repay.” He leaves it to us to call for repentance, to offer forgiveness to those who repent, and to love those in the midst of their sins, not by accepting their sin, but by telling them the Truth with love and leading them away from sin. Civil law may still bring judgment on those we forgive.

In conclusion, you are incorrect when you say, “Not all of the laws that God gave the Israelites are appropriate for believers.” In fact, the opposite is true. Every single law that God gave to all of humanity through the Israelites apply to us and should be upheld fully, in spirit and in truth. Did God make you and me an arbtrar of which laws of His are worthy and which are not? He did nothing of the sort. In fact, God, when He came in the flesh, said that NOT ONE JOT OR TITLE OF THE LAW WILL BE DONE AWAY WITH. He also said that anyone who taught that it was acceptable to disregard the law would not make it into Heaven. This is no small matter. Our Lord Yeshua has made this very clear. The law is fully upheld in every way by God and we will be judged by it. Thank God for His blood which washes our sins clean, but only when we repent and then go and sin no more. If we continue in sin, as many witches do, we will be destroyed. There is no forgiveness for those who practice lawlessness.

Dad responded: “Yes, I agree..... it is the "spirit" of the law that is relevant.”

My response:
The Spirit of law, yes. Consider 1 Corinthians 14, but especially verses 32-33: "And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. For God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints."

What this means is that the interpretation of the law, which is prophesy, by the power of the Holy Spirit, must align with the rest of Scripture (the prophets). The law doesn't mean what we want it to mean. It means what Scripture says it means when we interpret Scripture in its entirety. Scripture means what God wants it to mean, only.

Exodus 25, Exodus 26, Exodus 27

Today’s Christians need to study Exodus 25-27 and the related Scripture about the Tabernacle, because as God says repeatedly, “See that you make them by the pattern for them, which was shown to you on the mountain.” The Mountain of God is a metaphor for the Kingdom of God. As we learn when reading Hebrews, these models were made in the wilderness as a shadow of the real Kingdom that is coming, or in other words, as an image of what is real in God’s Kingdom. If we want to know who God is, what He promised to us, and how it will come to being, we need to study these patterns that He provided as a sign for His true throne room. It would take me all day to scratch the surface of this, so allow me to share a few points:

As God begins to instruct Israel to construct the Tabernacle, He first asks Israel to contribute whatever their heart moves them to contribute to its construction. We only need to go back a few chapters in Exodus to remember that God instructed Israel to lawfully plunder the Egyptians as they were leaving by asking them for gold, silver, bronze, violet, purple and scarlet material, and the like. This was prophesied by God many, many years earlier when He spoke to the patriarchs. God had been setting this up for hundreds of years. Now, rather than command Israel to contribute what He gave them through His own lovingkindness, He asks them to contribute whatever their heart moves them to contribute. NONE of these things belonged to them; God gave them ALL to them. And yet, God does not demand them, but only requests the people to offer what their heart moves them to offer. What do we have to offer to God who gives us all things? What do we freely give to Him in what He has called us to do?

Now God is instructing the tabernacle to be built as a place for Him to dwell with Israel. This isn’t just a place for religious ceremony, but a dwelling place for God’s presence to be with His people. We celebrate God’s presence among us during the Feast of Tabernacles today, and we remember this time in the wilderness. But we also remember the time when God game to tabernacle with Man in the flesh, when He took on the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross, and how God greatly exalted Him, so that we can confess that Yeshua is Yahweh to God’s glory! Finally, we look forward to the time when God will come to dwell with us forever; when He brings us a New Heaven and a New Earth and sits on His throne in our midst to light the eternal day. As God sets up the Tabernacle in the wilderness, He is setting us up to understand that He will one day dwell with us forever. We must first bring our free will offering—our entire being—before Him and offer it up.

We are now to come before the altar of God in Heaven to bring our prayers to Him, and from there He provides us with His commandments which are written on our hearts so that we know what step to take next. We see Him dwelling among the seven lamp stands, which represent the different parts of His Body that each illuminate one, whole and united Church in Yeshua. We see that clear oil is needed from beaten olives to illuminate the lamp stands. We must be grafted in to the Olive Tree of Israel if we are to produce the fruit that comes from the tree, and we must have the Holy Spirit dwelling with in us to produce the pure oil when we are pressed through the trials and tribulations of life. Will our light shine? Will our lamps burn continually. And will we, like the wise virgins, have enough oil to burn until the Messiah returns for us? Only if we endure in our faith in Yeshua and keep the commandments of God.

Exodus 28, Exodus 29
Exodus 30, Exodus 31, Exodus 32

Let our hearts be the altar for burning incense, which is our prayer. We read in Revelation 8:4: “And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, ascended before God from the angel’s hand.” Let our mouths bring praises forth to God, and let them be overlaid with gold, which is the righteousness of Messiah. Let our light shine brightly from one of seven lamps, united at the root, reflecting His righteousness in our lives, showing the world that we are not like the people who are of the World, but we are a people set apart. Now that the veil has been removed from the Holy of Holies by the Blood of Yeshua—He is our “atoning cover”—let us come before our God with clean hands and pure hearts, fully repentant of our sin, turning toward Him and walking only in His ways by the power of His Holy Spirit. Let God accept His blood for our atonement forever on the horns of His altar forever in our place; praise His Holy Name! I pray this in the name of the one and only Messiah Yeshua.

If the Lord ever were to call for a census of all of His people, the commandment here is for every person counted among the sons of Israel to contribute a half ounce of silver to the Congregation at large. Without fulfilling this command, plague results as a judgment for sin. We see this take place in 1 Samuel 21 and 2 Samuel 24, when God allows Satan to bring judgment on Israel for their sin through such a census. God doesn’t seem to command a census here, but only that any census that is called is used for His purposes of building up the Assembly financially, rather than for the purposes of Man.

As we come into the faith, Yeshua commanded that we all be baptized, confessing with our hearts and our mouths that He is Messiah. The baths for washing outside the sanctuary are a type of baptism that is required before coming before God’s altar. Fulfilling this commandment is simple. When you truly come to believe in Christ, get baptized. Before you come before Him on the Sabbath or a Holy Convocation, take a shower, but also, cleanse your hearts. We are standing before God Most High. What manner of honor do we owe Him when we come before Him to praise and worship Him? The incense and anointing oil is only meant for Levitical priests. God says so Himself.

It’s interesting that we see Bezalel, son of Uri, in the tribe of Judah in Exodus was “filled with the Spirit of God.” For anyone who says the Holy Spirit did not fill people prior to the New Testament Pentecost, this verse discredits that. It’s amazing that God’s Holy Spirit is breathed into certain men in the Old Covenant to do His works. In this case, Bezalel was used for artistic expression of God’s glory. And yet, at the same time, God was dwelling with them all in the Tabernacle. In the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit is available to “all flesh,” as we read in Jeremiah 31:31. This does not mean that all flesh receives the Holy Spirit, for Yeshua tells us in John 14 what we must do to receive Him. It means that the Holy Spirit is now available to all flesh through faith in Yeshua and obedience to His commandments. Then, He comes to dwell in the tabernacle of our hearts. Praise God! Before the New Covenant, only chosen people, like Moses, Bezalel and David received His Holy Spirit.

We see the last thing God commands Moses, as a strong reiteration, is to keep the Sabbath, which is the seventh day of the week, Saturday. God says “it is a sign between Me and you throughout your generations, so that you may know that I am the Lord who sanctifies you.” It is “holy to you.” Anyone who profanes the Sabbath will be put to death. We see in Isaiah 56 that this also applies to Gentiles who come to have faith in Yeshua, for the chapter begins, “My Yeshua is about to come…” and then speaks about what will come to pass when He does. The Sabbath is a blessing and is meant to show that we who keep it are the people of God. It’s one of the commandments that God emphasizes more than most of the others, because He knew it would be forgotten. We also see right after this that God finished speaking to Moses after reiterating this commandment, and gave Moses the tablets, written with “the finger of God,” which is His Holy Spirit. This was the first Shavuot/Pentecost. Now, the finger of God writes the law on our hearts, and our obedience to it brings more intimacy than any people has ever had before.

The sin of Israel in Ex. 32 is disheartening, but it reflects truth. When Moses went up on the mountain, and when Yeshua, the “prophet like unto Moses,” went up into Heaven, the people violate God’s commands. In this case, while Moses is literally talking with God on the mountain right in front of them, they make a calf to represent the one true God who is in their midst. What golden calfs do we have in our lives that replace our authentic relationship with the living God? What commands of His do we refuse to follow, convincing ourselves with the evil intents of our own hearts that we are right to do so? Why do we listen to Satan, who says to Eve, “you will not surely die,” when we disobey God. God is clear: the punishment for sin is death. Yes, we have Yeshua as our savior, and we are saved by grace, not by works. But as Paul writes in Gal. 2:17, Christ is not a minister of sin. While Yeshua is up on the Mountain, we cannot make golden calves in our hearts or we too will be destroyed.

The Lord so desires to dwell with His people, but His people cannot dwell with Him with even a scintilla of sin, for God is Holy, and any man will die upon encountering His presence. The High Priest and the Tent of Meeting again were shadows, or metaphors, for the things that would come in Messiah Yeshua, who covered our repentant sin. Read the Book of Hebrews, particularly chapters 8-10. It details how the Old Covenant was meant to show the work of God that would be realized in Christ. Aaron, with his holy garments would be replaced as High Priest by Yeshua, who wears His own cloak of righteousness as our eternal High Priest. The dwelling place of God, the Tabernacle, is now the tabernacle of our hearts, and the Holy Spirit dwells in those who have faith in Yeshua and obey His commandments. As we read these instructions, it’s critically important to note every element has a purpose and serves as meaningful for the Truth that would come and will be represented in God’s eternal Kingdom.

Exodus 33, Exodus 34, Exodus 35

God is ready to move in the life of Israel, and it is time for them to go into the Promised Land. Today’s Scripture shows me the clear promises of God, but it also shows me the desolation of Man on account of his doubt and the failure of so many in the church to have true faith. God promises to send His Angle, the pre-incarnate Yeshua, to drive out the enemy in the Promised Land and go up with the people, but God initially says that His presence, His Holy Spirit, will not go with them on account of their lack of faith. The inability to recognize, accept and act on God’s Truth when it stares us in the face is obstinance or “stiff-necked.” But Moses continues to act as a mediator between God and the people of Israel. We ought to learn from Moses here, who trusted God and spoke with Him face-to-face. He is a friend of God, a man who has developed true faith, who will go with God and do whatever He asks. Yeshua said this about us; that we are His friends when we trust in Him and obey Him.

Moses, in His faith, asks God to be more clear about who is going up into the land with him. He doesn’t yet know Yeshua, it would seem. Moses reminds God that He has written his name in the Book of Life—“you have known me by name”—and that He has been saved by grace—“you have also found favor in My sight.” He moves beyond this, asking God in humility, “Now then, if I have found favor in Your sight in any way, please let me know Your ways so that I may know You, in order that I may find favor in Your sight.” This is what I’ve called the “knowledge-obedience” cycle. We are saved by grace so that we can seek after the Lord with all of our hearts, seeking Him in all of His ways, and this in turn adds to the grace that He offers us by sharing more knowledge about who He is to us as we grow in our sanctification. This heart is clearly what the Lord seeks in all of us, for He responds: “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.” What a blessing!

This beautiful interchange concludes with God showing His glory to Moses, walking by Him stating His character: “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in faithfulness and truth; who keeps faithfulness for thousands, who forgives wrongdoing, violation of His Law, and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, inflicting the punishment of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.” We cannot “practice lawlessness,” but if our heart is like Moses’s heart, the Lord is merciful and forgives when we stumble. Our heart cannot be rebellious, but if we are eager to please the Lord and seek Him as Moses did, He will be with us. Like Moses, we cannot see His face, for God is Holy. Only with the blood of Yeshua do we have any hope to look at the face of God and live.

God then gives Moses a second set of commandments and reengages with the people whom he has interceded for. He asks for the people to willingly offer out of the abundance God has given them so that Moses can build a tabernacle for the Lord. Likewise, we must have willing hearts, ready to give the Lord out of the abundance He has shared with us so that He can fill us right back up with His Holy Spirit and go with us wherever we go. If only we could continue this walk of faith without wavering. But as Paul says, the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Only with the Lord’s Spirit do we have any hope of living according to God’s will, and with our faith in Christ, He provides us with His Spirit.  

Exodus 36, Exodus 37, Exodus 38

The people were so moved to honor the Lord that they brought an abundance to Moses by their own free will to build a sanctuary for the Lord. At the very heart of man, we are generous, particularly when we believe we are doing something for the good of other people or for the worship of the Lord. Israel had developed hearts in a good place, but as we see just a little later, this religious expression is not enough for salvation. As Israel prepares for a direct march up into Canaan, to take the “Promised” Land, they reject the promises of God and see only what is directly in front of them. The false reality of the world is present, while the promises of God are not yet realized. Only Joshua and Caleb accept what the Lord has promised. All of the religious celebration we can offer, and all of our generosity is not enough to make it to Heaven. We need to trust in God’s promises. Do we act in a way that shows we believe, or do we just give generously to the church and its earthly missions?

The gold that overlayed all of these materials must have been magnificent to behold. Imagine how the light of that menorah would have reflected off of the gold in the otherwise darkened tent. It would have been magnificent. There are churches today that exhibit similar magnificence. Add worship music from a skilled musician to the mix, and there is enough glory right within the halls of worship to move hearts and change lives. God commanded this sanctuary to be constructed. It has value, and in fact, a piece of His presence ultimately dwelt there. As we read later in Hebrews, it was a literal model of what truly exists in Heaven. There the people are to bring their sacrifices. But as the Lord later tells King Saul, “I desire obedience, not sacrifice.” Obedience means to do what God says on account of the promises that He has made to us. We act, because we believe. This faith is what was missing from most of the Israelites in the wilderness, and it is missing from most Christians today.

Another way to put this is that because of what God has done for us, and because of what He has promised to us, we are to do the things that He commands. It is because we love Him who died for us that we obey. If we don’t obey, it’s not on account of some freedom we now have; it’s on account of rebellion against the one who loved us first. Do we respond with evil when He has done such good to us? If so, do we expect that He will save us anyway? He won’t. He has said, “depart from me you who practice lawlessness.” In Isaiah 1, the Lord talks about loathing the sacrifices and offerings, the sabbaths and the new moons, the holy feast days of Israel, the reasons is different than you might expect. The Lord says, “I cannot bear sin and the sacred assembly.” We can’t come into God’s presence with disobedient, rebellious hearts. We need to purify our hearts and obey God before we go into His sanctuary. If we love Him, we ought to keep His commandments, and then His grace is sufficient for us.

Exodus 39, Exodus 40

I think of the crown of pure gold in Exodus 39:30-31 inscribed with the engraving, “Holy to the Lord,” complete with a violet cord to fasten it on the turban above, signifying the royal priesthood of Aaron and his sons. I think of the crown of thorns dug into my Savior’s forehead, blood streaming down his face, and behind His head, an inscription in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, “Yeshua of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Heb. 10:14 says, “For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified.” And then we read in Heb. 10:19-23, “Therefore, brethren, having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way which He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh, and having a High Priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.”

And that leads me to think of the song, “Echo Holy,” which goes, “All blessing and honor, dominion and power to You! … A million angels fall, face down on the floor, all to echo HOLY IS THE LORD.” This is what His throne room is like! And here I am, ever in His presence—His presence within me. How often do we fall face down to the floor, singing, shouting, praising God, “Holy is the Lord!” How often do we humble ourselves before Him and just offer our whole self to the moment, spending the time in His throne room? For we have a High Priest who never leaves the throne of Heaven, who has made us clean, who sanctifies us with His Holy Spirit! How can we not give Him everything we have, every fiber of our being, and echo with the Heavenly angels, “Holy is the Lord!” Do we stop to wonder? Do we stop to praise Him? Do we stop and spend time in His presence?

The glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle that Moses and the people who were led by the Holy Spirit completed just as the Lord had commanded, and so it was an authentic replica of the Tabernacle in Heaven. They could not enter when the cloud was on it by day and the fire by night! In Christ, as we read in Hebrews 8:1-2, we have a better way: “Now this is the main point of the things we are saying: We have such a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle which the Lord erected, and not man.” And the Lord has written the law on the tablets of our heart, whereas before it was written on tablets of stone and stored in the ark within the holy of holies. And so, the true Holy of Holies of Heaven is directly connected with the very core of our being by the blood of Christ. We worship now in Spirit and Truth, and we have boldness to dwell right within the throne room of God at His feet!

Knowing we have access to God in this way, Peter asks us in 2 Peter 3:11, “Therefore, since all these things [the whole world and everything in it] will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat?” What sort of persons ought we to be when we know that God dwells in and writes His law in us, and yet our flesh wars against Him? What sort of persons ought we to be when we know that we can walk into God’s throne room in spirit and truth with our prayers? We have a better way, but do we realize it? Do we humble ourselves and come before Him as the hated tax collector in the Temple who was justified by saying, “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” or do we look at others and thank God that we’re not like them, condemning ourselves? Oh have mercy on me, my King of kings, for you are Holy! I am not!

Leviticus 1, Leviticus 2, Leviticus 3, Leviticus 4

As we read through the 10 days of Leviticus, keep the Book of Hebrews in mind, which clarifies how to interpret the law with the New Covenant Spirit and Truth of Yeshua. In Hebrews 9:22, we read, “And almost all things are cleansed with blood, according to the Law, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” As we read about bulls and goats sacrificed and their blood poured out, consider our Lamb of God sacrificed Himself and poured out His own blood on our behalf. Christ’s sacrifice became the one-time sacrifice for sin. This is one way the New Covenant is a better covenant than the Old; however, it is also critical to understand that the underlying Torah is eternal and applies to us today. In either Covenant, the blood sacrifice for sin is the essential law, and it is what takes an unclean, impure, and sinful people separated from God and purifies us so we can enter the tabernacle and be with God, and even more than this; so He can enter us and dwell within us.

The sin offering is a male without defect, just as our sinless Lord. In Him we can stand accepted before the Lord, who has atoned for sin on our behalf. When Aaron’s sons sprinkle the blood around the altar, imagine our risen Lord who walked up to the altar in Heaven following His crucifixion to show Himself to the Father, leaving a sprinkling of blood.

The Bread of Life must also be made of fine flour, and never can it be used as a grain offering with leaven: “for you shall not offer up in smoke any leaven or any honey as an offering by fire to the Lord.” Rev. 8:4 notes, “And the smoke of the incense ascended from the angel’s hand with the prayers of the saints before God.” When we come before the Lord in prayer, we cannot come while practicing sin. We cannot cover up our sins with good works, either. We must first repent, or God will not hear us. Proverbs 28:9: “One who turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination.” 1 John 3:22 says the same thing.

When we come before the Lord in peace, to give Him thanks and praise, we must offer Him our abundance. The fat of the animal around the entrails and the organs—this excess does not belong to us—it belongs to God. When we have excess, what do we do with it? Sure, we can follow the example of Joseph and store up resources for the lean times, but there is a point when we are eating the fat ourselves, and this is not to be. Yeshua tells us to pray, “give us Lord our daily bread.” We want the Word that He has for us today, and we want the provision He has for us today, and anything extra that He gives us we ought to use for His purposes.

We all sin unintentionally. When it becomes known to us, we need to atone for it, no matter who we are. Just because it was “a mistake” does not make it forgivable without repentance. We must repent of all sin, regardless of our intentions.

Leviticus 5, Leviticus 6, Leviticus 7

So here is the law that is stated as Leviticus 5 begins: If you are a witness to a crime or to a crime not being committed that someone is accused of and don’t report this so that the situation can be properly adjudicated, you’re guilty of the same crime. This is an extension of the ninth commandment, to not bear false witness, which further clarifies its meaning. Not only are we obligated to testify truthfully, but we are also commanded to testify when we can help convict or acquit someone of a crime. We can see this type of clarification occurring throughout Torah, and coincidentally, Yeshua does this same thing in His ministry. In Matthew 5, for instance, He says it’s not just adultery when you actually commit the act, but it’s also adultery when you look at a woman with lust in your eyes. He says it’s not just murder to take another person’s life, but also to harbor anger or hatred toward them. Messiah Yeshua is the same yesterday, today and forever.

We should not touch unclean dead things or other contaminants, but we might. If we do, we’re unclean until we take a shower or wash our hands. It’s common sense, but God spells it out, because He loves us and wants to know what’s good for us.

Next we read about a person “swearing thoughtlessly with his lips to do evil or to do good” or people “speaking thoughtlessly with an oath.” Paul identifies this as a sin of “the flesh,” and he redirects us how to live in the Spirit instead in Eph. 4:29: “Let no unwholesome word come out of your mouth, but if there is any good word for edification according to the need of the moment, say that, so that it will give grace to those who hear.” In Eph. 5:4, he says, “there must be no filthiness or foolish talk, or vulgar joking, which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks.“ Paul is a Torah expert, drawing from it with his every word. To live in the Spirit is to obey Torah.

Torah is merciful on the poor, allowing people to recognize their sins according to the means that they have. The wealthy may bring a lamb for a sin offering, while the middle class might bring two turtledoves, while the poor are permitted to sacrifice some of their flour without oil. We see that some sacrifices are offered to the priests so that they can eat, since they don’t have lands or industries of their own. This is also a mercy. And these things sacrificed for sin are assuredly for those committed to the Old Covenant, but the law itself in Leviticus that defines sin is eternal and lives on in the New Covenant. And this leads to our need for a sin offering also. The greatest mercy of all is that God came in the flesh to die for our sins, and now He has become the one-time offering for sin so we no longer have to sacrifice bulls and goats, turtledoves or flour. We are still called to offer ourselves as a “living sacrifice,” meaning that Yeshua and God’s commandments come first.

Read Hebrews 10:14: “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.” NOTE: He provides righteousness ONLY to ”those who are being sanctified;” meaning, those with faith who turn away from sin and walk according to the commandments of God. We are NOT counted righteous while we are living in sin, as we read in Gal. 2:17: “But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not!” Christ’s blood is our sin offering, and He makes us righteous through that offering. However, if we “practice lawlessness,” we will be cast into Hell, according to Christ’s own words in Matthew 7. To become righteous in Christ, we must turn toward Him and sin no more. Knowing Torah and obeying it, with the Spirit of Christ helping us, is how we become righteous in Christ. It’s not just faith, but also doing the will of God that justifies us (Read James 1-2, ie., “faith without works is dead”).

We see a myriad of other sins and acts of justice and injustice explained throughout Leviticus 5-7, and each example is eternal. If we act unfaithfully against the Lord, if we disavow a rightful claim of our neighbor, if we extort, lie, rob, or any other such matter, the Lord calls this sin and He says it is our duty to make restitution. When we sin, and then repent, the Lord forgives us through Christ, but there are still consequences for our actions. Judgment results from sin every time. And according to the Torah of God, the consequences of our sin will be more severe against us than the affect of the sin itself. This is something I have experienced, and I know it is true. Consider what happens when we do something that harms another person. They may forgive us for it, but their lives were upended. What did they do to others on account of our sin? What time did they lose, and what good for the Lord could have filled that time? Our hearts must flee from unrighteousness.

Leviticus 8, Leviticus 9, Leviticus 10

The blood of the bull was sprinkled before the altar, just as Christ’s blood was sprinkled before the altar in Heaven—both atone for our sins. We must explore the blood that was put on Aaron’s right ear, the thumb of his right hand, and the big toe of his right foot. The right side in Scripture represents action, and listening is an action. Aaron was being consecrated so that He could hear the voice of the Lord. His right thumb and his right big toe are the beginning and the end of the man, and so by consecrating these locations, Aaron was consecrating his whole being for service to the Lord. Once this is done for him and his sons, the Lord asks the High Priest, the Mediator and the attendants at the Tabernacle to enjoy a feast with the Lord, an honor that is beyond comprehension. On the Eighth Day, the Lord commanded very specific procedures for atonement and He was serious about the manner in which Israel was to worship Him, so that the Lord could bring blessing into the camp.

In one of the most horrifying parts of Scripture—one of those sections that makes you tremble before the Lord—Nadab and Abihu are killed when they bring “strange fire” before the Lord. This is something that ought to strike fear into our hearts, for we ought to ask ourselves if we are worshipping the Lord in a manner that He has not commanded. The Lord makes it abundantly clear throughout Scripture that we are not to worship Him in the way we choose, but rather in the way He commands. We must keep the feasts, keep the Sabbaths, not the way we think is best, but the way He thinks is best. We read in Isaiah 1: He will not tolerate our Sabbaths, our holy days, our festivals; he will not bear iniquity with the sacred assembly. This is why Aaron’s sons are killed. We cannot mix the Holy with the profane. If we want to be with the Lord, we must love and trust in Him and keep His commandments, not our own traditions or ideas. Yeshua makes this very clear, particularly in Mt. 15 and Mk. 7.

Leviticus 11, Leviticus 12, Leviticus 13

There are many New Testament verses mainstream Christians like to reference that they believe indicates they can eat any animal they’d like, in contrast to what we read in Leviticus 11, and because time is not on my side today, I can’t go through each one of them. The main theme of them is encapsulated in 1 Timothy 4:1-5, where Paul writes that the teaching of demons is to “advocate abstaining from foods with God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude.” The key words here are “…foods which God has created to be gratefully shared….” We read about which foods those are in Leviticus 11, and we also read about which foods those aren’t. In all of the verse like 1 Timothy 4:1-5 in the New Testament, Romans 14 is another one and there are others, it is critical to know the historical context.

Christians at the time were advocating to a return to the Garden of Eden, when Man ate only seed-bearing plants, and we did not eat meat at all. The Essenes were one of the groups in Paul’s day that formed and they called it sin to eat meat, because God gave Adam and Even only the seed-bearing plants to eat. They actually twisted the interpretation of Scripture, saying that Yeshua advocated not eating the Passover Lamb during the Last Supper, among other interpolations to affirm their view. Their teaching was popular. And in the context of 1 Timothy 4:1-5 in particular, we see these demons also “forbid marriage,” also linked to the Essenes. In Romans 14, Paul makes it very clear that we are not to distinguish between those who eat vegetables only (this is fine) and those who eat CLEAN meat and vegetables. He didn’t say “clean,” but He wouldn’t have had to. Everyone knew what was clean and what was not, and would have known clearly that Paul was not talking about eating unclean meat.

In Mark 7, there are words literally added to Scripture in some translations that say in parentheses, “therefore He declared all foods clean.” What an abomination! This is just as bad as what the Essenes were doing. In this passage, Yeshua was talking about the Rabbinical teaching that eating bread with unclean hands would make the bread unclean. This is not a law in Torah. Yeshua was simply saying that by passing through the intestinal tract and passing out into the sewer, any bread eaten with unwashed hands would be purified. In other words, it’s irrelevant whether the hands are clean or not, for the bread itself is clean and what matters more is that the person has a clean heart. What does it mean to have a clean heart? It means that we keep the commandments of God out of love for Him and we do not hold up the teachings and traditions of men above these commandments of God. This is what Yeshua teaches in Matthew 15 and Mark 7.

I exhort you, brothers and sisters, to keep the commandments of God, which are clear, and not the traditions of Christian men who have clearly misinterpreted New Testament verses due to the lust of their stomachs to eat what their own hearts desire, instead of what God has said we can eat. A doctrine of demons is a teaching that is contrary to the Word of God. A doctrine of Heaven from Gos is what His Word in Torah teaches. It is a doctrine of demons that we must abstain from eating all meat to please God, as the Essenes were teaching, but it is also a doctrine of demons that it is OK to eat swine or shellfish, because the Lord has made it quite clear in Leviticus 11 that it is not OK to eat those things. They are not even considered food. Clean meat has a testimony of two, just like any other Truth of God: It has split hoofs and it chews the cud; it has fins and scales. If this testimony of two is not present, it cannot be eaten.

In Isaiah 66, the Lord sends prophesy about the End Times, and this is His Word and His doctrine, and NOT the doctrine of demons: In Isaiah 66:12, we read that the Lord “extends peace to her [Jerusalem] like a river and the glory of the nations like and overflowing stream.” In verse 14, we read that “the hand of the Lord,” Yeshua, “will be made known to His servants, but He will be indignant toward His enemies.” The next two verses reflect this fiery judgment on the Last Day that Yeshua will bring to His enemies. And then in Verse 17, we read this: “Those who sanctify and purify themselves to go to the gardens, following one in the center [THIS IS JESUS], who eat pig’s flesh, detestable things, and mice, will come to an end altogether,” declares the Lord.” In the end days, those who refuse to obey the commandments of God in Leviticus 11 on account of the desires of their own flesh are not going to make it to Heaven. This is what the Lord has said.

In other words, as Yeshua says in Matthew 7, those who say “Lord, Lord,” but “practice lawlessness,” will be destroyed. It is lawlessness to eat ham or lobster and think the Lord blesses it. He doesn’t. The Lord will say, “I never knew you.” We must keep the commands of God, if we love Him, and if we do, He will say, “well DONE good and faithful servant,” for we know from James 1 that “faith is doing, and not just hearing” and in Jam. 2 “faith without works is dead.” In 2 Tim. 3:16-17, Paul says, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Every good work! Faith without works is dead. The Truth is all here in Scripture for those with eyes to see it.  We are saved by Yeshua’s blood when we repent and turn from our wicked ways and follow Him. Like Peter in Acts 10-11, Yeshua would NEVER allow any unclean thing enter His mouth, and we can’t either.

As Gentiles come into the faith and are declared clean by the blood of Yeshua, we must be instructed in the laws of Moses every Sabbath in the synagogue (church) so that we can come to know and do His will. Acts 15:21: “For the law of Moses has been preached in every city from the earliest times and is read in the synagogues on every Sabbath.” As we assemble together to worship, as we’re exhorted in Hebrews 10:25, we will learn the law of God that was given to Moses and learn to give up the traditions of men, the traditions of the elders and the false teaching of modern Christendom that are leading many people toward Hell. We are saved by Christ to do good works (Ephesians 2:8-10), to follow the Spirit of God and allow Him to write the law of God on our hearts, not to follow after the lusts of our flesh. Paul writes in Romans 8:6-8: “The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace. The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God; it does not submit to God’s law, nor can it do so. Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.” In the Spirit, we must submit to the commandments of God.

Leviticus 14, Leviticus 15

The Lord’s Truth is simple. There are diseases that make our flesh unclean, and some of these diseases can be spread to others. We should be careful to obey God’s laws to keep others from suffering because of our carelessness. Homes can become unclean. There are entire businesses today devoted to mold remediation. If a house is infected with mold, from time to time it needs to be demolished. God explained this in His Torah, and it is still Truth today. Bodily fluids cause uncleanliness, and we certainly should not go into God’s Holy Assembly before bathing after engaging in sexual activity. Menstrual impurity was more of a problem without sanitary solutions for it in the day Torah was written, but even today, touching such a sanitary solution would make one unclean. Washing the hands that touched such a thing would satisfy Torah. The sacrifices are satisfied by Yeshua’s death on the cross, but all the other law is eternal and still applies to us today. We should be mindful and obey.

Leviticus 16, Leviticus 17, Leviticus 18

In Lev. 16, God said, “This shall be a permanent statute for you: in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall humble yourselves and not do any work, whether the native, or the stranger who resides among you; for it is on this day that atonement shall be made for you to cleanse you; you will be clean from all your sins before the Lord. It is to be a Sabbath of solemn rest for you, so that you may humble yourselves; it is a permanent statute.” When we read this, it is clear that this Day of Atonement (in Hebrew Yom Kippur) ought to be kept by all who say they follow Yeshua. Never did Yeshua ever say to disobey God or His commandments—in fact, He said the opposite, that not one jot or title of the law would be done away with—and no one except God has the authority to change His law. He has not done so. The Day of Atonement is a Holy Convocation forever, a day for us to meet and refrain from all work, to fast and pray, and we must honor this day if we say we love God.

God changed the sacrifices and offerings for the Day of Atonement and the location of the Tabernacle. He said in His Word in the Old Testament that He would do this, and this is confirmed in the New Testament. In the Book of Hebrews, we see the Old Covenant is “abolished” and replaced by the New Covenant, which is called (and certainly is) “a better way.” But this does NOT refer to the law. This refers to the manner in which we now keep the law and where it is written, where we worship, the identity of our Mediator and High Priest, and what sacrifices God accepts on our behalf. Jer. 31:31 says that the New Covenant would come and the law would be written on our hearts, rather than tablets of stone. Ps. 40:6 (39:6 in the Septuagint) is properly translated, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me.” Yeshua told the woman at the well, the “day NOW is” when we will not worship on the mountains or in Jerusalem at the Temple, but “in Spirit and Truth.”

We read Hebrews 8-10, and it is clear, it was “impossible” for the sacrifices of bulls, goats, and other animals to take away sin, but now with a “one-time sacrifice,” sin has been atoned for eternally. “For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified,” we read in Hebrews 10:14. Yeshua is now our High Priest and our Mediator and the cornerstone of the new Temple that is being built on His sacrifice as a foundation, and His Holy Spirit writes the law of God on our heart for us to follow fully without hesitancy in Sprit and in Truth. In Romans 12:1, we become “a living sacrifice” as we follow Christ, putting Him first in our lives in every way. And so on the 10th day of the 7th month of the Hebrew calendar, we who follow Yeshua ought to humble ourselves and do no work, spend the day in prayer and fasting for the Lord’s cleansing by His blood. It is a day to concentrate on healing our own sins and the sins of the nation of Israel, to which we are grafted-in.

And it is clear that Yeshua’s one-time sacrifice for sin does not absolve us from the punishment for sin if we are living in sin. He said this Himself over and over again, but most poignantly in Matthew 7, where He said, Many will say “Lord, Lord,” in the day of His coming. These people are Holy Spirit filled Christians, who literally have cast out demons in the name of Yeshua and done miracles and wonders in His name. These men and women are saved Christians, for you cannot do these signs and wonders without the Holy Spirit dwelling within you as we read in 1 Corinthians 12:3-4, “Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, “Jesus is accursed”; and no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit. Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit.” There are other verses that show this. In Luke 10:20, Yeshua said, “do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice that your names are recorded in heaven.”

Judas cast out demons in the name of Yeshua. Therefore, his name, Judas Iscariot, was written in Heaven. Judas was saved and was one of the people of God, but when lawlessness was born in him, his name was blotted out of the book. We can see this written right within the Word of God. We must be cautious not follow in Judas’s footsteps, for we know that the Lord will say “depart from me” to those who “practice lawlessness.” To practice lawlessness means to disregard the law of Torah, even though it is abundantly clear that we are to follow it fully, in Spirit and in Truth. We can slip and fall and get back up, healed by the blood of Christ, but if we persistently sin and do not repent, if we rebel against His law and do not repent, we will not make it. Paul writes in Galatians 2:17, “Christ is not a minister of sin.” He does not abide with those who are lawless. He will not forgive those who thumb their noses at His Word and say it doesn’t apply to them. These will die the second death.

Thus, in Lev. 17 we read that when we slaughter any CLEAN animal to use it for food, that we must pour out the blood. If we consume the blood, we will be cut off from among the people of God. Not only this, but we must offer any clean animal up to God and praise His name for the meat that He has given for us to eat. We cannot eat meat sacrificed to demons. In 1 Corinth: 10:20-21, Paul writes: “I say that things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God; and I do not want you to become partners with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” We read right in Levi. 17, that “anyone” who slaughters and ox, lamb, or goat (all clean animals) and does not “present it as an offering to the Lord” will have the bloodshed counted against them; they will be cut off from God. God says we are to “no longer offer [our] sacrifices to the goat demons.” Torah is eternal.

We learn that there is a reason why we are not to eat an animal’s blood. The nephesh, or life, is in the blood, and we are not to consume the life of another living being. The life belongs to God. We learn the soul of any living creature is bound to its blood, and thus only creatures with blood are “living beings.” This is why when we die, our blood must be poured out, for this is how our soul comes to rest in the Earth until the Last Day when the Lord returns for us, to give us our new bodies that we will dwell in forever. We read in Ps. 49:20, “Mankind in its splendor, yet without understanding, Is like the animals that perish.” Thus the man who does not come to understand salvation in Christ, who does not turn away from sin toward God in repentance, will perish like the beasts. While it is true that all living things with blood have souls, only the soul of a repentant man in Christ lives forever, and the souls of all other beasts, whether man or animal, die. 2 Peter 2:12 confirms.

It is also clear from this why the blood of Yeshua on the cross has the power to save us.

In Acts 15:18-21, we read there are four things Gentiles must do immediately (day 1) when they become Christians: “Known to God from eternity are all His works. Therefore I judge that we should not trouble those from among the Gentiles who are turning to God, but that we write to them to abstain from things polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from things strangled, and from blood. For Moses has had throughout many generations those who preach him in every city, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath.”

We learn about all of these things in today’s reading, and we’ve covered blood, things strangled and animal sacrifice polluted by idolatry in Leviticus 17. In Leviticus 18, we learn about what “sexual immorality” actually means.

It is abundantly clear in Acts 15:21 that James, the head of the Messianic Christian counsel, acknowledges that new Christians cannot follow the whole law on day one, but he also gives a list of four things that must be done immediately. Sexual immorality has different meanings to different people, depending on whom you ask, but to God it is clearly defined. Read Leviticus 18 and 20 and you will understand how God defines sexual immorality. This is what new Christians must understand and do on day one of becoming a Christian. James doesn’t stop there. He makes it clear that Christians will continue to come to worship every Sabbath Day (Saturday) and learn the rest of the law given to Moses. As Christians become more mature in their faith, they are convicted of sin by the law, repent, and go and sin no more. It is a beautiful thing. Any so-called “Christians” not abiding immediately by the law in Leviticus 18 & 20, or the whole law for that matter, can expect nothing but fiery judgment.

Leviticus 19, Leviticus 20, Leviticus 21

In Leviticus 20:22, we read: ‘You are therefore to keep all My statutes and all My ordinances, and do them, so that the land to which I am bringing you to live will not vomit you out.” In Revelation 3:15-16, Yeshua says this, “I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.” Our hearts must be hearts of obedience to the Lord, but not only this, we need to be on fire for the Lord, burning with our first love, Yeshua—to do His will first before all else. God knows if this is our heart. Jeremiah 17:9-10, reads, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart, test the mind, even to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings.” Read Romans 2:5-11, it says the same thing, particularly verse 6: The Lord “…will render to each one according to his deeds…”

In Leviticus 20:11, we read: “If there is a man who sleeps with his father’s wife, he has uncovered his father’s nakedness. Both of them must be put to death, they have brought their own deaths upon themselves.” Paul teaches this same thing in 1 Corinthians 5. Here’s an excerpt from verses 1 and 4-5: “It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and sexual immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, namely, that someone has his father’s wife. … In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to turn such a person over to Satan for the destruction of his body, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” Excommunication is akin to death in “spirit and truth,” and Paul shows us this. How great a witness excommunication is! Will the person repent? This one does. But while living in sin, we cannot worship with those who serve Christ. We must repent.

These above two pieces stuck out at me today as good examples of how the Old and New Testaments are the same message and the law does not change. Another example comes to mind, and it what Yeshua calls the “SECOND greatest commandment” in Mark 12:30-31, Luke10:27-37, Matthew  22:39, and Paul in Galatians 5:14. We read in Leviticus 19, “You shall not hate your fellow countryman in your heart; you may certainly rebuke your neighbor, but you are not to incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance, nor hold any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord.” The way God defines love includes making sure your brother or sister knows when they are off course, and rebuking them in the appropriate way to get them back on track. I honestly believe this is one of the most important acts of love in the Christian walk that most Christians neglect, because of a false understanding of Yeshua’s grace. Grace is only for the repentant.

The balance of today’s reading is just Torah commands. Our reading today is beautiful love offered by God to His people to know Him and understand who He is. As any good Father, He explains what is good for us and what will lead us to destruction, and tries to steer us to do what is right. He offers us grace when we fail unknowingly, but when we rebel or fail willingly, there are going to be consequences and judgment. Whether this judgment comes in this life or the next, that is up to God to determine. We cannot be the arbitrars of eternal disposition. Even the Apostle Paul is considered about Himself staying in the Lord’s grace and potentially losing it, as we read in 1 Corinthians 9:27, “but I strictly discipline my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified.” I also feel this burden. I exhort others to love Yeshua by keeping His commandments, but do I do so myself. Yes! I must strictly discipline my body to make sure of it.

There are a couple verses that might be confusing on the surface, and this is where spirit and truth come into play: We read: “You shall not cross-breed two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment of two kinds of material mixed together.” Is God against breeding for different features in livestock, is He a mono-cropper, and does He oppose our wicking undershirts? I don’t believe this literal meaning is intended here. The reason why three totally different things are put together here is to establish a truth forever, and the truth is this, we cannot mix the Holy with the Profane, the Sacred with the Vulgar. God says in Isaiah 1:13: “I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting.” That’s what this is about. I’m happy to address questions about the myriad verses like this one, but I’ll tackle one more for today:

Secondly, the Lord says, “You shall not round off the hairline of your heads, nor trim the edges of your beard. You shall not make any cuts in your body for the dead, nor make any tattoo marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” The Lord is not saying that we can’t cut our hair or shave our beards and we have to look like the Hasidic Jews walking around in New York. Such a literal meaning is not intended here. The Lord is referring to pagan practices, and the Lord is making it clear to us not to partake in them for ritualistic purposes. Again, He has lumped together several practices of the nations around Israel as they are about to head into the land, and He intends to separate His people from those pagans and the things that they do. Now, we MUST NOT shave shapes into our beard or head that have pagan symbology, and we certainly should not cut ourselves or wear tattoos of any kind. To put a mark on your skin is to disgrace the image of God that He put on you. We must bear His image only.

Dad said this was his prayer today: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm 119:1-2,Psalm 119:4-5,Psalm 119:17-18,Psalm 119:33-34&version=NABRE

Leviticus 22, Leviticus 23

Leviticus 22 is about abiding in purity of heart and mind before coming before the Lord for worship or prayer, and this ought to be our takeaway. In Romans 12:1-2, the Apostle Paul writes, “Therefore I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” In other words, our whole lives become a devotion to following Yeshua and giving everything we have to Him, even our very own lives. This sacrifice is acceptable to God when we renew our Mind by reading His Word by the power of His Holy Spirit for understanding and become “doers of the Word” (abide by it) in our lives by the same Spirit. God’s Truth must be planted and growing to produce fruit from the depths of our hearts. Then we can bring our worship before God.

Yeshua, talking about the laws of Lev. 23, says this in Mt. 5:23-24 emphasizing His overarching summary commandment to Love God and love one another: “Therefore if you bring your gift to the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar, and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”

Now we know from today’s reading  that only the Levitical priests may eat of the food that is presented before God, and this is true of the Tabernacle made by human hands, but Yeshua is not a Levitical Priest. Rather, He is a priest in the order of Melchizedek, a King from the line of David, and because He is our High Priest and King of kings ministering before the eternal altar of God in Heaven, we may come and eat the bread and drink the wine of His table—the Word of God and the sacrifice that He made for our atonement—the obedience to God’s commandments and the faith of Yeshua as our salvation.

Because as Gentile Christians we are grafted into Israel (Rom. 11, Col. 2, Acts 10-11), the Lord speaks to us in Lev. 23 here: “The Lord’s appointed times which you shall proclaim as holy convocations—My appointed times are these:…” Each of them is “a permanent statute throughout your generations.” These appointed times are “holy convocations,” meaning that it is required of every believer of Yeshua to come together and celebrate. Paul says in 1 Cor. 5:8, speaking of Passover, “therefore, let us keep the feast… with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Yeshua commanded: “Do this in memory of me.” He referred to eating unleavened bread and wine to represent His Body and Blood for sure, but the Passover Seder meal is what He celebrated, and this is the Feast we must keep sincerely according to the Truth of God’s Word, which we read about in Lev. 23. It’s not just Passover, but all eight of these holy convocations when we ought to do no work and instead come together for worship.

In Zech. 14:16, we read about the End when Yeshua will reign from Jerusalem: “Then it will come about that any who are left of all the nations that went against Jerusalem will go up from year to year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles.” If this feast is celebrated eternally, we should be rehearsing it now. The eight feasts are these: The weekly Sabbath (Friday at sundown to Saturday at sundown), the Lord’s Passover Seder at sunset on the 14th day of the month as it transitions into the 15th day of the month of Aviv (Nisan), which is usually March or April. The 1st Day of Unleavened Bread, which is the same as the Passover and begins at the same time but lasts until sunset on the 15th. The 7th day of Unleavened Bread, when Yeshua appeared to Thomas. The Pentecost, which is 50 days following First Fruits. The Day of Shouting/Blowing Trumpets to bring in the fall harvest, the Day of Atonement, and the 1st and 8th days of Tabernacles.

First Fruits is not a “holy convocation,” meaning that we don’t gather. It is recognized as a day of remembrance, though. First Fruits, when the first grain harvest was waved before God, takes place on the day following the Sabbath during the week of Passover. In other words, it is Resurrection Day in the Hebraic calendar—a Sunday. Paul says this about First Fruits in 1 Cor. 15:20:  “But the fact is, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep.” He recognizes that Yeshua was the “grain offering” that was waved before God, the Bread of Life offered up for us to share at His table. While our hearts may desire to celebrate Resurrection Day as we are accustomed, the Lord has asked us to keep His Passover in remembrance of Him, and thus we celebrate both His death and resurrection simultaneously during the Passover Seder, again the following day, and again on the seventh day, and we eat unleavened bread and drink wine all week “in remembrance of Him.”

I have named our church, First Fruits Ministries, primarily because of 1 Corinth. 15:20-23, “But the fact is, Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who are asleep. For since by a man death came, by a man also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, after that those who are Christ’s at His coming,…” The reason is simple: The Resurrection that occurred on First Fruits is the crux, pun intended, of the whole Christian faith.  And in this verse we can see the beauty and magnificence of God’s Holy Convocations as a whole, and not just this one day of remembrance.

Christ is our First Fruits, who died for our sins and rose from the dead during the Passover as our Unleavened Bread and Lamb of God. He sent His Holy Spirit to dwell with us during the Pentecost, to help us! He will return for the harvest of souls who are fully devoted to Him during the Feast of Trumpets. We read in 1 Corinth. 15:52, “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” This is the day we will all be raised from the dead or changed immediately upon His coming. The Sabbath is our weekly rehearsal dinner for the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. We need to be ready! The Day of Atonement is Judgement Day, and we will face Christ on the Judgment Seat. Those who have Christ’s grace will dwell with Him forever. The rest will be destroyed. The Feast of Tabernacles is when God will live among His people forever—represented by the Eighth Day. Let us endure in faith until then.

Leviticus 24, Leviticus 25

Note that lighting the menorah and putting out the shewbread is “an everlasting covenant.” Note the distinction. This isn’t the law of God, it is part of the First Covenant implementation of it. Thus, these instructions about the menorah and shewbread is for the first covenant, which has been subsumed by the New Covenant in Christ. However, it is still an everlasting covenant. So we must ask ourselves how in Spirit and Truth do we read and apply Leviticus 24? We must only put pure oil from the Holy Spirit into the lamps that are our bodies, and we need to let our light shine continually so all can see it. We also need to bring our bread before the Lord in thanksgiving, and we know that thanksgiving is a sweet fragrance like Frankincense that rises up to the Lord. There’s more to write on this, but that will suffice.

I long for a society where it would be unthinkable to blaspheme the Name of the Lord. We know the Lord says, “vengeance is mine, and I shall repay,” and this is the truth. But Moses is God’s mediator in the wilderness and he is acting as a king, the government of Israel. God uses government to judge the people at large, then and now. While Moses could not stone the man for blaspheming the Lord alone, in his position as Mediator/Judge of Israel, he can stone the man under God’s authority and under God’s law. It is for this reason that government exists at all, to bring God’s judgment to a world that needs it. When a people is moral and abides by God’s law, judgment is not needed and the government (Moses, in this case), will remain in their tents. When a people is immoral, God will bring hell down on the people and use the government to do it. The government itself may become “evil” from our perspective as a reflection on our own moral standing with God. It is ideal to have a government of a moral people take out outliers like this son of Shelomith of the tribe of Dan. Evil spreads like a cancer in society when it is not punished, and so punished it must be.

The law of the Shmitah Year (Sabbath Year) and the Jubilee is such a blessing. The Lord intends for there to be Mercy within the land and for one family to not become too dominant over another on account of hardship and the natural course of the world that we live in. Family members are to redeem their unlucky brothers, sisters and cousins and take care of their parents. No member of Israel is to remain in servitude past the 50-year mark, but their property and freedom is to be restored. While it is easy to keep track of the weekly Saturday Sabbath, because it is every 7th day, and it is still reasonable to keep track of every Shmitah, for it is every 7 years, we have not kept track of the Jubilee years. It may actually be this year (last year was a Shmitah year), and it may be 7 years from now, or we could be off by several Shmitahs. I personally believe it is in 7 years from now (2030) for various reasons, but I don’t really know. Regardless, I know that the year Yeshua announced His ministry by reading Isaiah in his own synagogue was a Jubilee. And the Year of His return will be one also. Perhaps the loss of the Jubilee cycle is one reason no one knows the day or the hour?

Leviticus 26, Leviticus 27

Leviticus 26, along with Deuteronomy 28 as a second witness, are among the most frightening passages in Scripture. When we enter covenant relationship with the Lord, we will face blessing for being obedient to it and curses for disobedience. We are in the New Covenant, which subsumes the former covenants. For us, the judgment for violating it is even more severe, as we read in Heb. 10:26-31; for “how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will he be thought worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot”? Understand from Leviticus 26 that the purpose of all of the blessings are to create fellowship between God and Man, when the covenant relationship is sound. However, when that relationship is not sound, the curses are meant to bring Man into repentance and restore the right relationship. God does not want to destroy His people, but correct them and bring them back to Him. Those in His presence receive eternal blessing. However, those who continue in rebellion will be destroyed.

The laws of redemption for money in Leviticus 27 are relevant. For a man under 20, his assessment is 20 shekels of silver. For a working age male, like Yeshua, it’s 50. We know that Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery for 20 shekels of silver (Genesis 37:28). This, of course, is a prophetic template for Yeshua being sold for 30 pieces of silver by Judas (Mt. 26:15, 27:3, etc.), but why the disparity in number? Look at Ex. 21:32: “If the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall give his master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.” NOTE: the Aleph, the first letter in Hebrew, pictorially represents an Ox’s head, and it also represents God the Father. Judas represents the Jews, who brought forth the Messiah who would save the repentant from sin, whether Jew or Gentile. Judas was paid the price of a slave being gored by an Ox. We know that Yeshua says that He came to do God’s will. Sacrifice and offering God did not desire, but a Body was prepared for Him.

Numbers 1, Numbers 2

As God instructs Israel to number itself, He asks Moses to count “every male, head by head from 20 years old and upward, whoever is able to go to war in Israel.” These are the men who will die in the wilderness because of disobedience—603,550 to be exact. It is unclear what happened to the women. Their children, the uncounted from 19 years and younger, are the ones who will inherit the Promised Land. The second generation is better than the first, just like the second covenant is better than the first. All of these children grew up in Egypt; many of them lived as slaves. They’ve only been away from it for a year now. But these 603,550 men who “could go to war,” decided they were too afraid; they did not trust the Lord to fulfill His promises. For this, they died in their sins. When the Lord calls us to go to war, we must obey, especially when He says He will come with us. Read Matthew 28:18-20 in this context, for Yeshua said to us, “I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

As Israel camps, God instructs them to set up their tabernacles in the form of a cross. There are more of some tribes than others, and the way God aligns them perfectly with Judah at the lead gives them a longer vertical beam of the cross from West (shortest side) to East (longest side), and the North and South pieces are about equal size, shorter than East but longer than West. With God’s tabernacle at the center of this formation, it is clear that the cross formation symbolizes the sacrifice of God’s only begotten Son, Yeshua, and His Heart was there at the center of it. His heart is the one that bled for us so that our sins would be forgiven. God’s heart is at the center of everything He does for Israel, His Son, and for Yeshua, His only begotten Son. Israel would serve as a kingdom of priests for all of the nations, to teach them about our loving God. Yeshua is the King of kings and High Priest who died so that all who believe in Him and obey His commands will have eternal life.

Numbers 3, Numbers 4

The Lord committed the whole tribe of Levi to the Temple service in exchange for all the first born of Israel, who he saved by the blood of the Lamb. The Jews who believed in Yeshua became the First Born of the New Covenant, called as priests to minister for Christ and spread the Gospel to all who would hear it and believe, whether Jew or Gentile, on account of the blood of the Lamb. Yeshua also became the First Born of the Resurrection, and all who believe in Him and keep God’s commandments will be resurrected with Him when He comes. While certain groups of Levites had special privileges that other Levites did not have, and certainly more than the laymen, all who believe have access to the throne room on account of Christ’s blood. God gave His only begotten Son to redeem us by His blood. I pray for more understanding of these early chapters in Numbers.

Later:
Each of our callings are unique, and God has used each part of His Body to build His Temple. One part missing would make the Temple incomplete. God will bring forth His Kingdom at the appointed time, when each block of His Temple is in place, and not a moment before. He knows what day and what hour, and we can do nothing other than answer our calling with faith in what He has done for us and faith in His promises, obeying Him with every thought, word and deed, so help us God.

Numbers 5, Numbers 6

The English version of the curse against an adulterous woman who has not been caught is odd, but a study of the Hebrew clarifies it and it makes perfect sense. When a belly swells (tzabah), it means that the uterus becomes hard and unusable and when a thigh (yarek) shrivels, it means the seat of her reproductive power is taken. In brief, the procedure for a jealous husband who suspects his wife has become unfaithful is meant to take away his cancerous jealousy and prove whether it is founded. If his wife continues to bear children for him, then she has been faithful, but if she becomes barren on account of the prayer, then she was unfaithful. To be barren in the Hebraic understanding is to be cursed, and to bear children is a blessing from God. There’s really not more to this.

To send the leprous outside the camp was a health precaution, for leprosy did not have a cure in the days of Moses. However, the commandment is also a metaphor. If someone is sinning, or bringing unrighteousness into a church, they must be removed. Yeshua is quite clear in Matthew 18 how to remove leprosy from the church properly. First we must confront the sinner, next we bring two or three with us to confront the leper, and then the whole community ought to confront the sinner. If they repent in any stage, they are welcome to stay, but if the leprosy continues in their heart, they must be removed from the camp.

When we sin, we need to confess our sins before each other and before the Lord. This is not a private ordeal, but it ought to be done within the community. To confess sin is paramount to forgiveness, and confession ought to lead to repentance, which means turning away from sin. Now, if we have wronged anyone in a material way, we need to restore what had been before and add a fifth to it to overcome the hurt from the wrong committed. We ought to follow these laws today.

It’s interesting to me that whenever I see the Apostle Paul depicted in film form, he has short hair, but Scripture is quite clear he had taken a Nazirite vow. In Acts 18:18, he seems to end his vow:  Now “Paul, when he had remained many days longer, took leave of the brothers and sisters and sailed away to Syria, and Priscilla and Aquila were with him. Paul first had his hair cut at Cenchrea, for he was keeping a vow.” If one wishes to consecrate themselves with such a vow, they should read Numbers 6 to determine how.

The end of Numbers 6:22-27 is the Birkat Kohanim—the priestly blessing—, which I give at the end of each Sabbath service to bless the congregation. Pastor Daniel has a beautiful five-part teaching on the Blessing that I highly recommend: https://www.cornerfringe.com/media/series/q7t2z8b/the-blessing. I feel the Holy Spirit descend on me every time I either give or receive this blessing. It is powerful to call on the Lord to bless His people and it is powerful to receive this blessing from the Lord. “The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord cause His face to shine on you and be gracious to you; The Lord lift up His face to you and give you peace.’” Everyone who follow Yeshua should want this blessing in their life, for the Lord to bless us and keep us in the faith, to keep us in His presence by His grace, and to shine His light and life on us by looking toward us and being with us, and to give us the wholeness of His presence to fill us with everything we need.

ye·va·re'·khe·kha' · Adonai · ve·yeesh'·me·re'·kha
ya·eir · Adonai · pa·nav · e·ley'·kha · vee·khoon·ne'·kah
yees·sa · Adonai · pa·nav · e·ley'·kha · ve·ya·seim · le·kha · sha·lom

יברכך יהוה וישמרך
יאר יהוה פניו אליך ויחנך
ישא יהוה פניו אליך וישם לך שׁלום

Numbers 7

The Lord has given us all things. He asked us to worship Him “in Spirit and in Truth,” no longer from Jerusalem or the mountains of Israel (John 4:24). How do we dedicate our hearts to the Lord? When we dedicate a new thing to the Lord, whether a new home, a new church building, a new marriage, a new child, and so on, it is proper to bring our gifts to His altar in Heaven. Among the most prominent gifts should be thanks and praise, for God gives us everything we have, including our own talents.

“Through Yeshua then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.” (Hebrews 13:15)

“Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Yeshua, giving thanks through Him to God our Father.” (Colossians 3:17)

“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.” (Ephesians 5:1-2)

Do not come before the alter of God empty-handed:  "I beseech you therefore, breathern, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service." (Romans 12:1)

Numbers 8, Numbers 9, Numbers 10

The Levites are a special class of people who consecrated themselves to God and served within the Tabernacle and/or Temple in Jerusalem from 25-50 years old. It is clear from reading Scripture that Yeshua was not a priest according to this order of Aaron, but he was a priest after the order of Melchizedek. Paul talks about this, as does the writer of Hebrews. Abraham, we know, tithed to Melchizedek, who was a high priest for God Most High in Jerusalem, and therefore, those who came from the loins of Abraham; namely, the Levites, also would be subject to the higher order of the priesthood under Messiah Yeshua, our eternal High Priest, in the New Covenant. Read the Book of Hebrews to get a better sense of this transition that occurred. It is well spelled out there. There are several Old Testament passages where the Lord talks about removing the authority from the Levites and giving it to Yeshua, particularly in the prophets. This occurred the first time in the Book of Samuel, however.

Passover is such an important feast that if we cannot celebrate it in the first month on the 14th day at twilight, the Lord has made provision to celebrate it during the second month on the 14th day. Anyone who believes in the Lord and does not keep the Passover on one of these two occasions will be cut off from among God’s people, and this law applies “both for the stranger and for the native of the land.” In other words, both Jews and Gentiles who believe in the Lord are required to keep the feast, lest they be cut off. The Lord Yeshua Himself said, “do THIS in memory of me.” THIS was to celebrate the Passover in memory of our Lord’s sacrifice on the cross as our Passover Lamb of God. The Last Supper was a Passover Seder. In 1 Corinthians 5 and 1 Corinthians 11, Paul makes it very clear that we are to keep Passover in memory of Yeshua, and we had better do it with sincerity and truth, meaning in the way it is meant to be kept according to Torah, as Yeshua commanded us. We should not do it the way Constantine developed as emperor of Rome, but the way the Lord commanded.

In Numbers 11, the cloud by day and fire by night either stayed with Israel over the Tabernacle or it moved and beckoned for Israel to go with it. Pay special attention to this language: “Whether it was two days, a month, or a year that the cloud lingered over the tabernacle, staying above it, the sons of Israel remained camped and did not set out; but when it was lifted, they did set out. At the command of the Lord they camped, and at the command of the Lord they set out; they did what the Lord required…” Compare this language to what Yeshua told Nicodemus in John 3:8: “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” In the New Covenant, rather than be guided by God’s presence in the cloud by day and fire by night, we have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. The same principle applies to us that applied to Israel in the wilderness. We are to obey God and His Holy Spirit and go wherever He commands us at the time that God appoints. We are not to follow our own way, but God’s way alone!

Dad: I love this prayer of Moses. I think of the Resurrected Lord, who conquered sin and death, and from whom the demons were scattered.
 I will use it myself,

“Rise up, Lord!
May your enemies be scattered;
may your foes flee before you.”

Numbers 11, Numbers 12, Numbers 13

How egregious the sin of this people Israel. In John 6:58, Yeshua said, “I am the manna from Heaven.” The Israelites said literally, “but now our soul is dried up. There is nothing for our eyes except this manna!” What did they desire instead? Flesh. Plain and simple. They wanted flesh. What did Paul say to us in Romans 8:6 “For the mind set on the flesh is death, but the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace….” They literally had God Most High dwelling among them in the wilderness, providing them with everything they needed, and the Angel of God, the pre-incarnate Christ, was leading them to the promised land. And what did they want? Flesh. They wanted flesh. Their soul preferred the things of this world over God; they did not want to look upon the Son or sustain themselves on the life that He provides through faith and obedience. They wanted to return to their former life and live a temporary existence until they died. This is all about the heart of man that leads to death.

God’s solution to this is to put His Holy Spirit on 70 more men, to get them to try to lead the people to think rightly toward Him.  But men are still getting burned up by fire on the edges of the camp; they are looking back with worldly sorrow, not wanting to be a part of Israel, which has direct relationship with the God who created them. How could a man fail to desire God? Because they want to be of the world; they want flesh. We need godly sorrow to repent and turn back to the Lord whenever our heart wanders and desires the things of this world before God, or whenever we grumble against the Lord who has provided us with everything we need. Moses prophesied, saying, “If only all the Lord’s people were prophets, that the Lord would put His Spirit upon them!” In Jeremiah 31:31, the Lord says He will do this. In Acts 2, the Lord fulfills the prophesy, and according to John 14, we all have access now to God’s spirit when we love Yeshua and keep His commandments.

Miriam and Aaron, rather than encourage their brother Moses as he faced the people and their grumbling, began grumbling themselves and even questioned Moses’s leadership. At least Moses kept his heart aligned with the Lord, and God had called him quite directly to lead his people Israel in the ways of the Lord. Miriam had become jealous of Moses and did not appreciate his black wife. The Cushites of Africa were very wealthy during this time, and Miriam was acting as any envious woman would who had forgotten the love that the Lord teaches us all to embrace. She envied Moses’s relationship with God and she envied Moses on account of his wife. This is the same lesson as Numb. 11, but now more focused. Instead of express gratitude and thanksgiving for all the Lord had done, and help Moses to turn more hearts toward the Lord, they grumbled against both. God will not reward such behavior, and thankfully in this case, instant repentance comes to the lips of Miriam. This saved her life.

In Numbers 13, the same theme continues in another microcosm. God shows us that only two of 12 men that He sent to spy out the promised land can see the promises of God fulfilled. They believe just because God made the promises—God who had already proven Himself faithful. And so, despite any challenges they are facing in the world that is in front of their eyes, they know God has given them the land. Ten of the men, a significant majority, only see the world in front of them and do not believe in the promises of God. They therefore act accordingly and grumble, once again believing that the troubles that face them in the world will take them down and that God will not be with them. How quickly they’ve forgotten God! We must constantly remind ourselves to be like Joshua and Caleb, because if we are not, we won’t make it into the Kingdom of God. Yeshua told us the gate is narrow and the way is difficult to life, and there are few who find it. Let us be among the few.

Numbers 14, Numbers 15

Numb. 14 continues Numb. 11-13. The 10 men who sinned by disbelieving the Lord’s promises have influenced ALL of Israel. We read: “Then all the congregation raised their voices and cried out and the people wept that night, and all the sons of Israel grumbled…” Joshua and Caleb brought a good report, saying that the Lord would fulfill His promises, but the people listened to the 10 doubtful men instead. If there ever was a case against Democracy in the Bible, this is it. A Republican form of government is superior, for it protects the minority against the majority. The people wanted to stone Joshua and Caleb with stones because of their faith and trust in the Lord God Most High. If Israel had been a Democracy, what would come of their faith? Thankfully, at this point the Lord was the King of Israel, and He judged rightly, destroying the 10 men who led the people astray and judging the people as a whole. Not one of that generation, except Joshua and Caleb, would enter the Promised Land.

The Lord now promises that every man and woman 20 years and older, except Joshua and Caleb, would die in the wilderness, and the people disbelieve this promise now, too. We can see that the people’s repentance follows the Lord’s judgment on the sons of Israel, but the Lord’s mercy and grace had reached its end. He would only allow their children, the second generation, to reach the Promised Land, and this first generation would die in the wilderness according to their own faith. They actually brought this judgment on themselves by prophesying and believing it, instead of believing the prophesy of the Lord. False prophets are so dangerous they can lead to our permanent destruction if we believe them instead of the Word of the Lord. Despite the people’s repentance, it is further sin that the people presume they can still enter the Promised Land. Those who followed the false prophets to try and take the land against the Word of the Lord were destroyed, and it wasn’t just a physical death.

In the wilderness, the Lord proposed that He destroy the whole nation and raise up a nation from Moses. It would have fulfilled His promises to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for Moses was their descendant. But Moses, being the humble servant of the Lord that He is, appealed to the Lord on behalf of the people and sacrificed himself for them as a prophetic template of what our Lord would do for us on the cross. In so doing, He showed us how we ought to pray, also: “So now, please, let the power of the Lord be great, just as You have declared, saying, ‘The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in mercy, forgiving wrongdoing and violation of His Law; but He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, inflicting the punishment of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations.’ Please forgive the guilt of this people in accordance with the greatness of Your mercy, just as You also have forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.”

Once we come to knowledge of the Truth and the Lord convicts us, we cannot turn back toward our life before we knew the Lord or we will die in our sin. We might slip up, we might stumble, we might sin unintentionally, and the Lord is merciful and full of grace, but if we rebel continuously there is no longer salvation available. As we dwell in the wilderness of this life, and we look to Yeshua as our sacrificial ram who died for our sins, we must bring bread and wine before the Lord in memory of Him. The grain offering and the drink offering fulfills vows (the covenant) and fulfills our obligation to the Lord during His appointed times, and He is the Lamb that was slain. The commandments apply to us all: “As for the assembly, there shall be one statute for you and for the stranger who resides among you, a permanent statute throughout your generations; as you are, so shall the stranger be before the Lord.” There is no separation between Jews and Gentiles; we are united in Christ!

This is the sacred assembly that the Lord refers to; the people who call upon His name: Yeshua (Jesus). This applies to us. To reiterate, I’ll quote the second reference, for where there is a witness of two or three, a thing is established: “You shall have one law for the native among the sons of Israel and for the stranger who resides among them, for one who does anything wrong unintentionally. But the person who does wrong defiantly, whether he is a native or a stranger, that one is blaspheming the Lord; and that person shall be cut off from among his people. Since he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken His commandment, that person shall be completely cut off; his guilt will be on him.’” It is a violation of the third commandment, to not take the name of the Lord in vain, to sin defiantly. This means the one who reads the Word of God and says the law does not apply to them. This one sins defiantly and will be cut off from among the people of God. Beware!

Numbers 15 concludes with an example of what it means to “despise the word of the Lord” or to “sin defiantly,” which occurred while Israel was “in the wilderness,” meaning that they turned back from the Promised Land and went back toward the Sea of Reeds, which is where they began. There they would live for 40 years until everyone 20 and older died, except Joshua and Caleb. God said in Numbers 14:25: “Now the Amalekites and the Canaanites live in the valleys; turn tomorrow and set out for the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea.” This tells us that they left the border of civilization and were back in a land that was far away from any civilization. This is critically important to understand, because this is the setting for the example at the end of Numbers 15. Here a man was caught gathering wood on the Sabbath Day, and for that God commanded that He be stoned with stones to death.

I maintain my earlier belief that this punishment was more merciful than casting the man outside the camp without food and water, because they were days away from civilization. To “cut the man off” from among the people could be accomplished in two ways: either by stoning to death or banishment. We see Paul talk about this very thing in 1 Corinth. 5 to judge the adulterous man—he was banished, not stoned. King Saul banished the witches from Israel and did not stone them. The punishments are equivalent. But banishment would be less merciful than stoning this Sabbath breaker to death on account of where they were—he would have suffered without food and water. Still, we should not get lost in our perceived harshness of this punishment, for it is meant to teach us an important lesson, and that is this: If we willfully disobey the commandments of God we should expect nothing but eternal death in Hell. God will not show mercy on those who know His commandments but refuse to obey them.

It is not coincidental that the Lord has chosen violation of the Sabbath Day as the commandment for this lesson. In Exodus 20, He says “Zakar [Remember] the Sabbath Day, to keep it Holy.” He would not say “remember” unless He knew His people would forget on account of the false prophets who have led them astray; who explained that they don’t have to keep it or that they can keep it another day of the week. God has said we must keep the “seventh day” holy. That is the end of the matter, and nowhere did God undo this commandment, nor did Christ undo it. Once we read the Word of God, we either obey God’s commands or we willfully rebel. The Lord institutes the law to wear white tzit-tzits (tassels) with one blue thread following this event. The tassels are meant to remind everyone to keep the law of God—so they don’t forget. We must remember to keep the Sabbath holy, the Lord commanded. Our faith is what matters, but the tassels remind us when the flesh might draw us away from our faith.

Numbers 16, Numbers 17

When the Lord calls a man (not a woman) to become a prophet, teacher, pastor or leader of a congregation, those who grumble against their leadership have two choices: 1) leave the congregation or 2) submit to their leadership. If they remain and grumble against leadership, even claiming the role for themselves as Korah did, the punishment is death, or in the modern church, banishment. God’s law on the matter is eternal. Paul writes on the same topic in 1 Timothy 5:17-22, “The elders who lead well are to be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who work hard at preaching and teaching. … Do not accept an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses. Those who continue in sin, rebuke in the presence of all, so that the rest also will be fearful of sinning. I solemnly exhort you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of His chosen angels, to maintain these principles without bias, doing nothing in a spirit of partiality. Do not lay hands upon anyone too quickly and thereby share responsibility for the sins of others; keep yourself free from sin.”

The law is so significant that the Lord did a new thing and opened up the Earth to swallow the rebellious ones whole. At this point, we should recognize that the Lord has just prohibited this generation from entering the promised land because of their continuous rebellion. How much more will the Lord destroy any man who continues to rebel against Him or His called leadership? Korah, Dathan and Abirham would serve as a witness to anyone who ever challenged God’s leadership without cause; in this case out of envy. It’s important to note as an aside that the Lord has done a new thing, and He didn’t repeat this work. The Lord does “new things” all the time, and we should notice when He does. He may have split the Sea of Reeds for Israel to pass safely through, but never before did He Himself walk on water until He came in the flesh, and Peter followed Him out onto that water. It was a new thing for God to manifest Himself in human likeness. Never before and never after did He do this. He did a new thing.

On that note, the Lord calls for each of the tribes to bring forth a staff and He caused Aaron’s staff to bud and to bear fruit. While He did this to establish Aaron as the High Priest that could not be challenged by other men in his position of authority, He also did this as a prophetic template for the new High Priest who would come to serve eternally as God’s right hand. The Lord shows that life will come from death, fruit will be borne out of a branch that was formally dead, and this fruit would stand before the Lord permanently as a witness to all the World that He is the One who takes away the sins of the world, and there is no other. In like manner, when we come to faith and abide in Christ, God takes what was once a dead branch and brings new life into it by breathing His Holy Spirit into us so that we might bear fruit; namely, love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. Any who do not look to this branch for their salvation, and those who rebel against Him, will be destroyed.

Numbers 18, Numbers 19, Numbers 20

The offerings brought to sacrifice to the Lord were used by Aaron and the Levites for food, but even they gave a tithe of the tithes unto the Lord.

In Hebrews 9:13-14, we read, “For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?” We know that Yeshua replaced all of the sacrificial offerings with His Body as a one-time offering for sin, and so every time we read about these offerings in Torah, we know that Yeshua is our offering. Do we come before our Risen King with clean hands and a clean heart? We ought to according to the Law of Moses.

Moses, frustrated with the obstinance of the people of Israel, claimed credit for striking a rock with his staff to bring water out from it for the people and their animals to drink. It was this simple sin, a one-time sin, that prevented Moses and Aaron from entering the Promised Land. Instead of give credit to God for His continuous, long-suffering and merciful grace, Moses took credit for himself in front of the people. We must always give credit to God, for God Himself created us and gave us all of the talents we have. He gave us our breath, our life and our strength, He gave us our imagination and our time, and He gave us all of the materials by which we can co-create anything. God deserves all the glory for everything we do, and never ought we take credit for ourselves.  

Numbers 21, Numbers 22

The Lord made covenant with fleshly Israel, and any who come against her shall perish. In Numb. 24:9, Balaam himself speaks Truth: “Blessed is he who blesses you, And cursed is he who curses you.” The Lord has a special place in his heart for this people in our timeline, but He has called all people to come to Him through His Jewish Messiah. He has offered the office of sons and daughters to who all believe in Him and do what He commands. This is for a Promised Land that is not of this world. And so we see prophetic templates for the Spiritual reality within Israel’s story. If we are bitten by sin in the flesh, and we experience the venom of the law and begin to die, only by looking upon the One who died for our sin on the Cross can we live. Without the cross, there is no opportunity for us to live. In John 3:14-15, we read, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes will have eternal life in Him.”

Balak was one of a handful of kings who stood against Israel, and while he would have some success fighting against the people of God by later using temptation to pull some away from God, he and Balaam whom he hired could not successfully engage in a frontal attack. Balaam himself is a tragic case, for he could have come to join Israel and be eternally blessed, but his heart was stolen away from God by fame & riches. The Lord warns us many times to not succumb to the heart of Balaam. In Rev. 2:14, Yeshua says to the Church in Pergamon: “I have a few things against you, because you have some there who hold the teaching of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit sexual immorality.” In Numb. 22, Balaam says, “The word that God puts in my mouth, that only shall I speak.” As he gazed down on the multitude of Israel, He saw their formation: it was a cross. If only He would have endured in this faith.

Numbers 23, Numbers 24, Numbers 25, Numbers 26, Numbers 27

Balaam was a true prophet of God Most High, blessing Israel and cursing her enemies for all eternity, even prophesying the coming of Messiah who would make all things right during His eternal kingship. The prophet gazed down on Israel in its formation—the sign of a cross—and He believed that God fulfills His promises. He blessed Israel along with the Kenites, the sons of Moses’s father-in-law, but he cursed Amalak, Edom, Moab, and any other nations that would come against Israel. He rebuked Balak for attempting to manipulate him with riches, giving priority to God Most High in his life. Why did he falter? He had reached the pinnacle of faith, the place where we are all expected to be, and he prophesied in the name of God Most High. Money was too much of a draw for him. It ate at his heart. Balak’s desire to curse Israel fell back on Balaam, who was cursed by his lust for acceptance from the worldly king. He returned and showed Balak how to use the women of Moab to seduce Israel.

Yeshua says in John 10:28, “And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand.” This is as true of us as it was true of Israel in the wilderness. While many wouldn’t make it into the land, those who obeyed God despite their lot in life to die in the wilderness would make it into His eternal kingdom. And, they were untouchable in the plains of Moab, for God protects His people from the enemy. Balaam could not curse them; but could only bless them. How then did they fall? They committed adultery with the daughters of Moab and started to worship their god, Ba’al of Peor, the demon king. We read in Numbers 31:16, “Look, these women caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to trespass against the LORD in the incident of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the LORD.” Balaam had come back and given counsel to Balak to do this; he fell victim to his own greed, and for this he died. In Joshua 13:22, we read: “The sons of Israel also killed Balaam the son of Beor, the diviner, with the sword among the rest of their dead.”

Satan works in this way toward us. We’re warned: “Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8). Balaam is not Satan, but Satan worked through his greed to tempt Israel. While Israel was untouchable living in faith and obedience to God, with temptation to sin Israel could be destroyed entirely. The same is true of us. Satan does not prowl around trying to destroy the lost. Satan tempts the saved to steal them from Christ. Salvation is a free gift that we cannot earn, but once we have salvation, our glorification with Christ on the Last Day is conditional on our endurance in faith and obedience to God. Sanctification is the process we go in once we are baptized and begin to walk according to Christ. We wander through the wilderness being tested over and over again by God to make us into the people He wants us to be. If we fall away during this time, we will not make it into the Promised Land.

We see that the people are numbered again following this incident and every one of the men who was numbered at the beginning of this chapter is now dead, except Joshua and Caleb. God had practically replaced every single man who died in the wilderness, and now he was ready to bring the second generation into the land promised to their fathers. The New Covenant is represented by this Second Generation. All who call upon the name of Yeshua will be saved, but we must do our part to keep our faith and endure in our obedience, or we too will be cut off. Read Hebrews 3-4. It’s quite clear. We must be like Phinehas, who God blessed greatly on account of his faith. He received a “covenant of peace” from God for himself and his children because of his zeal for the Lord; because He was jealous for the Lord and wanted all to worship the Lord alone. We must have this same zeal within the Church, separating the Holy from the profane and immediately removing any profane thing from within our midst.

The Lord will ensure that His people receive their inheritance if they remain faithful to Him. To be faithful to the Lord, we must put Him first. The daughters of Zelophehad yearned to be counted among their brothers with an inheritance in the Promised Land, and God makes it clear that women will be counted among His chosen people. Women do not simply relate to God through their Fathers or Husbands, but can also receive an inheritance of their own. Certainly a man and his wife are meant to be one unit, working together to prepare themselves and their children for God’s kingdom, but when there is not such a unit, the single person has full access on his or her own. Even the Gentiles have access through Christ, as we see prophesied in Ezekiel 47:22: “…And [the strangers in your midst] shall be to you as the native-born among the sons of Israel; they shall be allotted an inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.” Anyone who remains faithful to God has a place in the Kingdom.

Numbers 28, Numbers 29, Numbers 30

We ought to bring our prayers of thanksgiving before the Lord always, and on His Holy Convocation Days, we ought to bring our hearts of praise to worship the Lamb of God. Our prayers and songs of praise and thanksgiving rise as a soothing aroma to the Lord. Our burnt offering of prayer ought to be continual, meaning that we must “pray without ceasing.” The Word of praise and prayer should never depart from our lips. God’s Holy Assemblies as He has ordained them are incredibly important to Him, and we had better learn to repent and bring our humble hearts before Him as He commands. He asks us to celebrate His feasts with clean hands and clean hearts.

Yeshua said that we shouldn’t take oaths, but simply let our “yes be yes” and our “no be no.” Numbers 30 says the same thing. If we make a vow, the key word being “if,” then we had better keep it and not break our word. Torah illustrates several examples of how this might apply, and it explains the authority of a father over her daughter until she weds her husband, and then he assumes this authority. The husband is the head of a woman, Paul writes, while Christ is the head of the man. The whole Word aligns perfectly.

Numbers 31, Numbers 32

God commanded Moses saying, “take vengeance on the Midianites.” This is not a contradiction from the general principle of the Lord; namely, “vengeance is mine. I shall repay.” The Lord is executing His vengeance in this way by commanding Moses to execute it. How important a concept this is, and it applies to us today as the people of God in Christ. We must wait on the Lord to lead us into and through every battle in our lives, and if we do not wait on Him, we sin. However, if the Lord commands us to pick up our sword and He will be with us and we fail to act, we also sin in disobedience to Him by this inaction. We must have discernment and we must belong to Him, for to act without His blessing is sin, and to fail to act when He commands it is sin. His sheep hear His voice, and they listen to Him. Don’t ever forget this.

The sons of Reuben and Gad saw land that they desired, but they did not covet it. They went to the Lord ready to obey Him in all things and waited on the Lord to determine whether they could have the land that seemed right to them. The Lord through Moses made it clear that they could possess the land, but first they had to obey the voice of the Lord and fight with their brothers to take the Promised Land that the Lord had given to the nation. Before we go and take anything in this life—a business, a home, a wife—we need to turn to the Lord in prayer and see if it is His will. Sometimes, He will say “no;” other times, “not yet;” and other times, “yes, but do this for me first.” We must be able to discern the Lord’s voice in these things. We must discipline ourselves with prayer, fasting and obedience to His commandments so we can hear His will for our lives. John 9:31 says, “Now we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him.”

Numbers 33, Numbers 34

When Israel, the people of God, go into a land, all idols and idolatry must be removed and all of the people who do not belong to God must also be removed, we read toward the end of Numbers 33. This is how we should view the sacred assembly. If any remain who are from a pagan mindset, who mix the holy with the profane, if any remain who do not love the Lord with all of their heart, they will be a thorn in our sides and they will continue to trouble us week after week. The Lord desires His holy land to be pure, and we should share in this desire. The place to meet with sinners and bring them to repentance, as our Lord Yeshua did, is outside the camp; not inside of the church. Church is a place to worship God and be at peace with Him. It is not a place for battle. Battles take place outside the camp, and we are commanded to fight them—the Lord be with us.

This map shows the borders of Israel as they are today as compared with Numbers 34 and Ezekiel 47: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Map_Land_of_Israel.jpg. It’s interesting to consider that the people have never possessed this whole land as God commanded, and they’ve even possessed parts of Edom. It’s fairly close, though Gaza and the West Bank are certainly thorns in the sides of God’s people. One day, when our Lord Yeshua returns, Israel will be fully inhabited by all whom the Lord gives His inheritance, and the nations will dwell around her in peace. I long for this Kingdom on the Earth, and I look to my King and pray for His Kingdom to come and His will to be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. We know that the New Jerusalem—I believe this to be the followers of Christ—will descend from Heaven and after an initial period of restructuring authority under Christ, Heaven and Earth will be refreshed and will be united as one place again, just as in the Garden of Eden. This day cannot come soon enough, but all in God’s appointed time.

Numbers 35, Numbers 36

God’s justice in Numbers 35 makes perfect sense. No murderer may be accused on the testimony of one witness, but at least two are needed. Murder with intent is punishable by death, but manslaughter leads to a trial to determine if the death was caused by murder, and the one who accidentally kills another shall live in a city of refuge, awaiting trial and then awaiting freedom. The concept of bail likely originated here. Importantly we read that the life of the one who is murdered defiles the land, and nothing can satisfy this defilement except for the blood of the murderer. How much land is defiled in America today on account of abortion! We’re in trouble. The Lord will judge a people who has defiled their land with murder.

Deuteronomy 1, Deuteronomy 2

Israel wanted to rest by Mt. Sinai where God spoke to them forever—who wouldn’t want to do this? Our hearts as a people are to stay put when the Lord has given us His Word and to enjoy the blessing that He has given to us. But the Lord doesn’t want this for us. He wants us to go out, to be on the move, to change, to grow, to reach other people and to conquer the land that belongs to the enemy so that we can obtain the promises that He has given to us. Our faith is not passive. We do not just accept Yeshua for our salvation and then sit still. Salvation is the beginning of our road toward the Promised Land, which is the Kingdom of Heaven. Before He ascended into Heaven, Yeshua told us to go out and make disciples of ALL nations (that means people groups, or races, of which there are 71), to baptize them in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and to teach them the commandments of God. Our faith must be active, or it will die in the wilderness that is this life.

If we give credence to the Book of Enoch—and I do because Judah (Jude) quotes it in the NT and calls Enoch a prophet—the giants described in Deut. 2 are descendants of the evil spirits that were created when rebellious angels married human women and had children. We read that both Lot’s and Esau’s descendants have conquered these giants and possessed their land in obedience to God. Now Israel, the descendants of Jacob, who were given a special role in God’s overall plan to be a nation of kings and priests, is asked to do the same in Canaan. From the text, it appears that the descendants of Lot and Esau have not completely succeeded in eradicating the giants, and neither does Israel, which means that these evil spirits remain as an influence in the world until the time of the end, when Yeshua will conquer them forever. Yet, He gives us authority to cast them out. This requires that we stand in the Name of the Lord and obediently keep His commandments in our lives with faith.

Deuteronomy 3, Deuteronomy 4

From out of Egypt to Heshbon to Bashan, Israel had walked around the whole border of the “promised land.” God instructed them to destroy their enemies all around. Heshbon is in the middle of the land on the east, and Bashan is in the north in modern Syria where the Golan Heights is today. I can understand why Moses would ask the Lord again to go into the land, having seen it all. The Lord said literally to Him, “Much for you,” often translated “Enough!” “Do not ask me again about this matter.” Rather than a statement of weariness; this statement is encouragement. God is saying to Moses, I have given you more than you even know. Moses, a prophet of God who knew Yeshua intimately, would inherit the true Promised Land and he did not need to cross over into the worldly land he had just surveyed. In Hebrews 11:26-27, the writer says Moses “esteemed the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt, for he looked to the reward. … he endured as seeing Him who is invisible.”

And so Moses stands in a position of expectation. He soon would climb the mountain to his earthly death, promised to all men on account of sin, but he would await an eternal prize in Christ on account of his faith. From this position, he advises his brothers and sisters to follow after God and not their own desires. He even warned them: “You shall not add to the word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, so that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I am commanding you.” Sadly, Israel both added to and took away from the law through their oral tradition, which has since been recorded in the Talmud. Yeshua rebuked them for this in Matthew 15:3 and Mark 7: “Why do you yourselves also break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?” Modern Christians have done the same thing, rejecting the commandments of God in order to uphold the traditions of the elders. This does not end well.

You see, when we keep the Torah with the Holy Spirit of Yeshua guiding us so we understand what is True, this is the very thing that makes us into a chosen people. Moses says, “so keep and do them,” referring to God’s commandments, “for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’” There is nothing new under the sun, Solomon wrote, and this is still true today, except in those with a heart of rebellion. “For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the Lord our God whenever we call on Him?” There is none. In Christ, we are grafted-in to Israel, a kingdom of kings and priests, and no one else has a direct relationship with God besides us.

Moses warns Israel, of which we are members in Christ, and says, “Only be careful for yourself and watch over your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons.” We will read tomorrow how we must teach the Torah diligently to our children, and we do this best by living it out day-by-day in our lives and show them by example, for this is what it means to follow Christ. We must perform the commandments, the statutes and the judgments in the land that the Lord has given to us.

Among the Lord’s most serious warnings is His teaching to keep our faithfulness to Him and not corrupt ourselves by going after other gods. We cannot make “any figure, a representation of male or female, a representation of any animal that is on the earth, a representation of any winged bird that flies in the sky, a representation of anything that crawls on the ground, or a representation of any fish that is in the water below the earth. And be careful not to raise your eyes to heaven and look at the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the heavenly lights, and allow yourself to be drawn away and worship them and serve them…” These are things that both we and our ancestors are guilty of, and most churches today are guilty of this very thing. For example, the very idea of Sunday worship is idolatry in this exact sense—it is a worship of the sun; it always has been and always will be. The Lord’s Sabbath is the seventh day, which is Saturday. We cannot mix the holy with the profane. The Lord warns us to “be very careful yourselves.”

Moses also makes it clear that the Lord knows we’re going to mess up. He says “when you act corruptly … and do what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God to provoke Him to anger…” It’s clear, the Lord is going to judge us, He’s going to scatter us, and He will not allow us to live in the land He has given us. However, in the midst of our distress, if we “seek the Lord your God,” we will “find Him if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.” We read: “When you are in distress and all these things happen to you, in the latter days you will return to the Lord your God and listen to His voice. For the Lord your God is a compassionate God; He will not abandon you nor destroy you, nor forget the covenant with your fathers which He swore to them.” In other words, when you sin, repent, and the Lord will forgive you. He died on the cross for this. We read: “You were shown these things so that you might know that the Lord, He is God; there is no other besides Him.”

The conclusion: “Therefore know today, and take it to your heart, that the Lord, He is God in heaven above and on the earth below; there is no other. So you shall keep His statutes and His commandments which I am giving you today, so that it may go well for you and for your children after you, and that you may live long on the land which the Lord your God is giving you for all time.” Yeshua said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.” He later identifies these commandments as the ones He gave us in the beginning—the ones He gave through Moses. He said, these commandments are the Father’s. If we do this, He will give us a helper, the “Spirit of Truth.” He will help us in all things in all ways to understand, know and keep the commandments so that we can love God and love one another all the days of our lives. Let us have willing hearts as we seek the Lord, and He will bring us into that “Promised Land” that is not a part of this world; it is part of the kingdom that endures.

Deuteronomy 5, Deuteronomy 6, Deuteronomy 7

Moses delivered the ten words to Israel a second time, noting that they heard God speak these words themselves which frightened them. Israel asked Moses to mediate between them and God, and God said it was good. In this way, Yeshua is “a prophet like unto Moses,” an eternal mediator between the Invisible Father whose holiness would consume us in an instant and our own temporal lives of flesh, which must be atoned for by His blood. If we are careful to obey God’s commandments, we show our love for Yeshua—what He has done for us and what He promises to do. We don’t obey out of blind obligatory duty as Israel did in the wilderness, but out of a deep desire and commitment to serve the Lord and put Him first in our lives. We have a better way in Christ, who puts His Holy Spirit in us to help us obey when our heart is aligned to do so, and this is the walk of faithfulness in God. If we do not obey, however, we will die. And yet, God calls to the unfaithful to repent and He forgives sin.

The sh’ma of Deuteronomy 6 is what Yeshua called “the greatest commandment.” Sh’ma is translated in English as “Hear,” but it’s true meaning is “hear and obey.” Like all of Scripture, it has spiritual meaning that unveils Truth much deeper than the literal surface meaning that has been misused. In brief, to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, we must first understand that He is ONE God, not three. Our one God manifests Himself as three powers, sometimes simultaneously, but He is not three gods. Many Jews reject Yeshua as the Messiah because of the pagan manner in which the Trinity is often explained. God absolutely expresses Himself as three powers—namely, Father, Son and Holy Spirit—and Scripture shows us how this happens in both the Old and New Testaments, but we must remember that His ways are not our ways. We may wonder how the Son is subjected to the Father and yet they are equal; this is because they have one will and they are one being—not two.

As the sh’ma continues, we understand that to love God, we must keep His commandments. Yeshua told us the same thing, “If you love Me, keep my commandments.” It’s not blind obedience, as we covered, but we shall teach them to our children and speak of them in our house, when we go out of the house, before we get up in the morning and as we lie down at night. Yeshua told us the same thing in Matthew 28: “make disciples of all nations … teach them all the things I commanded to you.” To bind them as a sign on our hand means that everything we say or do must reflect obedience to God’s commandments. To put them as frontlets on our forehead, means everything we think ought to reflect obedience to God’s commandments. We must “renew the Spirit of our mind” and “take every thought captive,” as Paul says. By writing them on our doorposts and gates, we understand in our hearts that everything that happens on our property is in obedience to God. Our whole lives must reflect our commitment to God.

It is because of what God has done for us that we give Him our love. When our children ask us why we keep God’s commandments, we might have said before Christ, “‘We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. … He brought us out of there in order to bring us in, to give us the land which He had sworn to our fathers.” Now we can say, “We were slaves to Satan in the World, and the Lord freed us from the slavery to sin with a mighty hand by giving His own life on the cross for us, and then He rose from the dead to make a way for us into His Kingdom.” Because of what the Lord has done and what He has promised to do, this is why we commit ourselves to keep His commandments faithfully with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength. Will the Lord be merciful to those who disregard His commandments? Only if they repent. In Matthew 7, He makes it abundantly clear those who “practice lawlessness” will not make it into His kingdom.

As we go throughout the wilderness and take possession of the temporal lands that the Lord our God gives to us as strangers in a strange land, dwellers in temporary dwellings, we ought to know that God will go before us and drive out His enemies from before us. That doesn’t mean that we won’t have to face them. This entire plain of existence is dedicated toward facing trials and tribulations so that we can learn to be the men and women that God has designed us to be. Yeshua came and told us that we ought to love our enemies. God wants their hearts, also, and by living our lives fully reflecting God’s commandments, we show God’s love for them. If they reject God’s heart for them, this is their own choice and will ultimately lead to their destruction, but it is our duty to withstand the temporal pressures of our enemies so as to convict them of God’s Truth and hopefully bring them to repentance. We are a chosen people, God’s personal possession, and He has suffered and died to redeem us.

Deuteronomy 8, Deuteronomy 9, Deuteronomy 10

The Lord is faithful even though we are not faithful to Him. He will fulfill His promises to bring Abraham’s children into the Promised Land; so that the Nations will know that He is God for God’s own glory. The children of Abraham do the works of Abraham, Yeshua said. God will also be faithful to judge the disobedient and lawless for the purpose of restoring them in repentance. Every good thing we have is from God, and He gives us good things for His own glory, so that we might praise His name. God’s Holy Spirit wrote the commandments on stone as He now writes them on our hearts, and we need to “circumcise” our hearts so that they no longer contain sin, but focus alone on the will of the Lord. “What does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and to keep the Lord’s commandments and His statutes which I am commanding you today for your good?”

Deuteronomy 11, Deuteronomy 12, Deuteronomy 13

Moses repeats himself in Deut. 11 with an interesting twist. He says, “Know this day that I am not speaking with your sons who have not known and who have not seen the discipline of the Lord your God…” For our eisegetical assassins, to coin a phrase, they might point to this verse saying, “see: the commandments were only for Israel.” Let’s do some exegesis: It’s only a few lines below this where Moses writes: “You shall therefore take these words of mine to heart and to soul;  … You shall also teach them to your sons, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, and when you get up.” The Lord, through Moses, explains: The commandments apply to YOU directly and God wants your willing obedience. Also, it is YOUR duty to teach them to your children, so that they can follow them, too. With this understanding, the rest of the chapter becomes more alarming. We will be blessed when we desire to obey, and cursed when we desire to rebel.

While Israel was instructed to destroy all of the idols that they discovered in the land, we can read the Spirit and Truth of these verses and note that in America, it is our duty to remove all idols or possible idols from our property. An idol is anything that is not God that we give power to, have an attachment to, or worship. I have thrown out many items that I used to treasure and I have asked for God’s forgiveness in holding on to them. I’m sure He will reveal more such items in time.

In Deut. 12, the Lord also makes it clear that we may eat clean meats on our property and we do not have to rely only on meat that has been sacrificed in the Tabernacle or Temple. To be clear, the text says: whether we are clean or unclean, we may eat clean meat. So, it doesn’t mean if we are a priest or a common Christian, we may eat meat on our property according to the Levitical laws of Leviticus 11. Note: It is critical that we remove the blood from meat, for blood makes clean meat, unclean.

In Deut. 13, God clarifies the idea of false prophecy and false prophets, whom Yeshua called “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” Even if these people going after other gods are in our own family, the punishment is death. In practice, this means they must be excommunicated from the church and from the home. Their sin becomes a cancer if you allow them to remain; as Paul said, “a little leaven leavens the whole lump.” A wolf that gets in among the sheep can tear it apart without mercy, and there will be nothing left. We cannot take false prophesy or false prophets lightly. Only upon repentance can such a person be allowed back in. Idolatry is among the greatest, the most pervasive and the most appealing of sins against God, because those who practice it believe they are worshipping God, and they teach others the same. God is quite clear that He hates this, and so we cannot allow it whatsoever in our lives, in our homes or in our churches. It will only bring destruction if we disobey.

Deuteronomy 14, Deuteronomy 15, Deuteronomy 16

Moses reminds the second generation about the key commandments of God that are meant for us to keep forever. We should not engage in pagan activities, like carving shapes into our hair or beard. We should not eat anything unclean, as specified. We should tithe (give 10 percent) of everything we earn; we should give our first and our best to the Lord (this is up to you how you execute this, but it must be given, preferably to your church and in the third year to a charitable organization). Now, here is a key point for the New Covenant.

While the Lord had established the tabernacle and the Temple as places to put His name during the Old Covenant, He has now established our hearts as the place where we ought to worship “In spirit and Truth” (See John 4:23), and so we ought to celebrate God’s feasts with our congregations and bring our first and our best offerings to enjoy with the Lord. These are holy convocations, meaning that we must come together with the Body.

We have lost track of the Jubilee, but we do know the Shemitah year. Last year was the Shemitah, and we celebrated in Spirit and Truth on the Land the Lord had given us. We are still learning how to do this, but our desire is to honor the Lord and His commandments. It is critically important that we do not approach God’s commandments with mean spiritedness, but with joy! It is a joy indeed to desire the Lord’s ways, and to serve Him is a delight. Let us come into these Holy Times with clean hands and clean hearts, and let us search our hearts for repentance.

The Lord wants humble servants who desire to please Him, not robots who obey out of fear. We ought to be generous, loving and join the Lord in Spirit and in Truth every Holy Convocation Day He commands, starting with the weekly Sabbath (Friday sundown to Saturday sundown). The Passover, the Pentecost and the Feast of Tabernacles are eternal festivals to the Lord, but He also desires us to keep the Day of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement. We ought to celebrate with great joy, and never come empty-handed before His altar. God deserves our first and our best.

Deuteronomy 17, Deuteronomy 18, Deuteronomy 19, Deuteronomy 20

When we give an offering of time, money, prayer, praise, or anything at all to the Lord, we can’t give our second best. We need to give Him our first and our best. If there is anyone in our midst who is sacrificing to idols or putting their devotions in anything other than Yeshua, we need to cast that person out from among us. We cannot allow idolatry to take hold within the church, or it will destroy everything. It has, and it always will. So many churches have fallen away from God because of it. It is critical to remove such practices from the church immediately. Interestingly, when Israel enters the land, God tells us that the King they choose ought to make a copy of Scripture for Himself and read it day and night, among other things. We are kings and priests in the name of Jesus, and so we to ought to practice what the Lord commands here in Deuteronomy 17; most importantly, we should read and observe the law day and night.

In Deuteronomy 18, Moses explains that when Israel asked Moses to mediate between God and them at Mt. Sinai, God said it was a good idea. He then said He would later send a prophet like Moses who would mediate between God and the people in a superior manner. This prophet is Yeshua, and He references this section in His teaching. The Lord will require all humankind to listen to our Messiah Yeshua when He comes again. Moses also warns about false prophets and defines them as those who speak in the name of the Lord and then what they say does not occur. We are to ignore them.

In Deuteronomy 19, the Lord talks about two or three witnesses being needed to accuse anyone of wrongdoing. However, if someone gives false witness against his brother, then they will suffer the fate they were trying to bring about through their false testimony. The Lord’s justice system is perfect, and our society would be quite a better place if we followed it.

In Deuteronomy 20, the Lord shows justice against foreign nations that assert themselves against Israel. If they are far off, Israel will make them into servants when the Lord fights their battles for them. However, we should point out that the Lord intends to utterly annihilate the peoples who inhabited the lands of Canaan. It is important to understand that these people had sunk the depths of depravity and the Lord’s intent is to completely wipe them off the Earth. He had done this with all of humanity previously when He flooded the Earth; now He was just doing this with these people groups. He warns Israel that if they don’t obey this command, they could fall victim to the temptation of sin and potentially bring themselves to destruction.

Deuteronomy 21, Deuteronomy 22, Deuteronomy 23

As followers of Yeshua (Jesus), the entirety of the Torah applies to us—there are far more than 613 laws—the law is infinite. Yeshua, when He walked the Earth in the flesh, did not violate the Torah in any way. To believe or teach that He did is blasphemy, a violation of the 3rd commandment. Yeshua said, “follow me,” and as people who follow Yeshua, we must perfectly fulfill the law as He did, which He tells us. Read Matthew 5-7 to begin. To have faith in Yeshua brings obedience to the law, for the Holy Spirit writes the law on our hearts. This does not mean we overlook the written law, and Paul makes this clear in his letter to Timothy: “All Scripture is useful for doctrine… and etc.” This means that we ought to apply the written law in our lives according to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We are to worship God “in spirit and in truth.” This means our whole life is dedicated to the Truth, which is the law, and the Spirit, which is Christ in us helping us to keep the law perfectly.

Cited are two examples that are widely misunderstood by Christian audiences, because they are not taught from a Hebraic perspective nor a true understanding of Torah. Rather, they are taught as reiterated blasphemy uttered by some of the early church fathers who did not know Christ—wolves in sheep’s clothing that both Christ and Paul warned us about. On the other side of this blasphemous coin our the Scribes and Pharisees, who “taught as commandments the doctrines of men.” It was man’s law, not God’s commandments, that Christ often thwarted, and He did so intentionally to show that these leaders were hypocrites holding up their own standard above God’s standard. Many Christians do this today by discounting the commandments of God in honor of their tradition instead.

At First Fruits Ministries, we teach a Hebraic understanding that brings light to both situations:

God is a God of healing. The core meaning of the word “shalom” is to bring wholeness or completeness to our beings. To heal on the Sabbath is not only encouraged by God all throughout the Old Testament, it is commanded. When Yeshua healed on the Sabbath, He was fulfilling, not violating, Torah. I could cite hundreds of examples if you would like to explore privately with me.
As we read in our Deuteronomy 23 reading today: “When you enter your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluck the heads of grain with your hand, but you are not to use a sickle on your neighbor’s standing grain.” When Yeshua walked through a field with His disciples on the Sabbath, they plucked the heads off the grain. They were not doing any work, they were gleaning, which is also encouraged for the poor or sojourners (they were sojourners). This did not violate Sabbath. However, had they picked up a sickle or even put the grains into their baskets, they would have been violating Sabbath. They didn’t.

If you read nothing else, read this: Yeshua came to reorder men’s hearts to obey God and not man. The Jewish leaders had created an “oral tradition” that completely violated the law of God in every way. Here is a later written record of that oral tradition that Jesus rebuked: The Midrash, Pesikta Rabbati reads, “A person must not say, ‘I will not keep the commandment of the elders because they are not from the Torah. The Almighty says to such a person, ‘No, my son! Rather all that they decree upon you, observe! As it is written, ‘According to the instruction which they teach’ Even I [God] must obey their decree, as it is written, ‘You will decree, and He will fulfill it.” If there was ever something that should have been called blasphemy, this is it. But these men who taught this nonsense are the ones who called Yeshua a blasphemer and put Him to death, because He said to keep the commandments of God in Torah. We must obey God’s commandments and reject man’s tradition to follow Christ.

Commenting on our readings:
God will bring blood guilt judgment on any land that does not repent of the sin of murder. America is under judgment because we have abandoned the death penalty and we have allowed and encouraged abortion. God takes this so seriously that He teaches that when we cannot identify the guilty party to a murder, we should make a sacrifice in the closest city to ensure repentance is made. Today we have the blood of Christ to atone for sin, but we must ask for this forgiveness, not just as individuals, but as a community. If we do not, judgment will come on the whole land as it did on Sodom, Gomorrah, and all the Canaanite lands that Israel conquered. Read Ezk. 14:12-23. When any land sins against the Lord persistently, the judgments of the sword (war), famine, pestilence (COVID-19, etc.) and beasts of the earth (tyrannical government) will come upon that land. Only individuals like Daniel, Noah and Job can keep themselves from this judgement. We must know Christ.

In war, men rape women in the lands they conquer. This happened in Vietnam, it happened in World War 1 and World War 2, and it certainly happens today, and American men are guilty of it, maybe even women, too. Today, even children are captured and sold into sex slavery. God says not to do this, and he makes it very clear. If you are going to take a woman from a conquered land, God says to give her 30 days to mourn for her family that was lost. After that, you may take her as a wife (this is important) or you may set her free. If you are not willing to take her as a wife, you must set her free so she is not humiliated. This means that there is no rape. It’s consensual.

Later in the chapter, God makes it clear that when a woman is raped, this is akin to murder, and ONLY the man guilty of this shall be put to death. It is a crime worthy of the DEATH penalty!!! In all of the other scenarios, the text implies the woman was complicit in the sexual act. In cases of adultery, both the man and the woman are put to death. God’s law ensures that sin does not take root in society, and it is a law that we ought to follow. I can’t wait until He is King over all the Heaven and the Earth and this law is fully restored and enforced. ALL of society’s problems will necessarily go away. The chapter also handles fornication, for we learn here that fornicators who are voluntarily engaging in the act must get married, and the man owes the woman’s father the brideprice. The brideprice is akin to life insurance today. If the husband dies, the money was meant to take care of the widow and children, and her father bears that responsibility at her husband’s death.

In earlier chapters, we read about how a king ought not to multiply wives for himself. Even in the New Testament, Paul writes that spiritual leaders are to be the “husband of one wife.” However, God knows the heart of man is desperately wicked, and He makes it clear that IF a man takes multiple wives, He is to act as if He has one, and give the eldest child the inheritance the law requires, which is a double portion. Jacob violated this law, for He gave the double portion to Joseph, rather than to Reuben or even Judah, who was the eldest non-disgraced child. While the situation was used for prophetic purposes to identify the first and second comings of Christ, God makes it clear that it is not an example of how we ought to live. Rather, the eldest son is to receive a double portion.

If we find a countryman’s animal, car, or other piece of property while we are out and about and we are in a position to help identify its owner and return it to him, we must do so. This is love.

It is clear the LGBTQ lifestyle is against God’s law. A man cannot even wear a woman’s garment, and a woman cannot wear a man’s garment. It is an abomination to the Lord.

The Lord cares for the order of the natural world. It is cruel to take both a mother and her young to cultivate a farm or for a meal, but we must take only the young when we are seeking animals for our use. The mother herself can have another brood.

The Lord cares about how we care for our property. If we build anything on our land that leads to another’s injury or death, we are responsible for that. The law is clear. Thus, we should add protective measures to our property to prevent injury or death.

When we get to the section on not sowing two kinds of seed, wearing two types of material in our clothing, or plowing with an ox and donkey together, it is clear that these are metaphors since they are so closely placed and a testimony of two or three to establish a Truth. We know that the Lord is saying that believers should not be yoked with unbelievers because it will lead to pressure on the believer to give up the faith. This is why the Lord finishes this section by saying that we must wear tassels on the four corners of our garments. These tassels are meant to remind us to keep the commandments of God. All but one of the strands are white, signifying our purity of heart to keep God’s law, and one tassel is blue to remind us about the truth, the commandments of God that were written by the Holy Spirit on sapphire tablets of stone, and now on our heart. Note that our blood vessels appear to be blue inside the tassels on our garment (our body); namely, our hands and our feet.

While the law is clear in Deut. 23:1 that the emasculated shall not enter the assembly of the people, the Lord has literally changed this law for the New Covenant, but He does so within the text of the Old Covenant. If you read Isaiah 56, you will see that both foreigners as well as the emasculated who keep the sabbath, the faith, and the commandments of God will be given redemption in Christ. Here’s a relevant section for our reading today: “For thus says the Lord: ‘To the eunuchs who keep My Sabbaths, and choose what pleases Me, and hold fast My covenant, even to them I will give in My house and within My walls a place and a name better than that of sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” Likewise, the Lord says no Ammonite or Moabite nor their descendants shall enter the Assembly, but consider that Ruth the Moabite woman who “clung to Naomi” and said, “your people shall be my people, and your God, my God,” is grafted-in to Israel. In like manner, so too must we cling to Christ and keep God’s commandments as grafted-in branches on the olive tree of Israel. Praise be to God for His mercy!

We see in Deuteronomy 23 how Yeshua taught Torah; nothing more and nothing less, when He said, “you shall love your enemy.” See what Yeshua writes here through the pen of Moses: “You shall not loathe an Edomite, for he is your brother; you shall not loathe an Egyptian, because you were a stranger in his land.” Even their sons can enter the assembly of the people through Christ.

Modern hygiene may make life far more sanitary, but the law of God was even more advanced than us. The Lord instructs us to bury our human waste outside of civilization so it does not make anyone sick or profane the land on which we live and worship the Lord.

We are not to return slaves to their masters, according to God in His Torah, but in the case of Paul and Philemon, Paul sent Onesimus back voluntarily in the hope that Philemon would be moved to free him voluntarily and consider him a brother in Christ instead of a slave. It was a major opportunity for spiritual growth that was fully aligned with Torah, and Onesimus realized he was a slave of Christ in reality and ought to submit Himself Christ in all things, not concerning himself with the things of this world.

Idolatry resurfaces toward the end of Deuteronomy 23. There is nothing God writes about more. We must be mindful not to mix the holy with the profane. We must not charge interest. We must be mindful of strangers and the poor. God’s Torah is a law of love, and we imitate God when we keep it.

Deuteronomy 24, Deuteronomy 25, Deuteronomy 26, Deuteronomy 27

Yeshua taught us that God gave Moses the law of divorce not because he condones divorce, but because of the hardness of our hearts. This does not mean that the law of divorce is no longer valid. Rather, in this time when the hardness of men’s hearts has never been harder, such laws are sadly necessary. The lesson remains: “What God has joined together, let no man separate.” Now, “If we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Yeshua HaMashiach the righteous.” I know someone who married his ex-wife who had been with another man. Clearly, had he asked me advice, I would have pointed him to Deuteronomy 24. But now he has done it, and he is bound to her again. Our society would not allow us to redeem our brother’s wives if our brother dies; however, in spirit and Truth we can take care of our brother’s wife and children, and we ought to. It is the law of God. Repentance is needed every day from each one of us. Let us approach God with humble and contrite hearts.

God is clear that we ought to take care of the poor and needy and not exploit their situation. We should be mindful of the needs of those who borrow from us, rather than hold things over their head. Consider what they borrow a gift and never expect it back. Leave fruit and veggies in the garden for the passers by and the poor and needy or even the animals that God feeds, but at the same time, God is not saying that we should allow theft, for clearly He commands, “thou shalt not steal.”

We should always offer our first and best to the Lord in whatever place we worship, and we ought to store up the same to give to the poor. We should not offer our leftovers to the poor, but we should give them our first and our best, for as Yeshua said, “whatever you do to the least of your brothers, you do unto me.”

The blessings and curses on Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerazim really happened. The children of Israel obeyed God in this way. Just last year archeologists found evidence of curses written on a piece of lead on Mt. Ebal. There have also been discoveries of an altar made of natural stone that was not hewn, just as God had commanded it. Just as Israel pronounced back in the day, so too is true of anyone who is in Christ, “Cursed is anyone who does not fulfill the words of this Law by doing them.’ And all the people shall say, ‘Amen.’” As James writes in the first part of his letter, “we must be doers of the word and not hearers only.” The Word is the law given to God by Moses AND the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and showed us how to keep the law. Both are witnesses to us, and as we know, “by two or three witnesses, a thing shall be established.” Blessed are those saints who endure by keeping the commandments of God and faith in Yeshua.

Deuteronomy 28, Deuteronomy 29

The Lord brings the blessing of everlasting life to those who love Him and keep His commandments, but He will bring curse upon curse on His people who turn their backs on Him and His commandments. Regarding Israel specifically, the land will serve as a witness to God’s Word, whether Israel is blessed or cursed will depend on how well they obey God. We will know that God is God because of what He does to Israel according to His promises. As grafted-in members of Israel through Christ, we too will know God’s promises are real on account of the blessings and curses He brings upon us. Curses are meant to bring us to repentance so that we turn back to obeying God. It is Godly sorrow that leads to repentance and thus salvation through Christ, but worldly sorrow will lead to death. We should praise God always, and bring Him sacrifices of thanks and praise, no matter what is happening to us, for this alone leads to His blessings now and eternal life with Him forever.

Deuteronomy 30, Deuteronomy 31

Deuteronomy 30 is the Gospel message; namely: We will mess up and therefore be subject to the judgment of God. At this point, some of us will repent, we will turn away from our sin and turn toward God, instead. When we do this, God will restore us into proper relationship with Him through faith in His name, Yeshua. At this point, we will walk according to His commandments with he help of His Spirit. The Lord promises: “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the hearts of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul, so that you may live.” This is the circumcision of the Second Covenant in Christ. With the power of God, the commandments will be near us, it will be in our mouth and in our hearts, an easy yoke indeed for us to follow. On top of what these men had in the plains of Moan, we also have the example of Christ living out these commandments in His life and explaining them to us. We have a better way to choose life in Him, following Him and doing His will all of our days.

Moses commands us to “be strong and courageous” when we face our enemies, for “the Lord your God is the One who is going with you. He will not desert you or abandon you.” He will fulfill His promises, and in fact, He has already done so within His eternal continuum that is without time or space. He commands us: “do not fear and do not be dismayed.” He expects us to trust in Him alone, and to endure through this life until we can join Him in eternity.

Importantly, we also read that Moses wrote down all the words of the Torah (Pentateuch). There was no “oral tradition” that was passed down from God. God gave Moses Torah, and Moses wrote it all down. What is often referred to as “the law of Moses” is in Truth, the “law of God given to Moses.” He wrote it down. We have it as a treasure to learn from “in Spirit and in Truth” with the help of the Holy Spirit, with faith in the Messiah Yeshua, who showed us how to live by His example. It is important that we keep our eyes on the commandments of God and never the tradition of the elders so that we can endure until He comes to bring us to the place He has prepared for us.

Deuteronomy 32, Deuteronomy 33, Deuteronomy 34

In Revelation 15:3, the Lord reveals that the Saints will sing the Song of Moses and of the Lamb from Deuteronomy 32 at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. This is the day when all Saints will be raised up, whether sleeping in the grave or alive in Christ, and the gates of Heaven will be shut behind Him. Yeshua is the one who put every Word in the mouth of Moses, and He is the one who commanded Moses to write down the Word in Torah. And He is the one who became flesh and dwelt among us to interpret His Word through His words and actions, leaving us with a testimony of two: the written Word and His own example. This is the rock that we can build the Lord’s House upon, for we are the Temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells in us when we love Yeshua and keep His commandments. His work is perfect and all His ways are just. He is a God of faithfulness, and He will save those who are faithful to Him, but destroy all those who stand against Him and His ways. Blessed be His name!

Moses goes through a blessing for each of the 12 tribes, just as Jacob had done with his sons, the patriarchs themselves. It may be worthwhile to compare the end of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy in this way. I’m sure a whole sermon series could be preached on this. As Gentiles, we must be grafted-in among the tribes of Israel to have access to the living water that flows up from the root, which is Christ. And yet, He is also the cloud rider, who will return in the same way He ascended, with great power and glory to judge the Earth and bring in His eternal Kingdom. This is written by His Spirit and left for those of us who belong to Him: “Indeed, He loves the people; All Your holy ones are in Your hand, And they followed in Your steps; Everyone takes of Your words.” We know that there is “no one like the God of Jeshurun,” no one like our Yeshua, “who rides the heavens to your help, And the clouds in His majesty.” Blessed are those of us who are called to His supper, which we rehearse every Passover and will celebrate in His Kingdom!

Moses gazed upon the promised land but couldn’t enter on account of His rebellion. He took credit for the work of God Himself, rather than give God the glory. If there is anything good that we do EVER in this life, ALL of the glory belongs to God alone. Now Moses did not enter as an archetype so that Joshua could bring Israel in. In the same way, obedience to the law cannot save us, only faith in Christ, for it is His grace alone that redeems us from our sin and gives us the opportunity to dwell in His Kingdom. We read, however, in Hebrews 11:24-26: “By faith Moses, when he became of age, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt; for he looked to the reward.” Moses, who lived by the grace of Christ because of his heart commitment to the will of God, will be in the promised land that God will give to all faithful servants as their reward. So let us not forget the testimony of two needed for our endurance as Saints: obedience to God’s commandments and faith in Christ. Moses is an example to us in this life of what it means to give up everything we have to follow Christ. We won’t receive our reward in this life, but in the eternal Kingdom that awaits us in the world to come.