Isaiah and the Messiah–Podcasts and Transcripts–Seventeen part series.

Stuck inside? Ever wanted to really study Isaiah 40-56 in-depth without having to spend an arm and a leg on commentaries?

Are you a listener? Well, I have over fourteen hours of podcasts for you.

Are you a reader? Well, I have the equivalent of a commentary written out for you–with all my sources cited in the first transcript if you are wanting to purchase the books I used.

And, as usual, it is completely free of charge. Now, if you want to download these via podbean or iTunes, you can do that at characterincontext.podbean.com –which also links to my iTunes channel. 

If you have ever been interested in all the references to the Messianic Servant in the gospels, I’ve got that. If you are frustrated by the anti-missionaries taking verses out of context to get people to deny Yeshua/Jesus, I cover that. And it won’t take you as long to listen as it took me to study out and record! Not by a long shot! What do you have to lose?

Part 1–Comfort my People! A Voice of One Crying in the Desert! (Is 40)

Part 2–Idolatry in Ancient Israel and During the Exile

Part 3–Be Silent Before Me! Present Your Case! The First Idol Polemic (Is 41)

Part 4–The Servant Comes/Blind and Deaf Israel (Is 42)

Part 5–Polytheism and the Law of Continuity–Apart From Me There is No Savior (Is 43)

Part 6–Is 44:1-23, Hab 2, Jer 10, and Christmas Trees?

Part 7–Cyrus the Messiah? (44:23-45:14)

Part 8–Salvation for the Nations and the Marduk/Nebo Smackdown (45:15-46:13)

Part 9–Babylon the Virgin Queen? (Is 47)

Part 10–Shema Israel! No Peace for the Wicked! (Is 48)

Part 11–The Servant Speaks! The Second Servant Song. (49:1-13)

Part 12–The First Zion Song (49:14-50:3)

Part 13–The Servant Speaks Again! (50:4-51:11)

Part 14–The Good News! Your God Reigns! (51:2-52:12)

Part 15–The Suffering Servant Song (Is 52:13-53:13)

Part 16–The Third Zion Song–Your Husband Reigns! (Is 54)

Part 17–The Everlasting Covenant and Good News for the Outcasts (Is 55-56:8)




Episode 36: Isaiah and the Messiah 3–Isaiah 41

Why is Israel portrayed as holding God’s left hand? And what does it have to do with Yeshua/Jesus?

In this week’s episode, the comedy-drama really begins in earnest. God demands that the pagan nations and their representative gods come into the courtroom with him and present evidence that they are truly gods–and He presents evidence that it is instead Himself who is the one and only God. We have an idol polemic, a speech of disputation, and a salvation oracle all rolled into one chapter–AND Isaiah’s first mention of the only named person (well, he will be named in later chapters, anyway) in all of the Hebrew Scriptures to specifically be called a maschiach–pagan King Cyrus. So now we have seven different characters mentioned–Yahweh, Isaiah, the first and second heavenly council members, Israel the servant, the nations, their gods, and the servant coming from the east. Next week we will have introduced to us one more character who will occur throughout Isaiah 40-55, the one whom the targums, Rabbis David Kimchi and Abarbanel call THE Messiah–but for this week we have quite enough excitement dealing with these new developments in the New Exodus promises of YHWH to His people exiled in the Babylonian Empire.

Here’s the very rough transcript–please forgive any grammar or spelling errors:

Hey there! This is part three of my series on Isaiah and the Messiah. Two weeks ago we did a quick overview of the doom and gloom tones of Isaiah 1-39 and launched right into Isaiah 40 which, as opposed to chapters 1-39, was written to the Babylonian exiles. Chapters 1-39, of course, was written to pre-exile Judah as a warning to cease and desist with their idolatry and oppression, or else, but for the most part, they refused to repent. Isaiah takes a sharp turn in chapter 40, however, with the beginning of his discourse on the promise of a great deliverance at the hands of Cyrus, out of Babylon. It is spoken to a people who have been beaten down by almost seventy years of exile in the Babylonian Empire, who have come to wonder whether or not God is even there anymore, whether He wants to rescue them or even can anymore–based the ancient Near Eastern belief that when a country is conquered and a Temple destroyed, that the God/gods of that country are also defeated and destroyed. Did Yahweh survive the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah? Is he able to save? Does He want to save? How will He save?

We are covering this because the Gospel of Mark explores the ministry of Yeshua/Jesus from the unique vantage point of being a fulfillment of his “way discourse” aka the “Isianic New Exodus” and if we don’t know chapters 40-55 of Isaiah, so much of Mark is lost. Also, as this section of Isaiah is misused by anti-missionaries in order to undermine faith in Yeshua, covering it verse by verse in the original context, I hope, will protect people from being deceived.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on youtube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com.

All Scripture this week is taken from the ESV, the English Standard Version, because that is what my interlinear is in. And unlike my usual MO, I will be saying Yahweh instead of God and Lord because there are so many different voices speaking back and forth in Isaiah 40-55 that it will help eliminate confusion. Otherwise, I always use titles because I don’t like to use His name carelessly or casually.

41 Listen to me in silence, O coastlands; let the peoples renew their strength;
let them approach, then let them speak; let us together draw near for judgment.

 

Whereas Chapter 40 was largely focused on and addressed to the Jewish exile community in the Babylonian Empire, assuring them that their God is still alive, still powerful, able to save and wanting to save, Chapter 41 begins a courtroom comedy/drama. Mostly drama, but some parts are just laugh out loud hilarious. In verse one, Yahweh tells the coastlands—an idiom which can be translated into our idiom “the ends of the earth”—which is also equivalent to “the islands.” The far reaches of known land, so to speak. Anyway, Yahweh enters into a disputation dialogue with the nations of the earth. His first words were “Listen to me in silence.” Then “let the peoples renew their strength.” Peoples is not Israel, that would be “my people” but “peoples” is le’ummim, referring back to the coastlands, the peoples He just told to shut up and listen to Him. They are being told they need to gather their strength/courage, then approach and speak—after having shut up and listened to Him, and then to niqrabah “approach” yachdav “together” for judgment “mishpat”. There is nothing intimate or friendly about this. This is adversarial language right off the bat. A command to the nations (namely the Babylonian Empire but also others as we will see in a bit) and their gods to appear in court, to listen, to mount a defense if possible, and then face judgment.

 

Who stirred up one from the east whom victory meets at every step?
He gives up nations before him, so that he tramples kings underfoot;
he makes them like dust with his sword, like driven stubble with his bow.
He pursues them and passes on safely, by paths his feet have not trod.
Who has performed and done this, calling the generations from the beginning?
I, the Lord, the first, and with the last; I am he.

In these verses, the initial “who” refers to Yahweh who is beginning to present His evidence to the nations and their gods that He is supreme and the only real God. To prove His case, He begins to talk about how He will deliver His people from exile. He repeatedly asks, “Who” did such and such and of course the answer is Himself and no other. But whom has He stirred up from the east? Whom does victory meet at every step? Who easily defeats the nations and tramples kings underfoot the way that a potter tramples his clay? Who makes the nations and kings like dust, in other words, utterly shaming them so that they can be trodden underfoot by even the lowliest peasants? Who makes these kings and nations like the stubble that is blown away by the wind after being crushed to release the wheat? Who pursues his enemies but emerges without a scratch? It is none other than King Cyrus of Persia, who will be specifically named in future chapters.

But this section isn’t about Cyrus, it is about the power and authority behind Cyrus’s stunning military campaign. Who called him? Who gave him the authority to subdue nations? Who rose him up against the mightiest empire the world had ever seen up to that point? Who called it before it even happened? Yahweh did. This is what the nations were commanded to be silent and listen to. What is their response? Let’s see.

 

The coastlands have seen and are afraid; the ends of the earth tremble; they have drawn near and come.
Everyone helps his neighbor and says to his brother, “Be strong!”
The craftsman strengthens the goldsmith, and he who smooths with the hammer him who strikes the anvil, saying of the soldering, “It is good”; and they strengthen it with nails so that it cannot be moved.

 

The response of the nations is pure panic. And because Isaiah isn’t written in modern terms, with easy to understand stage direction and all that, it is easy to miss how hilarious this would have been to the original audience. Everyone panics, everyone is terrified. They are trying to give one another courage in the face of Yahweh’s pronouncement that He is sending a conqueror to enact His will and punish the Babylonian Empire. It was a great place to live, commercially prosperous, religiously tolerant, comfortable and luxurious. No one wanted it overthrown.

So they encourage each other and prop one another up, and then the craftsman encourages and strengthens the goldsmith, and what do they do to combat this terrible threat and protect themselves from Yahweh’s will? They make an idol to protect themselves. They create something to counteract the Creator. They use creation language, “It is good”. But then they have to nail it down, or else it will topple over. It cannot move. They expect something that can’t even keep itself from falling over–to actually save them from Cyrus, much less from Yahweh.

Of course, Isaiah and the Jews knew that idolatry doesn’t work this way—they believed that making the idol would allow them to harness and manipulate the gods, to placate and influence them, as we talked about at length last week and will only gloss over here. They were under no illusion that the idol actually was a god—but that doesn’t stop Isaiah from pointing out how ridiculous the situation is. There are some scholars who believe this bit is out of place, but I agree with others who think it was very deliberate on the part of the prophet. This is what the nations would do in response to fear.

 

But you, Israel, my servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, the offspring of Abraham, my friend;
you whom I took from the ends of the earth, and called from its farthest corners,
saying to you, “You are my servant, I have chosen you and not cast you off”;
10 fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God;
I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

We have a break in the courtroom action here as Yahweh figuratively turns to address His people again. He switches from prophesying doom to the nations through His as yet unnamed servant to reassuring His people that He is their God, that they are still “my servant” whom “I have chosen” that Abraham is still remembered as a “friend” an ancient covenant term which entails covenant loyalty on Yahweh’s part. He reminds them that He has not “cast them off.” He says, “fear not” as opposed to the nations who are now scrambling to make an idol to protect themselves, which only heightens the humor of the previous verses. We have a ton of “I’s” in here. I have chosen you, I took you, I have chosen again, I am with you, I am your God, I will strengthen, I will help, I will uphold you. How did Chapter 40 begin? “Comfort, comfort my people.” That verse was a command to His messengers to comfort but now He is comforting them personally.

Why is He stopping to comfort them? Because this is a generation in the midst of a land of idols, who grew up in Babylon as a defeated people—people who were painfully aware that they were conquered and who had undoubtedly been told by the nations that they were defeated that their God was under the feet of Marduk, Ishtar, and the rest of the Babylonian pantheon, rendered utterly useless and helpless. Of course, they had come to believe it. Their parents were never monotheists, they were henotheists. They worshiped Yahweh, but they also worshipped a whole slew of other gods and goddesses along with Him, even in His own temple. For all intents and purposes, this was all but a thoroughly pagan people. Yahweh was going to change that, once and for all, with a new deliverance that would show that there were no other gods, that He was the only one and all others were powerless and even pagan kings were at His command. It may seem silly to us, having been brought up taking monotheism for granted, but it was the very real outlook and belief system of the entire ancient world, with very few, and very brief exceptions.

 

I do want you to notice something important here, that He will uphold them with His righteous right hand. That will be an important distinction in a few verses.

11 Behold, all who are incensed against you shall be put to shame and confounded;
those who strive against you shall be as nothing and shall perish.
12 You shall seek those who contend with you, but you shall not find them;
those who war against you shall be as nothing at all.

Babylon. Edom. Ammon. Babylon had conquered Israel and shamed them, certainly, but Edom and Ammon took advantage of the situation. Yahweh gave Nebuchadnezzar the authority and strength to discipline Judah and take the people into exile, but they went too far and had to be punished. Edom and Ammon had not been given license to do what they did and especially as they are near kin to the Israelites. There would be retribution.

Psalm 137:7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!”

13 For I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, “Fear not,
I am the one who helps you.”

This is important. We see the Lord holding the right hand of His people. That means they are on His left-hand side. That leaves His right hand available for battle, and the space is empty for someone to be sitting at His right hand. The right hand is the one reserved for the designated first-born son who will inherit. Jacob, for example, placed his right hand on Ephraim’s head. But notice that Israel is protected and upheld on the other side.

Psalm 110:1 The Lord says to my Lord: “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”

Luke 22: 69 But from now on the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” 70 So they all said, “Are you the Son of God, then?” And he said to them, “You say that I am.” 71 Then they said, “What further testimony do we need? We have heard it ourselves from his own lips.”

Acts 7: And he said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”

This is not to demean Judah as God’s servant. I mean, after all, they are still portrayed here as servants, the seed of Abraham, sons, etc. holding God’s hand. Not too shabby, just not being that servant on His right side.

 

14 Fear not, you worm Jacob, you men of Israel! I am the one who helps you, declares the Lord; your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.

Quick note here—worm sounds awful, right? Blind and helpless, right? Not really mighty warriors. Well, there is a point here which is very important. One, they are called men in the next colon. So, this isn’t an insult. This is merely an expression of the concept that this is a battle they will not have to lift a finger to fight. They are not going to deliver themselves, they are irrelevant to their salvation apart from receiving it. Yahweh will make Cyrus happen and everything will fall into place and all they will have to do is go home—of course, that is when they will have to behave like men and it will be difficult when they return to rebuild.

And we see a word that will be repeated time and again in both noun and verb form—redeemer, or go’al. You have probably heard, if you have read the Torah and the story of Ruth, of kinsmen-redeemers whose job it was to rescue a near relative from debt or slavery. Same sense here. He says, “I am the one who helps you”—they can put their faith in no other, no other kingdom, king, or gods can stand in the way of the divine kinsman-redeemer. What Yahweh is declaring, in all the Hebrew perfect verb tenses, has effectively already happened. He said it and it is a done deal.

15 Behold, I make of you a threshing sledge, new, sharp, and having teeth; you shall thresh the mountains and crush them, and you shall make the hills like chaff;
16 you shall winnow them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the tempest shall scatter them.
And you shall rejoice in the Lord; in the Holy One of Israel you shall glory.

Let’s talk about threshing sledges. I encourage you to look up a picture of one. Flat board, sometimes on rollers and sometimes not, pulled along by a team of oxen or whatever the beast of burden of choice is. Driven into the underside are sharp stones or pieces of metal and, when it is dragged over wheat, it strips away the kernel from the chaff. Then the resulting debris pile can be tossed into the air with winnowing forks and the chaff, the outer useless layer of the wheat, will be picked up by the wind and blown away, while the wheat falls back down to the threshing floor. And they did this without breathing protection! We are such wimps in comparison.

Mountains in this sort of poetic Scripture often (but not always) represent obstacles, not real mountains. Yahweh is telling His people that they will be able to overcome all obstacles in their path, and when they do, they won’t be congratulating themselves on their hard work because, like worms, the threshing sledge is just a helpless tool that gets dragged around. The sledge doesn’t do the work, the team of oxen do. Because of this, they will rejoice in God, because He did all the work and they are just bystanders.

17 When the poor and needy seek water, and there is none, and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them; I the God of Israel will not forsake them.
18 I will open rivers on the bare heights, and fountains in the midst of the valleys.
I will make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water.
19 I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive.
I will set in the desert the cypress, the plane and the pine together,
20 that they may see and know, may consider and understand together,
that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it.

So, this is obviously symbolic language. There was no one in Babylon seeking water, it was a fertile plain with plenty of water. Nor would they need it on the journey back as they would have traveled along the river to return to the Land. The Jews in Babylon were not financially impoverished. Quite the opposite—which is why so few ended up leaving. This is the language of provision. This is Exodus language, hearkening back to the journey in the wilderness. Isaiah is painting a picture here of the exodus, preparing the people to trust God and go back when the time comes, which will happen in the form of Cyrus’s decree sometime around 539 BCE. It is what is known as “New Eden” language. But this never actually happened in the physical. We see no accounts of the returnees seeking water, or Yahweh miraculously creating water in the desert, or filling the Land miraculously with trees again. This is something that is portrayed as not being by any sort of human effort, going along with the rising up of Cyrus to free them. This is about the supernatural revitalization of a people in their Land—in the ancient world where no one returns from exile to become a separate people again. It just didn’t happen. There are seven species mentioned, all indigenous to the Land, and so this could even be a poetic and symbolic reference to the people who belong in the Land returning to it. People are sometimes, in Scripture, likened to trees. Just a thought. Just a theory. In any event, this is still consolation language, a salvation oracle, telling the Jews that they can and will return to the Land under the protection and provision of God. Again, not the result of any human effort.

But now, back to our heated courtroom drama:

 

21 Set forth your case, says the Lord; bring your proofs, says the King of Jacob.
22 Let them bring them, and tell us what is to happen. Tell us the former things, what they are,
that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome; or declare to us the things to come.
23 Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods;
do good, or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified.

 

Alright, now that Yahweh has had his say, proclaiming the coming of Cyrus, his servant, his instrument of deliverance and the destruction of the Babylonian Empire—He challenged the nations, actually He challenges the gods of the nations to prophesy something, anything. To do something, to do anything. That way they can show the Jews that they are indeed worthy of being feared. In other words, “Okay guys, your turn, let’s hear what you are going to do. And then do it so we can be quaking in our boots. I’m waiting guys, any day now…” And, of course, there is no response because idols cannot speak. I suppose if they could speak, the first thing they would say is, “Ouch, darn it, what did you have to nail me down for?”

We are invited to imagine a long pause, complete with the sound of crickets, before Yahweh’s response:

24 Behold, you are nothing, and your work is less than nothing; an abomination is he who chooses you.

In other words, “Yeah, I didn’t think so. How on earth can anyone take you seriously? Not only can you do nothing, but you are nothing. Non-existent.”

Now Yahweh is going to up the ante with His promises/predictions:

25 I stirred up one from the north, and he has come, from the rising of the sun, and he shall call upon my name; he shall trample on rulers as on mortar, as the potter treads clay.

Again, speaking of Cyrus, who came from the east, modern-day Iran, aka from the rising of the sun, to attack Babylon, modern-day Iraq, but when he attacked, history tells us that he came from the north. Here’s an interesting verse though, much debated among scholars, “he shall call upon my Name.”

There is no way that Cyrus declared his victory in the Name of Yahweh, it just didn’t happen. He was a polytheist who believed in regional gods and one of those gods being Yahweh of Israel. He did cite the name of Yahweh twice in Ezra 1:2-4, and so this could conceivably be it:

“Thus says Cyrus king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people, may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and rebuild the house of the Lord, the God of Israel—he is the God who is in Jerusalem. And let each survivor, in whatever place he sojourns, be assisted by the men of his place with silver and gold, with goods and with beasts, besides freewill offerings for the house of God that is in Jerusalem.”

But I don’t think so because to call upon the name does not mean in the ancient world what it means in plain English. If you call my name, it sounds like, “Hey, Tyler!” but to call on the name of a god had to do with drawing upon their authority. The prophet is very clear here in speaking for Yahweh that Cyrus will be going forth in the authority and power of Yahweh and Yahweh alone, no one else, no other gods, will be responsible for his victories and Yahweh is proving it by declaring it ahead of time.

26 Who declared it from the beginning, that we might know, and beforehand, that we might say, “He is right”? There was none who declared it, none who proclaimed, none who heard your words.

Again, challenging the nations and their gods—no one called it on the destruction of Babylon and the return of the exiles. They didn’t know. They couldn’t know. No one (their priestly mediators) heard them say it and they didn’t rush out to proclaim it to the people. It didn’t happen. Only Yahweh called it.

27 I was the first to say to Zion, “Behold, here they are!” and I give to Jerusalem a herald of good news.

Right here, Yahweh presents His evidence that He was the first to pronounce to desolate Jerusalem and Zion that the exiles are returning. This is pointing back to what we discussed last week in chapter 40:9-11

Go on up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news; lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good news; lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!”
10 Behold, the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
11 He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.

So, in 41:27 when Yahweh is saying “Behold, there they are,” He is referring to the same thing as when the prophet proclaimed, “His reward is with Him” and “His recompense is with Him.” They, his reward, his recompense—all refer to the returning exiles. This is good news for Jerusalem. God has intervened in human events (which is always good news) and Jerusalem and Judah will no longer be desolate and empty. Her people are returning to rebuild her. Again, Yahweh is calling it ahead of time.

Did anyone else call it? Let’s see with the last few lines of the chapter:

28 But when I look, there is no one; among these there is no counselor who, when I ask, gives an answer.
29 Behold, they are all a delusion; their works are nothing; their metal images are empty wind.

Nope, once more, no one saw this coming because their gods can offer them no counsel. They represent imaginary deities, without power, without knowledge, without substance. It’s important to note, throughout Isaiah 40-55, how many anti-idol polemics there are and not to lose sight of them as part and parcel of the entire discourse. It is Yahweh’s judgment and power vs the judgment and power of idols. Who will reign supreme? Who delivers the goods? The people have forgotten because (1) their parents were idolaters and (2) they have been crushed by Babylon and, presumably, its gods for too long. They have lost hope, they see themselves as abandoned, bereft, and powerless. So many of the verses taken out of context in Isaiah 40-55 fail to take this into account. They misjudge the type of literature this is, they pay no attention to all the multiple voices and themes, and they just quote verses entirely out of context in order to derail people. That’s why we are doing this one verse at a time.

I want to point out here the ultimate anti-idol polemic in all of Scripture, Psalm 115, which I quote from extensively in my last book Image-Bearing, Idolatry, and the New Creation, and I meant to include it last week and totally forgot.

Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory, for the sake of your steadfast love and your faithfulness!

Why should the nations say, “Where is their God?”
Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.
They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.
They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; and they do not make a sound in their throat.
Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them.

O Israel, trust in the Lord! He is their help and their shield.
10 O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord! He is their help and their shield.
11 You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord! He is their help and their shield.

12 The Lord has remembered us; he will bless us; he will bless the house of Israel;
he will bless the house of Aaron;
13 he will bless those who fear the Lord, both the small and the great.

14 May the Lord give you increase, you and your children!
15 May you be blessed by the Lord, who made heaven and earth!

16 The heavens are the Lord’s heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man.
17 The dead do not praise the Lord, nor do any who go down into silence.
18 But we will bless the Lord from this time forth and forevermore. Praise the Lord!

Next week we will see the huge theme cropping up, as it does all through Is 40-55 of the blindness and deafness of Israel, and we will be looking at what Is 6 has to say about this curse of Yahweh upon His rebellious servants.




Episode 35: Isaiah and the Messiah 2: Idolatry in Ancient Israel and During the Exile

Big thanks to our first podcast supporter! Thanks to Tamar! Just this last week I spent a bunch of money on new context books, so I appreciate the support.

This week we’re going to explore the ancient Near Eastern world of polytheism and henotheism (the religion of pre-monotheistic Israel) in order to understand why the prophet Isaiah is having so much trouble convincing the exiled Jews that they really can trust God and that the idols of the nations are nothing. What were idols? Were they actually gods? What does it mean for a god to be jealous? Why didn’t they believe that God could save them? What are cosmic functions and how did the concept of regional authority work?

This is all incredibly important foundational information for discussing the disputations and idol polemics that we find throughout Isaiah 40-55 and without this knowledge, it is very easy to make some wrong assumptions based on the faulty modern views of paganism put forth by the new age/Wiccan movement.

Transcript below, not really very edited so please forgive grammar and spelling mistakes

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As I was writing my lessons on Isaiah chapters 41 and 42, it occurred to me that I needed to lay some serious foundations as to what the faith of ancient Israel actually was during the monarchy and exile—what their mindset was and their view of reality. It can be very difficult to relate to the ancient Israelites at times because we were born into a largely monotheistic world. We look at what happened at Sinai with the golden calf, and during the time of the Judges, and the downward spiral of I and II Kings and we wonder how on earth they could not understand that they were breaking the first commandment to have no other gods before YHVH. Why didn’t they see a problem with worshiping Yahweh and other gods on the side?

But the ancients didn’t think the way we do – and the word monotheism (the exclusive worship and recognition of the existence of only one ultimate God) didn’t exist. The closest approximation to monotheism in the ancient world was actually atheism – because a belief in and worship of only one god just didn’t make any sense to the people of the ancient world.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on youtube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com.

In Isaiah 40-55 we see this common theme, as we will cover more in the upcoming weeks, of Yahweh having to challenge the belief of His people that He was unable to save them because He had been (1) defeated by the Babylonian gods and (2) He had no authority outside of Israel anyway. And this was a very reasonable assumption in the ancient world, this was how they looked at things. Monotheism was crazy and weird. But what were the Israelites? If they weren’t monotheists then what is the alternative? Polytheists? Monolaters? Henotheists? Let’s go through each and use the Biblical account to see where they lined up.

So, what was the norm? Why so many gods? And how did the ancients view their gods?

Gods and goddesses were all about function and dominion. Someone had to be responsible for the rain and it certainly couldn’t be the same one responsible for the sunshine because the functions of sun and rain were entirely different. Therefore, in their minds, there just had to be more than one god and in the case of the Hittites, thousands of them. This is the basis of polytheism, which is the recognition and worship of many gods – gods who are not jealous in nature and who do not demand exclusive allegiance. In other words, Marduk doesn’t care if you are seeing Ishtar on the side and she doesn’t care if you are seeing Enki. In fact, they expected you to. Marduk was the national god, supporting kingship, and Ishtar was the goddess of prostitution and war, and Enki was the god of wisdom. You can’t just neglect one, all of them had to be honored of society would fall apart.

The polytheistic gods were entirely different from the God of A, I & J. One – they were not moral in nature. They had no set standards of conduct that you had to live up to, no knowable expectations – and so the people who worshiped them had no idea whatsoever how to please or displease them. In the polytheistic world, if you made a god angry, then bad things started happening to you. The problem was – which god did you make angry and how did you do it? There was absolutely no way to know for sure, and so in the ancient cuneiform tablets, we see an account of a woman desperately seeking forgiveness but who has no idea what she has done.

If you were being cursed by an unknown god, it was serious business. You had to start repenting of everything you can think of, to every god imaginable. You had to start making the “sacrificial tour” – trying to appease these gods whom you have supposedly done something to offend. Your friends avoid you because they don’t want the gods angry at them by association.

Now – I want you to maybe consider the book of Job in a new light because Job is worded in a really interesting way. With the exception of the very beginning and the very end when the actual actions of YHVH are being discussed, the actual name of God is only mentioned twice in Job 12:9 and 28:28 – both times by Job:

Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this?

And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.

Every other reference is to the generic term God or Elohim and most folks assume that the God of AI &J was being referred to but in re-reading it, I see two different pictures of God being presented – one from the ANE polytheistic mindset of a god whose standards are unknown and must be appeased and the other in line with YHVH, whose standards can be known and which Job knows he has not transgressed.  Like the account of the woman who doesn’t know who the heck she offended or how, Job’s friends are desperately trying to get him to repent for whatever he has done – after all, in the ANE, community was everything, and Job was placing them all in jeopardy by refusing to just admit to a whole bunch of things that he hasn’t even done. So as the chapters wear on and Job keeps protesting his innocence, his friends get more and more determined that he has done something to deserve all this trouble, and Job gets more and more belligerent until their accusations finally lead Job into a place where he makes the mistake of saying that he, and not God, is in the right. But it all comes down to clashing world views and different ideas about God and gods. This was the ANE world.

Another reason that we struggle with understanding Israel’s continual fall into idolatry is because we do not understand faith in the ancient world. Nowadays we have these nice little boxes where we compartmentalize our lives – making a differentiation between sacred and secular, but in the ancient world, there was no such division. That division is very modern. There was no such thing as religion in the ancient world because every aspect of life was religious. There was the ever-present ancestral worship that we see in the story of Laban and Rachel – the teraphim she took would have been the representation of Laban’s ancestors and the caring for those idols was a very grave responsibility that Laban would have taken very seriously. Losing these idols would have been beyond traumatic for the entire family.

This next part is vital to understanding the hyperbole (exaggeration) and idol polemics in Isaiah. We often think that the ancients viewed their idols as gods, but nothing could be further from the truth – the idols were simply representations of the god, which the people could care for and in so doing, care for the god. These idols were oftentimes dressed in the morning, fed, given drink, bathed, oiled, and put to bed. In this way, they thought that they were caring for the god – freeing up the god to do their cosmic jobs and contributing to the general order and well-being of the world. A happy god, after all, is a non-interfering god and they didn’t really want the gods interfering in their lives because they were too unpredictable and amoral (as opposed to immoral—at least immoral gods would always do something bad, amoral gods are unpredictable) to be trusted. This caring for idols would have been normal and unquestioned by the mixed multitude that came out of Egypt and probably to the Israelites as well. Aaron, somehow, knew how to make an idol and did not seem to protest that the making of that idol would be breaking the covenant. That right there is our first clue as to what was going on in the minds of the Israelites and why they seemed unable to really grasp what was being demanded of them.

You see, polytheism is more than simply the worship of many gods – it is to have gods who don’t even remotely care if you are seeing other gods on the side. The worship of the main city god in the ancient world was the job of the priests and kings, the common people worshiped the household gods – they had pantry gods (snakes to keep the mice away), ancestral teraphim, the god of the hearth and a number of other minor deities. It may very well be that the rank and file Israelites, despite the commandment to only worship One God, felt that paying attention to the minor deities didn’t really count as a transgression. Maybe they only considered it super bad when something happened like when King Ahaz actually replaced the altar of Yahweh in the Temple with a replica of the altar he saw and made sacrifices on when he was in Damascus.

Now, I am not excusing them, but I am trying to explain how the ancients saw the world of the divine and what they had to overcome – and why, once they were in the Land, they were commanded not to associate with the Canaanites at all, ever.  The Canaanites had gods of the hills and gods of the valleys, gods of the harvest and gods for this and for that and the temptation would be very great to bow down and worship those gods and serve them if one was concerned that the harvest wasn’t going to come in, or if enemies attacked and you wanted the favor of the regional deities in battle. This is why the commandment was given in Deut 12 not to learn the ways of the peoples of the Land – because this was their approach to life and it was very tempting to follow them into it during times of testing and trial.

And the temptation has always been there to describe the religion of the Israelites as having always been monotheistic but truthfully until after the exile it never was. Israel was always worshiping other gods on the side – even King David had an idol in his home.

I Sam 19:13 And Michal took an image, and laid it in the bed, and put a pillow of goats’ hair for his bolster, and covered it with a cloth.

Solomon, who started out so well, was influenced by his wives to build temples to all of their gods – temples which remained until the days of Josiah and the great Covenant Renewal during his reign. We see good kings forever having to tear down idols and high places, and bad kings building them back up again. At one point, there was even idolatry going on in the very temple of God as we see in Ezekiel 8, the chapter that got me started studying all this in the first place back in 2015.

10 So I went in and saw; and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about.

11 And there stood before them seventy men of the ancients of the house of Israel, and in the midst of them stood Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan, with every man his censer in his hand; and a thick cloud of incense went up.

14 Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.

16 And he brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.

Now in verses 3 and 5 it refers to images of jealousy – which of course is absolutely unique to YHVH. No other god would have been jealous as long as they themselves were also worshiped. But Yahweh is exclusive and brooks no competition.

And yet the overwhelming majority of people really seemed to have no problem with this whatsoever. The reason for that is something called “henotheism” – the primary worship of one of a group of gods, while not denying the others, or necessarily ignoring them. Because of this mindset – idolatry was tolerated and even flourished. After all, this system put YHVH at the top of the pyramid, but while recognizing the other “gods” as minor deities and so Israel saw herself as faithful even though she was committing spiritual adultery. In the henotheistic mindset, it is okay to also acknowledge Ba’al or Ashtoreth as regional gods with local control as long as the main focus of your worship is YHVH. Obviously, to us at least, this was not acceptable to the one true God.

Monolatry is very similar to henotheism and it is what we see in Mormonism – the belief that there are many gods but it is only acceptable to worship one. The other gods have no jurisdiction and therefore they are not to be worshiped. Monolatry is exclusive polytheism – you can only worship one god but there are a great many.

So, Henotheism, and not monotheism, is what we see going on in Ancient Israel. Whereas other nations only worshiped their own gods and were therefore polytheistic, Israel worshiped YHVH AND the gods of all the other nations around them to varying degrees of severity over the years. In this way, they were far more unfaithful than the nations around them and this was why they were repeatedly called on the table for whoredom. The Moabites weren’t worshiping the Egyptian gods and the Egyptians weren’t worshiping the Phoenician gods – everyone but Israel worshiped their own gods. Now, the Egyptians recognized the Phoenician gods and the Moabite gods as being absolutely real, but they weren’t the gods of the Egyptians – they were centered in other countries and therefore weren’t really a concern.

So, idolatry in Israel didn’t start with Solomon, he simply made an existing situation far worse. In fact, it would seem that as soon as Joshua, Caleb and those who conquered the land died – Israel immediately started doing things according to the ways of the Canaanites that they had failed to drive out.

And so, I want to talk about the differences between YHVH and the gods of the Nations, because there is talk out in the secular scholarly world that monotheism was the natural evolution of religion. Quite the contrary, there was no evolution at all – it was commanded and resisted until exile drove the Jews to the realization that YHVH meant business and would not tolerate it anymore. And even during the exile, as we will see in our Isaiah studies, they still had to be convinced.

The gods of the nations were like us – they had beginnings and endings. They were born and they reproduced and sometimes they were even conquered by other gods and died. So, when you hear someone say, “Where did God come from” that is very much an ANE mindset. Like the people of the ANE world, they did not operate according to any wrong vs right code of conduct. Not that the people didn’t have laws for ordered living, mind you, but their gods weren’t scolding them for immorality. They were functional gods – each god having a jurisdiction and unable to go outside of it. The gods operated within a large community of gods, and they fought and debated and made decisions. Their job was to run their own particular cosmic functions – keeping everything in order. Nothing was more important to the ANE mind than order, because the opposite of that was chaos in the form of famine, drought, pestilence, barrenness, and death. The only reason that the people of the ancient world believed they were created was to do all the work for the gods, who were bored after having created the world and wanted to be cared for. Therefore, as I mentioned before, the priests and kings were responsible for taking care of the major city deities. The common people never bothered with them, but instead took care of their own household gods. As long as Ba’al was taken care of by the priests – given food and drink – he was free to manage the agricultural fertility of the land. If he was not taken care of, he might get distracted and everyone could die of hunger.

YHVH, on the other hand, did all the work of Creation not for Himself but for the people He was creating. Instead of creating a race of slaves to take care of Him, He took care of the needs of the people and created for them a day of rest. He had absolute standards of right and wrong, so his people knew whether or not they had transgressed – he cared for the least of these and not just the heroes and kings. So, from Gen 1 we see a God diametrically opposed to the ANE gods. As I mentioned before, He is jealous, unlike ANE gods. He doesn’t break His own rules, unlike ANE gods. He has no beginning and no end; He doesn’t need to be fed or dressed; He doesn’t need other gods to help him with the functioning of the universe. He refuses to allow His creation to create an idol to represent Him. However, that doesn’t mean that He can’t create a human being to represent Him and place His spirit in.

YHVH is the absolute antithesis of everything that was being worshiped in the ancient world and so, although the accounts of ancient myths might have literary similarities to the scriptures, and follow the patterns of the time, the information the bible conveys is generally the exact opposite. YHVH used the literary conventions of the day to say things like, “Okay, I want you to see me being enthroned in Genesis 1 and I want you to see the blueprint of who I am relationally to my people and so I am using this recognized literary style, but in the midst of it, I am going to show you how entirely different I am than every false god.”

And in Isaiah, we come across a number of paradigms that the Israelites had been living with for over a thousand years. Yahweh spends chapters and chapters addressing this mindset—not that there were chapters when He did it, but you know what I mean.

First up, in the ancient world, when one country defeated another country it was actually a case of one country’s gods defeating the other country’s gods. So, in the eyes of the people, the Babylonian gods were mightier than Yahweh and they proved it not only when they conquered Jerusalem and led away His people into exile, but even moreso when they destroyed His Temple. In their minds, they weren’t seeing and hearing what the prophets had been saying (well, some were but not most) about how Yahweh was going to hand them over for destruction, and the city, and His temple because they had made everything so disgusting that He couldn’t stand it anymore and He was literally going to use the Babylonian Empire as a janitorial service. Break down the walls, deport the people so they can’t defile the Land anymore, and burn Solomon’s Temple and the palace he built right beside it up on the Temple Mount, to the ground. But we will see in chapter 42 or 43, can’t remember right now, that they still don’t get the picture that this exile wasn’t Yahweh being conquered, but their punishment! It’s wild!

And we will see that they weren’t publicly worshiping Him in exile either! They were treating Him like an absentee, defeated god. Yahweh repeatedly reassures them that He is going to do what no gods has ever done before—restore a defeated nation from exile. He tells them that the upcoming deliverance will be more glorious than the Exodus out of Egypt. He makes a ton of stunning predictions which brings us to the next point about the gods of the nations—they didn’t make prophetic predictions. Oh sure, there are legends of the Oracle at Delphi delivering vague predictions that could go either way, and stories about pronouncements in literature, but we have zero religious literature referring to any pagan gods predicting what would happen in the future and having it come to pass. So we need to learn about the “law of continuity” in order to explain this.

The law of continuity, in a nutshell, says that nothing ever changes. Life goes on as it always has. And in the ancient world, it was pretty much true. The concept of a “new thing” was just foreign in the extreme. No nation had ever been delivered and restored from exile, therefore no country can ever be delivered and restored from exile. It is why Pharaoh wasn’t scared of Yahweh’s threats. It’s why Israel in exile had lost hope and had to be not only encouraged but also re-educated. Yahweh had lost. He was gone, off in Israel far away and powerless, shamed. They had no protector, they had no nation and no hope. Life was pretty good in Babylon and they were prospering even though they were a conquered people. Better to just give up and learn to like it. And so, starting next week in Isaiah 41, Yahweh is going to start making some startling predictions and He will literally be challenging the gods of the nations to a prediction duel—here’s what I say will happen, what do you say will happen? Hello? Hey, say something, do something! Anything! No? Didn’t think so!

Another thing you need to realize as we are going through the idol polemics is that they do not paint an accurate picture of idolatry in the ancient world—and they weren’t supposed to. Isaiah wasn’t going for historical accuracy here, this was a polemic designed to portray the polytheists as ridiculous. It is mocking the mindset and the practices of the ancient world by twisting what they were doing out of context but in a way that highlights the fact that idols cannot compete with Yahweh in any way, shape, or form. Isaiah knew what real idolatry looked like. He knew how it worked and He knew what the priests were thinking and doing—everyone did. Writing a boring treatise on that wouldn’t have convinced anyone how silly it is. As it was, it made sense to them and so he had to create a sort of Frankenstein’s monster out of it, real and yet grotesque—a caricature of the real thing. Because the real thing looked pretty reasonable to them. Remember, these were the children and grandchildren of idolaters, not of monotheists.

It is so important to understand literature types and especially when reading the prophets. Isaiah is largely lyrical poetry, peppered with polemics and disputations and historical accounts. When people take a verse out of context and fail to explain the literary genre of the passage, it is very easy to make that verse mean something entirely different than it was intended to mean and nowhere do we see that more than with the idol polemics. I have seen them used in order to discount Yeshua/Jesus as the Messiah, when, in context, they have nothing to do with the existence of a divine Messiah at all and are only applicable to the idols that the Israelites are fearing and crediting with more power than Yahweh. But it takes a lot of time and effort to learn to read the different literary styles of Isaiah and either the people who are misrepresenting it honestly haven’t studied it in this sort of literary and historical context, or they are just blinded by agenda—because nowhere in Isaiah does it disqualify a Messiah being born to embody the Spirit of Yahweh and deliver His people and the nations as His strong right arm, and quite the opposite. This is why I am taking the time to teach it all line by line and making sure that everyone understands the context, and when to and not to take verb tenses literally (in poetic works it can be tricky) and to understand why the Gospel writers, and the Qumran community, and David Kimhi and Abarbanel and others saw the Messiah in Isaiah. It is worth taking the time to do this. And when people tell you that Isaiah is so easy to understand that even a child could understand it, that’s nonsense. If that was true then we wouldn’t see so many commentaries from all sides over the last 2500 years saying so many different things about it. Those are the words of people who want to tell you exactly how a child reads it in order to shame you into thinking that if you don’t agree, then children are more clever than you are. No, it isn’t easy and it isn’t self-evident. It’s an ancient document that needs to be treated with the utmost respect and studied in-depth and not just read over at a shallow level and then presumed to be understood. None of us are that smart. We no longer know what the author knew. We are not familiar with how ancient authors expressed things. And most of all, Yahweh is smarter than we are, and cleverer, and He did not give His word to us in a form that everything is a no-brainer.

Truth is, most everyone reads Isaiah with an agenda, and not to see what actually is and is not there—which is why we see exactly what we expect to see. That’s called confirmation bias. You know, if you are led to believe that Yeshua is found in every page of the Bible, you will find Him there and even when the connections are dubious in the extreme. So, if you don’t want Yeshua to be the Messiah, you will find stuff out of context that clearly says He is not the Messiah. If you know He is, then you will see Him fulfilling everything. So, you know, we have to know what we believe and not read Isaiah in order to prove ourselves right. I mean, I know that Yeshua is the Messiah experientially—I KNOW Him. I am not looking in Isaiah to prove it or disprove it because I have already experienced the new creation miracle in my life and it is ongoing. What more proof do I need He is the real deal?




Who am I? My Statement of Faith.

This has been making the rounds on Facebook and other people’s blogs since I first wrote it in December 2013, and it has been altered a lot, so I wanted to post the original here. Okay, I altered it once more for the rewrite of The Bridge: Crossing Over Into the Fullness of Covenant Life so here is the altered alteration:

One of the first questions I asked in this book was “Who am I?”  I’d like to expand upon my answer now, with something I wrote a while back –

I am not a Jew, not by modern definitions. I was not born into a Jewish home. I am not trying to be Jewish, and I will never replace the Jews in God’s heart. I don’t find myself overly drawn to Jewish traditions.  It is wonderful to be a Jew – but I was not made to be one, not by modern standards.

I was born of the Nations. I was called out from the Nations by a God who designed me to be from the Nations, speaking one of the languages of the Nations, so that I could be one of His multitude of witnesses in full view of the Nations.  I make no apologies for having come from the Nations, nor should I! I also refuse to be defined by my having originated from the Nations.

What I am is grafted into the olive tree of Israel; I am not of the Jews and no longer of the Gentiles. I am called to obey the Laws of the people of Israel, the Torah; they are the Laws of my King and as a Citizen of His Kingdom they are my inheritance. I am not called to walk in the ways of the Gentiles (paganism and humanism), or the laws of the Church (denominational doctrines and traditions), or according to the traditions of the elders.

The original Christians were Jews, according to the pre-Roman definition of what it meant to be a Jew – one who worships the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and follows His commandments. That they, as have I, accepted Yeshua as Messiah did not exclude them from the Jewish community at large for the majority of the first 400 years after the life of Yeshua.

I am not trying to be a Jew as defined by the Romans. I am not trying to be a Christian, as defined by the Romans. I am trying to be an Israelite. Because I came from the Nations, I will never look authentically Jewish to most Jews, although to the Gentile eye, it might appear so because I will do some of the things that the Jews do, the way that they do it, but other things I will do in a way that looks utterly foreign to one of my Jewish brothers or sisters. That’s okay – it was that way during those times that predated the legislated Roman Orthodoxy as well.

I look this way because I am a person who was called out of the Nations, by the Master Yeshua the Messiah of Israel, to be a part of His people, obeying His Laws, and waiting for His return. I am doing my best, and it’s going to look weird to people, but that’s where patience and compassion and a desire for unity come into the picture. I have to obey the Torah of YHVH, but the way I obey it doesn’t always have to look exactly the same as the way that you obey it. 

Torah is a pursuit and a journey of a child with its Father. As each child is individually unique, so will our walk with the Father be unique. Same rules for all the children, born Jewish or born of the Nations, but at different points along the walk, we will be better and worse than others at figuring out how to live in obedience. It’s absolutely okay for those of us from the Nations to look strange; we weren’t raised like this. It’s a struggle and a learning process. We are wild olive branches receiving nourishment from the root of Israel and learning to thrive.  We will fail all the time; start expecting failure and realize that after 3500 years, we are all doing it wrong, but love spurs us on to try anyway. Faith tells us that YHVH greatly rejoices in our pursuit of obedience.

Who am I?  A woman greater than I will ever be said it beautifully.  I am just “a mother in Israel.”[1] I am what once was perfectly acceptable before Roman Orthodoxy – a Christian Jew.

All of my hopes and prayers for a full life in our Messiah go with you that you may know my joy – the faith once delivered to our fathers.  I pray with all my heart, mind and being that this book has served as a bridge across the muddied waters of tradition and time – leading you to the fullness of Yeshua and Torah.  Don’t stay on the bridge, whatever you do.  Keep moving. Get somewhere.

[1] Judges 5:7




The Character of God as Father Pt 8 — The Rejected Parent

 

I think it was very important for what I am called to say, that I was never able to carry any of my babies to term.  Because frankly, if I was not an adoptive mother, and if I had not suffered the loss of children, there are things I would never be able to understand about our relationship with God as Father, and how we are to relate to Him and what our actions towards Him mean in terms of this unique relationship.

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Ro 8:15 For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.

16 The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:

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Paul writes about our adoption as sons 5 times in scriptures (5 being the number of grace) and Paul uses adoption to illustrate something very important to us.  Before I became an adoptive parent, I would look at those verses on adoption and I would be kind of disappointed, because I viewed adoption through the eyes of 80’s and 90’s television, which was not adoption positive.  Adopted kids were the charity cases, they were the consolation prizes, they were maybe second best.  Adoption was often something hidden instead of out in the open. However, becoming an adoptive parent changed everything for me.

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Just talk to a barren couple on a waiting list, ask what they think of adopted children and they might just burst into tears right in front of you, out of pure longing.  When you have a desire for a child, and that longing goes unfulfilled, it is a pain that cannot be expressed.  But when you get that call that a child is coming, it is unimaginably wonderful.  The overwhelming majority of adopted children are wanted, very very badly.  They have been prayed for and ached for, oftentimes for many years before they are born.  To be adopted is to be the answer to the prayers of a parent, to be adopted is to be chosen.

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But I was taught that the Jews were the natural children and the Gentiles were adopted, and not understanding what I explained above, I felt like a second class citizen.

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Ro 9:For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh:

Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises;

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But right here, Paul says that we are ALL adopted, all who are of Israel, those who were born Jews as well as those who were born Gentiles.  There is only one flesh and blood son of God, and that is Yeshua (Jesus) the Messiah, born of a woman and of the Spirit of God.  The rest of us are all adopted, no one above any other.  There is one first born Son and the rest of us are added in as we are found (because were were lost) and chosen.

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Eph 1:5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,

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I could go on and on about adoption and what it means for us and what it was about historically with Yeshua and Moses, who were both adopted, but I want to recommend a series of teachings by Rico Cortes from Wisdom in Torah Ministries on the Laws of Adoption in the Ancient Near East, there is a small yearly charge to access his site, but it is well worth it.  I am not here to cover history, especially when someone else does it better than I do, but instead to talk about what adoption means as it relates to our relationship with the Father.

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Continuing on, our adoption was also a contested one — not by their wonderful birthmother but by their birthfather, who was in prison for some very serious crimes.  In the same way, we were also the result of a contested adoption, and it was our natural father, the devil (John 8:44), who was fighting it tooth and nail.  Our adoption of Matthew and Andrew cost us every cent we had and then some, but when God adopted us, it cost Yeshua His life.  When we look at our sons, we see all that money as proof of their value and how badly the enemy wanted them out of our home, and when God the Father sees us, I imagine that He must see our worth in terms of the price He paid as well.  I am certainly not comparing myself to God but I believe with all my heart that we had this experience for a reason, and I have to believe that the lessons He taught us are there for others to glean from.

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And so here’s where we get to the part of the story that He showed me this afternoon, and it really grieved me.

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The cruelest thing an adopted child can do to their parent is what I am about to share with you.  It’s something that hurts bad enough when other people imply it or outright say it, but when your child says it it’s just like a knife to the heart.  I will never forget the day, probably about a year ago, when I asked my son Andrew to do something for me, and he refused.  I told him that I was his mother and that he would do what I was telling him to do — and he looked me right in the eye with a nasty smirk and said the words I had always dreaded, “You aren’t my real mother.”  And with a triumphant look, he turned around and ignored me.  I honestly hurt more than I knew it was possible to hurt.  This beautiful child who I had given up everything for, my job, my freedom, our money, our lives — he had just told me that none of what I DID mattered, that he didn’t recognize my authority in his life.  Authority that was borne not out of conquest, but established every day of his life in loving acts.

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But don’t we do that to God our Father as well?  When we refuse to obey His commandments, we may not hear these sorts of things coming from our mouths, but are we telling Him that He’s not our real Father through our actions?  If our actions and our true motivations behind them could speak out loud, would they sound like this?

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Your laws are legalistic!

I have better things to do on a Saturday than spend it with You!

Look, the feasts are interesting, but my friends want me to spend Christmas and Easter with them, so go spend Passover with the Jews!

Oh my gosh, do You even have to control what I eat now?

Fringes, what, do you want me to look like an idiot?

It’s not like You’re my real Father.

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Of course, we don’t say it like that out loud, but is that what our actions say?  Isn’t that what we believe our children are really saying to us when they refuse to obey? When I think about how badly Andrew hurt me with what he SAID, and I look back over the years at the things I have DONE, well, wasn’t Andrew simply being more honest about his contempt for my authority than I was being with God?

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What part of “And YHVH spoke to Moses, saying, “Command the children of Israel to…” is too hard for me to deal with?  Am I not one of the children of Israel now?  Paul sure says I am in Ephesians 2!  Was the price He paid for me insufficient?  Has he not firmly established His right to be my authority and then built upon that with even more loving-kindness and grace?  Do I want to tell Him that He’s not my real Father when I have longed for that type of relationship my whole life?

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I want you to know that when Andrew turned his back on me, he had already seen the look on my face and his exultation didn’t last long.  When my pain really hit him, he repented and he has never repeated the comment.  But perhaps he had to  learn how deeply I love him, by finding out exactly how deeply he could hurt me.   And I think that I had to learn how deeply I hurt God when I refuse to recognize His authority to set up the rules of His own house.

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We reject God the Father all the time, as a Body as well as individually.  And I’ll tell you something, He receives us back in repentance not because He has to but because He wants to. I know that because when Andrew came to me and told me I was his only mommy… well, let’s say we were both pretty emotional.  So, right now I want to say something publicly.

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“Father God, You ARE my real Father.”

Andy and myself when he was about 2

Andy and myself when he was about 2