Like Little Children Part 1–The Status of Children in the Ancient World

In the modern world, children are viewed in some truly idealistic ways regarding inherent innocence and honesty. Does that POV carry any weight in the Bible or in biblical times? What exactly did Yeshua/Jesus mean when He told His disciples that they must become like little children? Was He preaching what many see as an impossible ideal, or something altogether attainable based on the role assigned to children in the ancient world?

Transcript–forgive any glaring errors

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Hi, this is Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where we explore Scripture in its original historical context and talk about how God is communicating His expectations to us as His image-bearers—Because, after all, if all this information doesn’t bring us closer to God’s character, it’s just useless brain candy..

You can catch my blogs at www.theancient bridge.com and my children’s context teachings at contextforkids.com. I also have two youtube channels where you can listen to the archives of past Character in Context broadcasts as well as watch my video teachings for adults and kids, which can be accessed through my websites, as can my books and my family curriculum series.

And remember my weekly disclaimer—scholars are an important part of the Kingdom, but the Kingdom is bigger than scholarship. We need all sorts of servants, and we need to give them the respect they are owed according to the area in which they have the expertise—whether that is in working with the homeless, in the missions field, getting justice for the oppressed, in their field of bible study, etc.

Romans 13:7 Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

Anyone who is functioning in their calling and devoting their life to God is worthy of our respect, whether we agree with them 100% on this and that or not.

This week and next I want to talk about a section of Scripture that seems really endearing but actually has a rather dark and tragic side to it that makes it even more profound—specifically Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) command to “Let the little children come to me.”

Let’s look at the different NT passages related to children, I hope you like Scripture, because we will be reading a lot of it:

Luke 18:15-17 ¹⁵Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. ¹⁶But Jesus called them to him, saying, “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. ¹⁷Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

(^^right after tax collector parable—whoever exalts himself….)

Matt 18 At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” ²And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them ³and said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.⁴Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. ⁵“Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, ⁶but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Matt 19 ¹³Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people, ¹⁴but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” ¹⁵And he laid his hands on them and went away.

Mark 10 ¹³And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. ¹⁴But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. ¹⁵Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” ¹⁶And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.

We have, potentially, three different occasions here, some recounted in more than one Gospel, and we have two important things going on. (1) we have the disciples being told in no uncertain terms that they must become like little children and (2) we see the disciples practically driving the kids and their mothers away from Yeshua. We will talk about the first point this week, and next week we will discuss the second point. This week will be a reality check about the way children were seen in the ancient world, and next week will be a sadder delving into the reality of being a child in the first-century world and why the disciples would feel they had excellent reason to be driving them away.

This is one of those times where our modern context almost completely obscures the reality of what it was to be a child in the ancient world, and how they were perceived. We are bringing a ton of modern baggage into these passages, and so we miss the meaning entirely.

“Oh, the trusting nature of a child, the honesty, and the innocence–yes, that is how we must be.”

The problem is that kids aren’t all that innocent and honest, and they are more naive than trusting. Children lie. I know they lie, mine will be 18 this month and I can tell you some stories about that. Like the time they cut a hole in the basement carpet because they felt something under the rug and convinced themselves it was a floor safe and when their father and I got home they told the most insane lie about what happened. Evidently, they thought I would believe their wild story about how our cat Monty, who was named after a dead horse (long story) got his claw stuck in the carpet and they had to free him. And boy did they stick to that tale for a disturbingly long time. Five years later and I still remember it whenever we leave them at home alone.

The thing is, the Bible says nothing about children being inherently virtuous. That’s a modern romantic ideal that has been thrust on the little monsters. Come on parents, you know I am telling the truth. No ancient documents glorified childhood the way we do now.

“Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; The rod of discipline will remove it far from him.” (Pro 22:15, NASB)

That’s right–they are fools and it has to be disciplined out of them. In context, there are no Bible verses glorifying children or whitewashing their undisciplined little booties.

Okay, so what was Yeshua talking about here? Well, it was about social status and not about mythical childlike qualities. Children had no legal rights and no honor status of their own to speak of. In general, children were neither seen nor heard and stayed at home with their mothers until the sons were old enough to work and the daughters were old enough to marry. They weren’t out playing kick the can—for more reasons than just the obvious.

Times were tough in the first century—it wasn’t like the monarchy before the exile. Families were often barely holding on to their land, which was being snatched up by the elites when loans were defaulted on. And not only the Roman elites, but the Jewish elites as well—they were preying on one another. This meant that children were working full time. In the ancient world, everyone worked seven days a week and from dawn till dusk, with the exception of the Jews, who observed the Sabbath. But children, although considered a blessing by the Jews, were also just cogs in the desperately needed family workforce. They grew up fast, if they grew up at all—and we will discuss that next week.

There was nothing romantic about childhood—it was rough. Certainly boys from some communities learned the Scriptures, but in general, they had to spend the bulk of their time working hard.

Now, the disciples had just been arguing about “Who will be the greatest in the Kingdom” which they still imagine is happening according to their Messianic paradigms of being under a Davidic king, or if He is REALLY serious about dying, well then, who is taking over. Please not Peter, that dude does and says some pretty messed up stuff.

Seriously, could you even begin to imagine how they would balk at having Peter be their boss? He was bold, but he also had this bad habit of promising way more than he could deliver. He wasn’t the most humble guy in the universe—yet.

“Seriously, not Peter. And not James and John–those dudes want to commit genocide against anyone who doesn’t receive them. Those three really scare us, Lord.”

But Yeshua rebukes them by calling over a little child who has no honor rating whatsoever—meaning no position or importance. No authority. No reason to be taken seriously apart from who his daddy is, and because he is still a child, it isn’t like people are rushing to hear what he has to say just because he does have an honorable daddy.

“You have to be like this little guy. You have to be willing to be nothing. You must be willing to have zero status in this world because my Kingdom isn’t about exalting the rulers of this world, but in giving dignity and life to the least of these. Heck, why do you even think I was spending time with you guys? Because of your innate leadership abilities, warrior skills, and education? Don’t you get it yet? I am not interested in what the world values and what the world sees in people. I am interested in the people themselves.”

We still get it all wrong. We want to be great in the Kingdom by having authority. That’s how the world system works–but we are called to be servants. That isn’t just an expression, to be a servant, it’s a paradigm buster–if we allow it to be.

Because, really, children in those days were servants and not served. Oh sure, when they were teenie they were served—of course, but as soon as they were useful they would be put to work and they would be told what to do. They didn’t make their own decisions, their own plans. They didn’t decide the rules of the house. They were disciplined into obedience.

the disciples wanted to be great in the eyes of the world, but Yeshua was telling them that it wasn’t going to happen that way, and really—it couldn’t. We will never be great in the eyes of the world because we can’t be. What we have to make sure of, however, is that we are not stumbling blocks by training to attain heavenly things in worldly ways.

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Matt 18:4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

That is the verse in all those “become like a child” passages that gets lost in all our idealism. Humbling ourselves like a child, becoming nothing the way a child was nothing in the ancient world, precious only to his own family members. But again, we have these romantic ideas about childlike faith, childlike innocence, childlike honesty.

Impossibility of becoming innocent. This is such a terrible burden that we lay on people. I have spoken in the past, right here on HNR actually, about being a former porn addict—from the age of 8 to 32, and my story is not uncommon, even among women.

When we tell people that they need to become innocent like little children in order to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, it can lead to some really disastrous misunderstandings. I will never, ever be a person who is unacquainted with the horrors of pornography. I harmed and rerouted parts of my brain that were supposed to be directed toward holiness. I can no more watch movies or tv shows with passionate kissing or sex in them than an alcoholic can go hang out in bars.

Impossibility of becoming absolutely trusting. Children are not absolutely trusting, they are just incredibly naïve and easily fooled. There is a big difference between being easily manipulated and being trusting. Trust has to be firmly rooted in wisdom or it is not trust. We trust God not because we are hopeful after He has proven to be unfaithful in the past but because He has always proven Himself to be worthy of it.

We’ve already covered the fictional honesty of children.

When we say that folks need to be like this non-existent ideal, we set them up for failure, but if we go to the context of the passages and tell folks that if they are true disciples they won’t be great in worldly terms, I think we can all achieve that. Most of us don’t even have to use our imaginations to figure out that we will never be rich, famous, powerful, or respected in a worldly sense. We have to just be satisfied with having decent reputations—even if we didn’t start out so well. Our testimony isn’t made up of how we became great after being small, but how we gave up on being great so that we could be subservient and submissive to God in order to meekly serve those around us, bearing patiently with them and considering all people to be greater than ourselves.

Remember the lead in to the first passage we looked at in Luke—whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. Bam! Hey, look at this little child. The two concepts aren’t unrelated. Children weren’t like they are today, all full of ideas about their rights and armed with the phone number to social services if they get spanked after going at the side of their parents’ new car with lava rocks, but I don’t want to think about that right now.

Pro 17:2 A servant who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully and will share the inheritance as one of the brothers.

Ambition—servants aren’t supposed to be ambitious, they are to have their hearts and minds focused on serving their masters. If the master wants to elevate them, he can, but that is entirely up to the Master.

Whenever I think of ambition in the Bible, Absalom is the first person to come to mind. More than any other human being in Scripture, he shows the poison of someone who isn’t satisfied to wait on God. His father David is the perfect example of someone who was willing to wait on God, and who was exalted in time—God’s time and certainly not his own. Absalom, however, was ambitious and threw the Kingdom into a brief civil war.

I have to imagine that that was the sort of situation that Yeshua was needing to head off—the tendency of humans to jockey for position when there is a power vacuum.

Ambition is brutal and unloving—and has zero place in the Body of Messiah, where we are supposed to be zealous for good works and not for positions of authority. We are supposed to desire the greater gifts, but only so that we can witness to the infiltration of the Kingdom of Heaven into the kingdoms of earth one person at a time.

That, as it turns out, wasn’t what the disciples wanted. Heck, no one in their right mind would want what Yeshua was talking about and what He still demands from us. Serving Him is generally thankless, glamourless, and poorly or not at all paid work that meets with heartache, betrayal, and rejection. You will work and work and work and it will never be good enough, and some folks will bleed you dry without ever thinking about giving you anything in return, and some will only give you grief in return. And they (and we) were told to expect that and to handle it with grace. I want you to think about something a child does have more of than adults and hangs on to for a lot longer. That’s hope. Kids and dogs can be abused and will still hold out hope that you will be kind to them the next time if they love you. It is amazing what abusive adults can put a child through and they will still retain hope of having their love returned in kind one day. That is part of the humility of a child, that they will take the blows while still longing for and being receptive to repentance on the part of the abuser. It’s an amazing thing how a child can just do that, even though that hope is damaging them and making the hurt far worse. I think that’s why people mistakenly say that kids are resilient, it isn’t that they are resilient, it’s just that they hope with such abandon. That we take so much advantage of that hope, it’s shameful, but we need to learn something from it. As adults, we can grow through the Spirit into a place where we can hope and love the way children hope and love.

Like a child, we have to be willing to be hurt for the sake of a world full of abusers who need God desperately. No, no one should hurt a child and I pity the ones that do because Scripture says it would be better to have a donkey-stone tied around their neck and be cast into the sea (describe that). But children also have always known throughout the history of the world (until just recently) that it was an accepted part of life for those with no social standing. Now, I am not saying that all kids were abused, don’t get me wrong here, but I am saying that Yeshua specifically told his disciples that they would be abused—but they must still be loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, trustworthy/trusting, gentle and self-controlled. We must be what the abusers are not or can not be at this point in their lives.

Like children in the ancient world, we must consider ourselves to be so lowly and socially insignificant that we will not dare get all prideful and huffy and puffy when people oppose us, ridicule us, or walk over us. A child would depend on his father to take care of any slights to the family—and so must we. It was the father in the ancient world who had all the respect and standing and responsibility to protect the family members and not the children.

If we can hurt after being hurt without lashing out, retaliating, and sinning in return, we make it easier for those who are being drawn to the Father through Yeshua to repent. When they hurt us and we hurt them back, they are more likely to feel justified than wrong. Of course, we need to know the difference between people who enjoy being hurtful and need to be cut off from relationship, and those wounded individuals who harm others without thinking yet regret it very deeply almost immediately. I used to be one of the latter group, and the one thing I had going for me was a few people who were incredibly patient and kind to me. They took the low seat at the table in order to help me out. I can also remember the people who didn’t help me out—I remember and it inspires me not to be anything like them.

The humble in the Kingdom—they are at risk, they are vulnerable, they are not flashy or particularly noticed, and they are often treated badly while the prideful attract a crowd and keep themselves safe while sometimes damaging others. It is very tempting to gravitate toward being in the latter group. It feels better and it looks better and it intrinsically makes more sense to want that. But we aren’t called to that kind of life—which is the antithesis of the Kingdom, which is why we see that sort of behavior on tv.

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Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Week 1

This year I decided to do something a bit different with my Bible reading. In years past, I would always read the Bible from front to back but in honor of my Savior I have decided to spend my twentieth year as a believer reading the Gospels and the Epistles over and over again. I am still maintaining my daily focus on the Gospel of Matthew, as I have spent the last six months in an in-depth study of the text, but I wanted to go back and immerse myself completely in what I call the Kingdom manifesto–literally marinating myself in the goodness of Yeshua/Jesus, the perfect image of the unseen Father and our black and white, flesh and blood example of how to love God and one another. This is simply a compilation of the social media posts I have made during the first week.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 1–John 15:4 and 6a

I am starting where I am currently reading because I didn’t quite get through the Scriptures twice this year. Bear with me. 🙂

“If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away like a branch and is dried up” (John 15:6a)

This was me, five years ago. I had been neglecting my Savior for a couple of years and nearly fell prey to the fruit of my own foolish ingratitude. I was focusing on Torah as though it was everything, as though I could get everything I needed there. Even when I did read the Gospels and epistles, it was with an eye towards the agenda of proving that Torah is for today. Isn’t that just amazing? I was reading the words and deeds of the One who died for me, who rescued me out of the filth of my life, and it was with an agenda. I had boiled Yeshua/Jesus down to an intellectual exercise–as a means to an end instead of the goal of our faith. How dare I do such a thing? It still boggles my mind.

God didn’t throw me away, however–I just got too far away from the vine to thrive.

“Abide in Me, and I will abide in you. The branch cannot itself produce fruit, unless it abides on the vine. Likewise, you cannot produce fruit unless you abide in Me.” (John 15:4)

I wasn’t abiding in my Savior, my Redeemer–I had wandered off to learn Torah, without Him. It’s a common mistake we tend to make whenever we grasp on to something new and exciting. I am grateful that God has shown me how to have both, and to produce fruit worthy of repentance again. But it took a drastic wake-up call.

Five years ago, last week of December 2013, the anti-missionaries almost got me. Unbeknownst to me, they had recently converted an acquaintance away from Messiah and into traditional Judaism. I had no idea he had denied my Master, and so when he came to me asking “innocent” questions and wanting my input on a video, I was like a lamb being led to the slaughter. Something was off in the conversation and so I didn’t watch the video, but his questions bugged me and I had wandered so far from the True Vine that I had lost touch with reality, to a degree.

I began to contemplate his questions and I found myself defenseless because I had stopped listening to the voice of my Savior. The doubts were loud in my ears. Even though I would roll my eyes at the same questions today, I had not fed myself on the bread of life, or the blood of the new covenant in so long that I was too weak to resist. I read the Bible all the time, but there was no communion with the One to whom I owed my very salvation.

I remember, for an instant, believing that it all might be a lie and that Yeshua might not be the Messiah when I heard that voice of mercy:

“What will you have to choose to forget in order to deny Me?”

Memories began flooding back. I was filled with shame, and relief. I remembered my Lord. I remembered everything He ever did for me. I remembered Yeshua. I remembered Jesus. I remembered who I was in January of 1999 without Him, and I remembered the difference between knowing Him and not knowing Him.

I had dried up because I, a lowly branch, strayed from the Vine that gave me life because I thought I found a better way. But without Yeshua as my cornerstone, it was just empty. With Yeshua, it is life.

Yes, the commandments are important, but without Yeshua they are just words on paper for me–exercises in self-control that gave me no life; Rules without the inner transformation that comes from a life lived in the shadow of the Cross.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 2–John 18:4

“Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, came forward and said to them, “Whom do you seek?” (John 18:4)

This is a sorrowful section of Scripture and more profound than it would appear at first glance (and not just because of the “I am” in the next verse–I think everyone gets that), but there is also a bit of irony here that is easy to miss.

Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. (Luke 2:25)

Simeon wasn’t alone–the entire Jewish nation was seeking the One who would lead the second exodus out of oppression. That’s why people got so excited about John the Baptist, who proclaimed himself to be preparing the way for the Messiah, who would “forgive sins.” To the Jews, who had the Temple service in place, there was no need to be concerned with what could be remedied through repentance and the shed blood of animals. No, they wanted their collective slates to be wiped clean by God so that the Roman occupation, their over 600 years of slavery to foreign powers both in exile and at “home,” would finally be over. They wanted safety, autonomy, and the constitutional theocracy under a Davidic king back in place. But, until God finally forgave the nation and wiped their slates totally clean, they were stuck with the latest in a long line of foreign oppressors. But they were waiting, as they paid heavy taxes and tribute not only to Rome in the form of crops and cash but also to the corrupt High priesthood in league with Rome, leaving even most land-owning families with barely enough to live on.

The Jews were seeking Messiah. Desperately waiting for the deliverance that John had heralded and Daniel and the prophets had foretold.

So when Yeshua/Jesus asked the question, “Who do you seek?” It was rather ironic. They were seeking Him, to kill Him, certainly, but the entire nation was seeking Him as well, the Messiah who was about to deliver a second and greater exodus, during the Passover, that none of them saw coming. The world was about to begin to know freedom from the oppression of Caesar, but in an unexpected way–because of the defeat of the powers of sin and death. Even more ironically, these were the very people who would get the ball rolling.

But it is a good question for all of us. Who do we seek?

Am I the only one who really, REALLY wants the Savior as MY personal ally? Vindicating me? Defending me? Avenging me? Showing everyone that I am worthy and not a total loser by giving me superpowers? (preferably ones not gained by coming into contact with a vat of toxic waste or spider venom)

And yet, do I also want Him to spare me and be patient as I grow and learn to be a better person? Do I want Him to give me a chance to learn to regret my past actions towards others, even if it takes a decade–despite wanting my vindication and vengeance against others NOW?

I guess what I am saying is, “Am I seeking who He actually is or who I think I need Him to be?”

I don’t need Him to be my ally, I just want that. I want Him to vindicate me, but I don’t need it. I want Him to defend me, but I don’t need that. If I truly needed it, He would do it. But He is working in the lives of others too, not just me, and they need mercy too.

I need Him to be exactly who He is. If I needed something different, He would have come as that, because He is perfect and everything we actually need, as is. We only want more, for ourselves. We want a personal healer so that we don’t have to learn humility, perspective, and compassion in disease and disability. We want a personal bodyguard so we don’t really have to pick up that cross and risk life and limb like they do in other countries. We want immediate vindication so we do not have to share in His humiliation and sufferings. And if we aren’t willing to partake in those things, then we don’t really want Him. We can’t be like Him if we don’t know those experiences that He knew. We can’t say we love others if we are not willing to endure those things in order to better serve their needs.

We have to come to terms with who it is that we are really seeking and ask ourselves if we are following a mythological Messiah to satisfy our wants, or the real Messiah as He revealed Himself. You see, we aren’t all that different from the first century Jews who had their own wants in mind, and believe me, their need for deliverance from Rome was very, very real. But that wasn’t exactly what Yeshua/Jesus came to do as He had something bigger and more profound in mind. We have to learn to wrap our minds around that in the midst of our own sufferings, big or small, that God has something bigger and more profound in mind than simple deliverance from the here and now of our troubles. He is preparing us to be eternal people, and maybe even more importantly, He is preparing us to get over ourselves and to look at what we can be to others–but we can’t deliver a message of salvation via the Cross if we have never tasted the bitterness of it. Frankly, unless we can relate to the suffering of others, we won’t even want to bother–and we won’t be safe voices. We are more likely to be tyrants.

Let’s face it, there are enough tyrants out there. As our Messiah braced the suffering servant role, so must we–skipping ahead to the “Lion of Judah” coming in victory part just isn’t realistic. We haven’t earned that sort of easy walk, and such a walk has no need of real disciples.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 3–Acts 2:1-12

I just love this.

Yeshua/Jesus said that once He was gone to the Father, that He would ask for the Comforter/Advocate/Helper/Counselor (depending on your translation) to be sent (John 14:16).

What is the very first thing that the Holy Spirit did for the world on the Day of Pentecost, after filling the 120 believers gathered in the Temple?

Did the Spirit enable everyone gathered to understand Hebrew? Not at all.

Now there were Jews gathered from all over the known world–from the Roman, Parthian, and Scythian Empires, as well as from Africa. It was a once in a lifetime, insanely expensive and time consuming trip for such Jews to make the pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem–some of them had traveled for weeks and others for months in caravans in order to see the Temple just once and to present offerings from their fellow Jews in the diaspora. Their native languages were not Hebrew. It is possible that some, many, of them spoke none of it at all, or at least not fluently.

“How is it that we each hear our own birth language?” (Acts 2:8)

Hebrew, in the dispersion, was not the mother tongue.

“We hear them declaring in our own tongues the mighty deeds of God!” (Acts 2:11)

Why didn’t the Spirit simply enable everyone to understand Hebrew? That would have been just as easy, and they would have marveled that they all understood what some later Rabbinic commentators designated “the holy tongue.” They might have gone back to their countries teaching it to others!

This is the part that I love.

God is so humble and so kind, as we see in the words and actions of Yeshua, that He deigns to come to where we are. Can you imagine? Yesterday He created the universe and today He is approaching sinners in order to save them? In order to pour out His extravagant love on them? It boggles the mind.

He doesn’t flaunt His superior knowledge. He doesn’t require us to understand science at His level. He reveals His truths to us as we can understand them, and graciously and mercifully not all at once. Is there anyone who would not have committed suicide long ago if they truly knew how much of their character needed to be fixed? We serve a God who is Great because of His restraint, not because of His impatience. An impatient God would have killed me long ago.

His first act through the 120, through the medium of the Spirit, is typical of one of the great hallmarks of His nature, His character. God speaks to us where we are now, occasionally challenging us and educating us forward towards where He wants us to eventually be, then strengthening and solidifying our growing foundation before challenging us again. But He always speaks to us where we are, according to our flawed understandings. He doesn’t come speaking Hebrew, or half-Hebrew and half English, when we do not understand it. His purpose is to parent us, not to discourage us or to cause us to feel like hopeless outsiders, even if we should be, by all worldly standards. He leads us along like a Shepherd and again, we saw this in Yeshua/Jesus throughout His ministry.

Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? (John 14:9)

Everyone at the Temple on that Pentecost/Shavuot was a Jew or a proselyte, as were all the disciples at the Last Supper. These were people who knew the law inside and out. Didn’t matter–God still went to them where they were, because we never really arrive. We worship a God who will even communicate truths through our cultural misconceptions and Biblical misunderstandings (of which we have a multitude). The disciples knew the commandments, but they still needed to see that what they had experienced daily from our Savior, was the very character of the Father.

Messiah, the perfect image-bearer, gives us as perfect picture of who God is as we can understand at this point. As we are too small to understand great matters, it is a great comfort that God knows that full well and doesn’t hold it against us–as we must not hold it against others.

A God who does not exalt Himself over us needlessly, represented on earth by His one unique Son who humbled Himself even to death on a cross, now revealed to us through His Word and via the guidance of the Spirit.

If God comes to us where we are and that is love, then what reason do we have to be exclusionary and create artificial barriers to understanding? Let us all endeavor to speak to people in their own language and at their own level, because they are precious–and if God called them in that language and has them at that level, who are we to demand otherwise? We must not exclude on the basis of knowledge and falsely call it outreach.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 4–Acts 8:3

Consumed by Zeal–Messiah vs Saul (Paul).

There are so many ways to meditate on the works of Messiah, but one of the best ways (for me) is in terms of compare and contrast. How did our Savior handle situations and people versus how others in the Bible chose to deal with their situations and the people around them. Yeshua/Jesus could take the same exact emotion or mindset as someone else, yet execute it sinlessly, whereas others–not so much. Today I want to talk about zeal.

Acts 8:3 But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.

Paul (as he as later called) would eventually, throughout Acts and the Epistles, attribute his actions to a zeal for God and none of us should doubt him. He was zealous in the extreme for God and the sanctity of the faith. Who else was zealous? Yeshua in the Temple!

John 2:17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

So zeal can be a positive or a negative–it all depends on how, when and where (and how often) it is administrated. Zeal can be pure or it can be contaminated.

Paul took his zeal violently into other people’s homes, arresting men and women whom he later learned to be entirely innocent. Our Savior limited this shockingly confrontational manifestation of His devotion to one house, His Father’s House in Jerusalem, and only when it was being overrun with corruption. Who else was overtly zealous? How about the “sons of thunder?”

Luke 9:54-55 And when his disciples James and John saw it, they said, “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” But he turned and rebuked them.

Evidently, zeal can be a deceptively dangerous emotion when pointed in the wrong direction–it is an emotion that needs to be rebuked, disciplined, and tamed before it can be of any use to God.

We should all be zealous for God, certainly, but we must not fool ourselves into thinking that all displays of zeal are righteous–quite the contrary. There is an appropriate time and place for zeal–and even then only once our own offense is mastered. That was Paul’s issue as well as James and John. Paul was offended on behalf of his faith, believing with his whole heart that he was doing God’s work, only to find himself tragically wrong. James and John, well, we don’t know if they were offended for their Master’s sake or for their own when Yeshua was not welcomed back to Samaria. I think it was probably a bit of both, “How dare they reject us!” But see, the Samaritans were being zealous too. They had their own Torah telling them, in black and white, that Yeshua and His disciples were sinning grievously by spending the upcoming Feast worshiping in Jerusalem instead of on Mt Gerazim. They wanted no part of that “sin”–they were zealous. Perhaps they hearkened back to the words of Moses telling them not to listen to anyone who subverted worship, no matter how amazing his works are.

Zeal. Nothing makes us more deadly as when our zeal lacks knowledge–but we never truly understand or appreciate that we really are lacking in knowledge. We believe that we have a pretty good bead on things–and so we pull the trigger on others while feeling pretty good about ourselves. Even when we are the villains in the situation.

Yeshua knew the thoughts of every man. He knew what they were really saying, and really thinking. On social media, we oftentimes don’t even know what a person’s real name is–much less what they are thinking and believing. It isn’t a holy thing when we go off on someone just because we suspect what they might be thinking, as though we were our Master. We must be humble and realize that we, unlike Him, are still getting it very wrong. Paul, James, and John knew the commandments of God better than we do. I guarantee it because they lived in a time and place where as a Nation could collectively keep almost all of them (Roman interference excluding a few). But knowing the commandments and keeping them on the outside doesn’t mean that our zeal is pure either–

after all, Paul by his own words reminds us that he was faultless concerning the Law, even as measured by the Pharisees, and yet he was still a self-professed murderer both in heart and actions.

How much more should we guard ourselves and others from our unbroken zeal?

May your Sabbath be restful.

Day 5–Taking a Sabbath Break from writing

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 6–Phil 4:11-13

I don’t have to be a slave to what I do and do not like and do and do not want to do.

“Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

It is no secret that I am no fan of memory verses because they often become trite little platitudes and Phil 4:13 is probably one of the worst victims of this phenomenon.

While my sons (almost 18 now) were in their toddler years, we spent many happy hours watching Veggie Tales together and I can sing every song by heart. In one episode, Phil 4:13 was Qwerty’s memory verse and, as I recall, Larry was happy that he was going to be able to fly, or something (I am better with the songs). Bob cautioned him that the verse just meant that we could do whatever God wanted us to do.

That is how this verse is taught, and it is not the wrong interpretation. But it is so much bigger than that.

I have spent the last couple of weeks doing unexpected and uncomfortable things that I hate doing, and yet I knew I had to do them because God was obviously training me. In fact, the last three Sabbaths I have had to do this, my most hated thing–if only it was work, that would have been easier. Little did I know that a breakthrough was coming and Messiah was about to show me how He could live among us, despite the fact that He must have hated a lot of what He had to do. Love does not enjoy being in the presence of hatred. Love can’t even want to be there, but love is stronger than hate, and so love can do anything it needs to do. Yeshua/Jesus is love, just as God is love, because Yeshua is the very image of the unseen Father.

And so while praying (being an insomniac helps), that verse just smacked me across the face. It goes far beyond being enabled, through the New Covenant transformation bought by Messiah’s blood shed on our behalf, to perform a difficult calling like Paul’s. God showed me that this truth allows me to be a different sort of slave, in a much deeper and more meaningful and honest way. Let me explain.

I don’t know about you, but I very much spend time thinking about what I do and don’t like, and do and don’t want to do. In fact, when a situation occurs, the first thing I think about is how I feel about the situation itself. LOL. Normally you guys don’t hear those thoughts as I keep them to myself. Inside, I am whining. Why do I have to do this? Why can’t I do that? I hate having to do this! I really want to do that! WHEN CAN I GO HOME?

My wants and my feelings, my desires and my apprehensions–they all come out to let me know exactly what they think and oftentimes, they drive me–sometimes my actions but, more often than not, my thoughts. Not so long ago, before God removed my cynicism, I could barely hear myself talking out loud over my cynical judgments about what was probably going to happen, or not happen. That was a great bit of freedom right there. I had no idea, back in the fall, how cynical I even was towards God–the thoughts were just natural for me, didn’t even realize the sin I was committing towards Him as I prayed and cynically expected nothing in return. *sigh*

(Before standing in judgment of that, it is a very common thing for parents of disabled kids to pray with walls up, not daring to hope anymore for a miracle. It’s a learned defense mechanism against hopelessness and I had to learn a new way to think about prayer, which I wrote about in the fall)

But back to the story–when God opened up this verse for me, I realize the “all things” that I “can” do:

I can do the things that my mind screams against doing, because He strengthens me. His love strengthens me to do what is necessary, no matter how much I want to dig in my heels; no matter how uncomfortable it makes me.

I also can resist doing the destructive things that I want to do, because He strengthens me. I have been learning for the last three years not to lash out and retaliate, and I can only do it because love gives me the strength.

I can do without the things I want, because He strengthens me.

I can live with conditions that I don’t want, because He strengthens me.

In other words, I can be ruled by God’s love, in service of His Kingdom, instead of by my own preferences, for the sake of sanity in my own little world.

We Westerners are too comfortable. We have everything we need, and even more stuff that we don’t need. We have become incapable of dealing even with basic stress, or a headache, or even bad smells or bland foods, without popping pills, inhaling or applying oils, or gorging ourselves with whatever our taste buds demand (I do not want to hear a defense of oils or meds, okay? It was just an example, no need to get defensive–I have both). We listen very closely to our wants, mistaking them for our needs, and to our fears and preferences, mistaking them for divine leading. We have a lot of excuses for what we do and what we don’t do, but the only needful thing is what God needs and where He is leading.

I can do without this and live with that, and I don’t have to like what I am doing and I don’t have to do what I like. I can. I can because Messiah gives me the strength to do and to endure whatever He needs me to do and to endure whatever He needs me to endure. I can live His life through me, instead of demanding that He direct the minutiae my life according to my liking.

I can do all things through Him who strengthens me–and I can especially do the stuff I hate.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 7–Acts 13:38

Greater than the Torah–read it all before commenting.

“Therefore, let it be known to you, brothers, that through this One is proclaimed to you the removal of sins, including all those from which you could not be set right by the Torah of Moses.”

I really like this version of the Bible (Tree of Life Version), translated by the Messianic Jewish Family Bible Society. I bought it a year ago and I am on my second way through it. So there is my plug for my current favorite Bible translation.

Throughout the Gospels, Yeshua/Jesus is proclaimed to be greater than David, Moses, the Temple, Jonah, the Sabbath–all authority in Heaven and on Earth is given to Him. In fact, this is one of the main themes of the Gospel of Matthew. We see Him going about doing what Torah, in and of itself, never could–casting out demons healing the sick, raising the dead, and providing a living, breathing example of God’s true image in a way that words on scrolls never could, no matter how divinely ordained. On the Cross, Yeshua did what Torah never could–setting us right with God by removing sins in a way that the Torah itself could not.

There are people who get angry when I say this, that Yeshua is greater than the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), but the Word itself says it! Here in Acts 13:38, Luke records Torah-observant Paul the devoted Pharisee’s words to the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia. By Paul’s own words, he loved and observed the Torah throughout his entire life, but in Yeshua he saw the fulfillment of something even greater–God dwelling among men, delivering men personally from demonic possession, healing the sick, feeding the impoverished and disenfranchised, rebuking the corrupt leadership, forgiving sin, and raising the dead. Paul saw not just the Laws of Heaven come to Earth, but the Kingdom of Heaven itself invading Earth at the Cross–one believer at a time.

Whereas Torah changes behavior, Yeshua transforms men and women to the very core of their being. While Torah inspires zeal towards God and a way of life, Yeshua inspired the most costly forms of self-sacrificial love on behalf of others. Torah is great, and anyone who thinks otherwise has never seen the law codes of the ancient world. Torah is an awe-inspiring invasion of the basic values of Heaven into the realm of Earth, but Yeshua showed us something greater still.

There are some who might protest that I am demeaning Torah by elevating Yeshua, but I would never demean Torah. When I say that Yeshua is greater than myself, or you, I am not demeaning either one of us–but simply stating the fact of His supremacy over us both. I was praying this morning about how to explain this and the most surprising example popped into my mind.

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, one of earliest scenes shows us a young George Bailey rescuing his younger brother Harry from a fall through the ice. The movie takes us through the life of this decent, self-sacrificing man as he struggles to do what is right despite the odds. As we go through the rest of the movie, the incident with his brother is almost forgotten, until near the end when George, having decided that the world is better off without him, is treated to a view of what the world around him would be like if he had never been born.

His brother, who had just been honored by the President for saving every man on his WWII transport, died as a child because George wasn’t there to save him. And every man on that transport died as well, because Harry wasn’t there to save them.

Harry was a hero, but George was greater than Harry–for a multitude of reasons. Do we demean Harry by saying that George is greater? After all, that is the point of the movie, to show the greatness of George, who was always sacrificing himself for others. Not at all. George’s greatness is such that it demeans nothing, it simply is a fact of life.

In the same way, the Giver of the Law is greater than the Law. Torah could not die for us. Torah never healed anyone, raised the dead, cast out demons or inaugurated the New Covenant in its blood because it had none to shed. If Torah was enough, then Yeshua would have never been needed and the bitter cup of suffering could have passed from Him. If Torah was enough, then the nations would have come to God solely by its merits, but Yeshua had to draw all men to Him by being lifted up.

I keep the commandments of God, to the best of my ability and according to my understanding, because of my relationship with Yeshua, who died for me. I don’t have a relationship with Yeshua because I kept the commandments of God. Quite the contrary, I needed Yeshua because I wasn’t living in such a way as to be pleasing to God. Yeshua was and is my salvation, and not the Torah. No amount of commandment keeping saves me, and yet I strive to follow the commandments as He did while on earth.

We don’t need to fear giving Yeshua the supremacy in position over the Torah itself, we need to fear witholding that supremacy from Him. He died for us. Torah cannot die. Not one jot or tittle. Yeshua is greater than the Torah because He died, not in spite of the fact. We needed a Savior, and the Torah–as wonderful as it is–can never be that.

Charity vs Community: Extending Dignity vs Our Misguided Attitudes about Serving the “Least of These”

Andrew and myself in 2002

A collection of my ramblings over the past 24 hours based on my experiences as a special needs mom and being a special needs person:

A dear friend inspired the words today for something that has been on my heart for weeks now.

You know what? People who are sick, disabled, wrongly imprisoned, poor, widowed, orphaned – they aren’t our charity cases. Yeshua called them the “least of these” because they were those who had the least honor/dignity attributed to them in society, not because we should consider them least, or so we could pat ourselves on the back for deigning to do things for them. Yeshua said that as we treat them, we are treating Him. Is it then charity to feed the poor, visit the sick, include the disabled, get justice for the prisoner, care for the widows and orphans? No, it isn’t charity but righting a wrong. No one truly in need wants to be a charity case and we certainly wouldn’t be considering anything we do for Yeshua to be charity. We do for them because we would want it to be done for us – because they are people, and their social status doesn’t change their needs for equity in the Kingdom, nor their basic humanity and need for dignity.

And that’s the problem – dignity. We are a society that is geared towards the Most of these, not the least of these. The healthy, the able-bodied, the free, those who can pay their bills, and the nuclear family. And then we congratulate ourselves for including those “special” cases – when we really don’t want to slow down at all, when we want to focus on how fast we want to go and what we want to get done and how to do it with the least amount of hassle.

That’s what being a special needs mom has taught me, and being a special needs person on top of that. Giving dignity to those who don’t have it in the eyes of the world through no fault of their own – just like Yeshua.

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I am not some kind of sainted person for adopting a special needs child – what I am is a barren woman who needed a child, and adopted a child who needed a mother. That isn’t charity, that is community – it shouldn’t be considered strange, or even noble – because there was nothing noble about it. On the adoption rolls, Andrew would have been considered to be one of the least of these, a potential adoptee without as much honor/dignity/worth in the eyes of the prospective parents and in the eyes of the rest of the world who want, by and large, healthy and (let’s face it) white babies (even though the waiting list for biracial babies like my kids is also very, very deep, supply pales in comparison with demand).

What I didn’t realize. almost 15 years ago, was that God was teaching me about the importance of community over individual. Andrew, beyond being disabled (and stubborn as heck), is a member of the community of Israel – and as such is entitled to both honor and dignity. Not fake honor and fake dignity, not sometimes inclusion on special occasions – but the real honor and dignity afforded to each member of the community in good standing not out of charity and pity, but rooted in the basic recognition of their worth and needs.

As I wrote last night, everyone has a need to be and feel like a functioning member of the community and being disabled doesn’t change that need or that calling. If anything, it intensifies it, because the sense of shame can be suffocating and so the need for restoration of dignity is far more acute.

Did you know that I went full panic mode at Revive in Dallas because someone waved a giant worship flag over my head and my sensory processing disorder kicked into high gear? I had spent much of the events in the big auditorium wearing earplugs or with my hands over my ears in order to put off the overload. It was incredibly embarassing, but it is also important for me to worship with the community. Does the disability negate my need to be in the community worshiping our King? Does it mean that I have less capacity to serve in the Kingdom? No, but it does mean that sometimes someone is going to have to help me out – as Teresa from Cuppa Shebrews did when she saw what was happening. But I saw no charity in her eyes, I saw a family member treating me like a member of the community. That’s rare.

That right there was embarassing to admit to. In this community there are some who believe that if you are afflicted, it is because of sin – and yet this is nothing but my personal thorn in the flesh, a thorn that tests the character of others and tries their hearts and serves to continually humble me.

And I look at my humiliation and then I cast an eye on my beloved son, whose disability is exponentially worse than mine and far more humiliating, and has afflicted him from birth – whereas I was spared until I had a stroke at the age of 27. If anything, he needs fellowship and community far more than I do. He needs acceptance as a human first and foremost, as every citizen of the Kingdom of Heaven is entitled to as the sons of God. He needs inclusion, and he needs to know that slowing down for him really isn’t burdening anyone – mostly we go fast simply out of our need for constant entertainment and stimulation. We move too fast for the sick and infirm – and the elderly who we would do well to take the time to sit and listen to. We move too extravagantly for the poor and needy. We move too selfishly to take the time to think of the oppressed.

Community requires slowing down, and we are moving way too fast. The most of these are setting the pace, and it isn’t a very equitable one.

Martin Luther and Me: What Opposition Reveals About the Heart

How could the man who made the earth-shattering statement that Jesus (Yeshua) and all his disciples were Jews come to have such a vitriolic hatred of them? How does it happen?

In 1523, Martin Luther wrote That Christ Was Born a Jew and it was revolutionary in the day – preaching love towards the Jews and encouraging their conversion. But the Jews were not interested in a Messiah who was a lawbreaker and who looked nothing like a Jew but instead like a Gentile. Luther’s professed love turned to a vitrolic hate and in 1543, 20 years later, he published On the Jews and Their Lies – considered by many to be Adolf Hitler’s 60,000 word blueprint for their extermination.

So what happened, and how can we learn from it? And how can we avoid doing it?

Doing it? Yes indeed – I see it on a daily basis. I saw it just this morning on a facebook thread, where a self-proclaimed Messianic Rabbi was preaching hatred and slander against other Messianics who disagree with his brand of theology, they were weirdos who just weren’t getting it and he painted his opposition with as wide and insulting a brush as he could manufacture (and misrepresenting just about everyone I know in the process). And I have seen it against Christians from Messianics as well, and from Christians against Catholics, Catholics against Christians, etc.

So what happens? We come into what we believe is the truth and we get super excited – we want to share that truth and relieve others of their blindness – and when those people don’t want to hear it, our “love” for them quickly turns to contempt, anger, and bitterness, and then slander and wrath if we don’t learn to control ourselves. And step by step, we feel justified in that contempt, anger, bitterness, slander and wrath – it starts to feel like righteousness when it is in fact the exact opposite.

You see, opposition reveals our heart, and our fruit – if our fruit is bad then opposition will reveal it. If we cannot have love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control when people aren’t “getting with the program” – then it’s just a sham the rest of the time. Even tax collectors are good to their friends, as Yeshua (Jesus) said. Martin Luther had a great revelation, but his fruit was bad. That revelation should have changed his heart, not just the company he kept. When Luther turned his hatred on the Jews, it wasn’t because the Jews weren’t believing God – it was because the Jews were not believing Martin Luther. And I see that everyday with new believers – they go out in pride, wanting to convert the world, but people don’t want to follow them. A lot of people get over that and remember that their blindness had to be removed by God Himself, but others just keep becoming more and more hateful and more and more insulting. They become worse because their minds are depraved with discord, they are divisive and love controversies, they have no patience or compassion for those who are blind (if they truly are – sometimes it is actually the preacher “of truth” who is blinded), and they have no tolerance for opposition.

Can we disagree without insults, without manipulation, without passive aggressive attacks? Can we wait upon others with the patience that God expended upon us? Can we acknowledge the things that those who disagree with us are right about, the things that they do excellently, the ways they perhaps reflect God’s character better than we do? Or are we, like Luther, going to stay focused on their real or imagined faults and descend into the pit of blind hatred and depraved cruelty?

No, we are called to good fruit, to die to ourselves – to be opposed and yet still hope, still love, and still have faith. We can’t afford to hate those who aren’t walking in the fullness of truth because none of us are. If we judge others for how short of our expectations they fall, how are we to justify ourselves before God? As the man who was forgiven a great debt went after the man who only had a small debt, and was thrown into prison for it, how can we tempt the gracious mercy of our King in not extending compassion and patience to others?

Becoming Martin Luther is easy, it’s the easiest thing in the world. We just need to get prideful about what we have been given, and then persecute everyone else who hasn’t received that gift yet. Martin Luther didn’t receive revelation because he was better than everyone else, it doesn’t work that way – he got that revelation because God was generous with him. God was also generous with me, but the moment that I start to forget His generosity and imagine that I am here by my virtue – I’m just 60,000 words away from becoming just as hateful and vengeful as the man who could have chosen to love the Jews and end the rift between Protestant Christianity and Judaism – and in so doing, save us from almost 500 years of antisemitic futility.

I’m not Moses

I get asked questions a lot about what people should do, according to the Torah, in certain situations and more often than not I just can’t tell them.

I can tell you what is written, and what is not written – but what I cannot do is sit face to face with God like Moses did. Moses and the Israelites found themselves in a situation very much like ours. They had lived among pagans for hundreds of years and, at the very least, the mixed multitude had never known a lifestyle that wasn’t intimately steeped in pagan idolatry. I mean – even Aaron knew how to make a golden calf! The Word (in Exodus 18) says that Moses sat and judged the people from morning to night and I don’t think he spent all that time settling disputes between people

Ex 18:15-16 And Moses said unto his father in law, Because the people come unto me to inquire of God: When they have a matter, they come unto me; and I judge between one and another, and I do make them know the statutes of God, and his laws.

I think that he was mostly answering questions – because that is oftentimes what people want me to do, not because I am like Moses but because we find ourselves in the same predicament. We are trying to leave lives steeped in sin and idolatry and it isn’t easy. The big questions aren’t about lying, murdering, stealing and adultery – they are about, “What do I do now?”

“I have a job on the Sabbath, what do I do now?”

“We thought we weren’t supposed to circumcise our young sons because we were taught Galatians incorrectly, what do we do now about Passover?”

“My wife thinks I have fallen from grace and won’t give up Christmas and Easter and pork – what do I do now?”

“I own a business that is open on Saturdays and if I close that day it’s going to hurt my employees – what do I do now?”

You see, if all I had to do was go by the letter of the Law, then all this would be very simple. No mercy, no time to transition, no recognition that we are in exile and that exile really complicates our lives. The Torah is the constitution of the Kingdom of God, of which we are all citizens, but it was never written in such a way as to easily operate within the midst of pagan communities. In many ways, we are very much still the exiles of Babylon and that would be true no matter what country on earth we live in. On top of that, we made decisions in ignorance long ago that complicate our lives now. We didn’t have rebellion in our hearts – we genuinely thought we were doing the right thing. But doing what ended up being the wrong thing made consequences that we are only now coming to fully appreciate.

And so we come into the area of “what is the higher law?” Love God and love our neighbors – those are the highest, they guide our interpretations of the others. We cannot use the excuse of feelings to eradicate a law, but we can acknowledge mitigating circumstances that actually cannot, at this time, be overcome. One cannot force a spouse, who is not on board, into Torah obedience and expect to maintain that marital relationship. Divorce will be the most likely outcome and then we will have children living in a broken home and the marriage covenant (that they made before God) in shambles. The husband or wife who resists Torah is simply guilty of being that exact same person to whom eternal vows were made – they didn’t change, and nothing in the vows said that they had to.

Out of the questions presented above – that’s the one I feel most comfortable about answering because it is clearly covenantal. The others are tough, and I can’t make personal decisions for other people. I can tell you what the Word says and what the Word does not say – but I can’t tell you what to do. If I were Moses, face to face with YHVH every day, then I could ask those hard questions and get absolute answers. When someone asked Moses, they were really asking God – but when you ask me, you have to know that you are really just asking Tyler. I am not an elder in the Body, nor am I one who is wise enough or knowledgeable enough to tell people in the Body definitively how they should walk this mess of an exile out. Someday it will be so easy, when Messiah comes, and we won’t face the tough questions anymore – or have to hope that the people giving answers are correct. No one will have to say “Know YHVH” for all will know Him. In the meantime, our lives are a mess and that is mostly incurable as we cannot fix the world that we live in.

If we believe in the mercy and compassion of God, then we can live in the midst of this mess and keep trying – but if we do not believe it, we will fall into despair and drag others along with us. The Law is good and holy and perfect, and for those living in Israel in ages past, they had the opportunity to keep it fairly easily. It’s hard for us, and there are landmines everywhere – but can you imagine, for a moment, how much it must please Him that we try so hard even in the midst of such difficulties? And even more, that we trust in His faithfulness in the areas where we are pretty much stuck? Is anything hidden from Him? He knows when we can and cannot adhere to the letter of the Kingdom laws, and when we simply don’t want to. He knows. What is key is the renewal of our minds and the ending of our hostilities towards His righteous commands – and it is vital that we patiently bear with those who are learning and struggling in the areas that we believe we have mastery over (until of course, we are faced with trials and then sometimes we learn that we are not quite the masters we think we are). We must recognize the journey in ourselves and others – focus on the progress and growth, not on the failings. After all, unless the failings are truly egregious, they are probably just a matter of opportunity and awareness. Adultery is something that should never be tolerated, but a man working a Saturday job to support his family while trying to get enough seniority or a better position where he no longer has to work it – we have to take exile into account. Exile does not effect murder, adultery, stealing, lying or coveting – but it seriously effects how we eat (no matter how hard we try), and the Sabbaths.

So maybe we should all cool our jets and keep in mind that law-keeping is only as good as we are in our hearts. A cruel person who keeps the Law is a poorer neighbor than a kind person who struggles with their Law-keeping. If I play loud music until 9:59 PM every night, walk my dog on a leash to your yard everyday so that her urine burns your grass instead of mine, or never rake my leaves and allow them to blow onto your lawn year around, when I am healthy and able to do so – I am not breaking any civil laws, but I am not being a good neighbor either. Law-keeping is not everything, and we have to stop pretending like it is. We must have balance, or we will demand unbalanced lives from others. And so, in all things – when I don’t have a good answer, I caution patience and balance.

Do not break the Laws of God in order to do anything that you don’t absolutely have to do. That’s the best advice I can give. Even the Rabbis recognize the importance of the preservation of life as being above all laws except those pertaining to actual literal idolatry, sexual perversions and murder. But most of the Laws that we break are not in service to the lives of others – we break them because we are either ignorant of them or do not want to keep them or don’t yet understand how to keep them. Those are the laws that we need to focus on – the ones that we can do something about, not the ones that we can’t do anything about yet. I would never instruct anyone to break a Law, but I do tell people to work towards observance.

Shabbat Shalom brothers and sisters. Peace be upon your homes and your lives.