Episode 171: The Study Series 16—The Torah, the Sermons and the Problem with Epistles

Okay, starting something new! I am now webcamming the recording process, which results in a slightly longer version of the teaching with a bit more nonsense than the radio show sometimes. You can catch that here.

We’re almost done with genre studies, I promise, so next week will be it. But this time, we have to look at the differences between the Sermons that Yeshua/Jesus delivered and the letters to specific congregations written by Paul, Peter, James, and others. When we read a letter (aka epistle) as though it is a simple sermon, it can lead to some really bad problems. Maybe most importantly, how are we supposed to read the “law codes” in the Bible?

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Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I usually teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. But not right now, right now I am doing a series about how to not waste your time with bad study practices, bad resources, and just the general confusion that I faced when I started studying the Bible and was trying to figure out what to do and whose books I should read. Bottom line, I read a lot of nonsense and spent a ton of money on it. I am going to give you some basics on how to avoid a lot of the pitfalls, save money, maximize your time and effort, and get the most out of what you are doing.

My master book list can be found on my website theancientbridge.com here and I will add to it as needed. Scripture this week comes from the CSB, the Christian Standard Bible. We’re actually coming to the end of this series because next week we will talk about the Psalms and how they need to be treated and understood, and the week after that we will tackle the minefield of inerrancy. That’s a word that most people have an idea about and assume everyone else has the same definition when they absolutely don’t. I want to help you to have a conversation about it—a real conversation where everyone understands what everyone else is actually saying when they claim that the Bible is inerrant. Then we are going to do a month of Psalms and a month of Matthew and we will switch back and forth until we run out of one or the other. That will probably take me the rest of my life but as the Psalms are a reflection of our relationship with the divine and one another and the Gospel of Matthew is the story of Yeshua/Jesus as the greater Moses, I think they will mesh well together.

So, let’s start out with the basics this week. A sermon, like the Sermon on the Mount, is generally given in public and has to do with teaching right behavior or expounding on Scripture in such a way that it directs the life and understanding of the audience. A sermon, at its heart, is guidance. A sermon can be angry, concerned, compassionate, a warning, or encouraging. The Bible is full of sermons not only from Jesus, Paul, and James but also Moses and the Prophets. In fact, Deuteronomy is the absolute, undisputed longest sermon in the entire Bible. Nothing else even comes close. Moses, before his death, delivers his “swan song” (for lack of a better term). It’s his last chance to tell Israel what they will need to know in his absence. All the warnings, encouragement, reality checks, and last-minute wisdom he can muster up. It’s almost like the telling-off one gets for stepping on the lawn of a grumpy, elderly man. Okay, not that bad. Moses wasn’t just venting—it was given for the purpose of attempting to save the nation (he had all but founded) from the sins that he knew were coming in the future once they were fat, happy, wealthy, and comfortable. He knew that they would forget the Lord because they had done so repeatedly even with the Tabernacle and the cloud of smoke/fire in their midst for forty years. If that wasn’t a deterrent, then what on earth would be?

Moses didn’t direct his sermon to a small group but to an entire nation. Yeshua preached to large groups, even groups of thousands, but they had chosen to hear Him whereas Moses spoke to absolutely everyone, from youngest to eldest. The content of their preaching was also very different—no “thus saith the Lord” with Yeshua, who instead preached His sermons by His own authority. Moses spoke the oracles of God as a mediator and not as a source, as Yeshua did. Moses spoke mainly in terms of wisdom sayings, attempting to teach the people basic principles of right-ruling within the ancient Near Eastern setting in which they lived. Moses’s guidance was far from exhaustive and covered very little as far as the variety of situations people found themselves in. Yeshua, on the other hand, raised the bar exponentially and yet, He was talking to an audience who were not part of the New Creation existence and so His words must have seemed very “pie in the sky.” Paul, Peter, James, and the others, when they wrote sermons, it was to an entirely different audience who did have the Torah increasingly written on their hearts. How we read their sermons changes based on whom they preached to, when, and why. Sermons aren’t just given in a vacuum, they come from a place of need. Moses spoke to a once mixed multitude who, over the course of forty years in the wilderness, had become a more uniform and cohesive people than they had been at first where former outsiders had undoubtedly intermarried with the children of Israel. The prophets gave sermons on the necessity of repentance in the face of gross national idolatry as they were warned of imminent exile from the Land if the people failed to respond properly. Yeshua spoke to an oppressed population living in their own land but under the rule of the last in a series of pagan empires. Unlike the well and miraculously-fed audience of Moses, and the far too comfortable audience of the prophets, Yeshua preached to a downtrodden, defeated, impoverished, and hungry excuse for a people group. Paul, Peter, James, and the others preached to groups of Jews, Gentiles, and mixtures of the two. Sometimes the material was generic and suitable to be read to absolutely anyone and at other times it was directed only toward certain groups or people going through certain things and who were in need of guidance. Certainly, advice to former pagans is going to look a lot different than advice to those who were born into observant Jewish families, and diaspora groups would have different concerns from Jerusalem-based congregations. Differences in audience can often illuminate the meaning of what has been written. For example, I will say entirely different things when teaching adults than I would when teaching children—not always but often. Knowing whether you are listening to Character in Context or Context for Kids will change the way you hear or read what I am saying. The advice I give to kids and adults is different because of differences in life experience and circumstances. Same exact things with the Sermons and Correspondences in the Bible.

The message of Romans concerning the “weak and the strong” changes radically depending on whether you assign strength and/or weakness to the Roman Jews or the Roman Gentiles. It is important to know that the letter to the Galatians was written to Gentile converts, and that Corinth was a Roman Colony and not Greek. Although the message of the fruit of the spirit and the works of the flesh work exactly the same way no matter who you are, what are we to do with instructions telling people not to keep honoring special days? And what sense do some of the instructions Moses gave in the wilderness even make outside of the culture of the ancient Near East or within a non-Temple centric society?

Sermons tend to be far more applicable to generic or mixed audiences than the correspondence we find in epistles and by correspondence I mean the portions of the writings (especially of Paul) which seem to come out of nowhere and counteract things he has ruled in other letters. It would seem, from reading what he writes about women that one day he is all gung-ho about allowing women to lead without restrictions in the congregations, and then all of a sudden in Ephesus they can’t even ask questions. If we fail to recognize the parts of Paul’s writings that are likely answers to specific questions he has been asked by specific congregations dealing with unique troubles, and we attempt to read the entire epistle as a generic, face-value sermon, we do get into all sorts of problems with consistency. But, you know, that’s what happens when we read someone else’s mail! Here’s an example I have used a lot in the past to illustrate this problem:

Dear Sam,

Well it was great hearing from you again, and I can’t wait until we can come visit!  Seems like forever since we were in Liverpool, and the chips we had at that place downtown were just THE BEST!  I was so shocked to hear about Charlie in prison!  But then, not really much of a surprise once I thought about it – he was always awkward around the kids, wasn’t he?  Maybe he can get things turned around for the better.  Give me his address so I can send him a Bible, will you please?  We are praying for him. As for Violet, I agree that she should not be teaching men like that!  Let the men do it.  It would be entirely inappropriate for Violet to be a part of anything like that.  Her heart is in the right place, but she would be better off with the women and children.

Best Regards, Your brother Paul

Now honestly, I want your first impressions. Question #1: what country is Sam from, and what sort of food is Paul referring to? Question #2: what can you discern of Charlie’s character, and his past and present situation? Question #3: why doesn’t Paul approve of Violet teaching men? The answer to all three should be – “I have no idea, there is not enough information given.”  Now it would be easier if we had the letter that this was a response to.

Dear Paul,

How are ya’ll doing in Chicago?  Everyone here in Texas sure misses you–and Trudy down at the deli says she has a bag of those Takis all put aside for you. She still laughs about how much you loved them, like you’d never seen a Mexican chip before! You are not going to believe this, but remember Charlie the youth group leader? Well, come to find out–he hated it and was only in it to please his parents. So Greg got him started in prison ministry and he loves it! He has started a Bible drive and everything. I think he is going to make a big difference there! Here is the issue though, and I want your honest opinion. His sister Violet, well, you know what a heart of gold she has, and I never met anyone so trusting. Well, she wants to go in there teaching right alongside him. I’m against it because she’s always falling for some sob story and getting herself into deep trouble.  Now, if it were Pat, their mom, that would be one thing–that sister is tough as nails, but I think Violet is absolutely the worst possible candidate for men’s prison ministry. And this isn’t a white-collar facility, these are violent felons!  She has been offered a chance to teach at the local women’s shelter, which I think she would be great at, with her compassion–but for some reason she is always wanting to save guys who end up walking all over her.  I know she takes your advice really seriously, so can you please put in a good word?  

Thanks. – Sam

Now be honest. You probably thought or at least strongly suspected that Sam was from Britain, they were talking about french fries, that Charlie was in jail for child molestation, that the Bible was for his salvation, and that Paul was saying women shouldn’t teach men at all, but instead should stick to teaching women and children.  That’s because my fictitious Paul had no obligation to write detailed accounts of what questions he was answering – after all, he was writing to the person who asked the questions in the first place.   You filled in the blanks logically with details from your sphere of reference, just like we all naturally are inclined to do.  (And yes, there is a Liverpool in Texas). If that response letter had been taught in church by itself, what sort of doctrine could be built around it?  And just think of poor Charlie’s reputation, way worse than Thomas’.

Anyway, we have to be very careful with the epistles because they were sometimes sermons and were at other times letters and generally they were both at the same time. No one alive today was part of the original audience and as John Walton always says, the Bible was written for our benefit but it wasn’t written specifically with ourselves, our culture, or our modern rules of communication in mind. Nor should it have been as it would have died out as a needlessly ineffective and confusing book that wouldn’t have made sense to anyone until after the Enlightenment. The beauty of the Bible is that it said what it needed to say to the original audience and that is why it survived and not only that, but why it has changed the world.

One more thing I want to talk about, and this is a bit controversial but it is also gaining more and more scholarly acceptance in both Jewish and Christian circles. Namely, what do we make of the Torah? I am not talking about the narratives, of course, but the sections that most would call legal. For a law code, if we are going to be honest, it is utterly inadequate because it just doesn’t cover a lot of situations and there really isn’t a lot of clear guidance in it for specific problems or crimes. This is why the Talmud happened, in recognition of this fact. The Talmud is made up of two parts, produced at different points in time. The Mishna, compiled by 200 CE, contains the legal rulings of the Sanhedrin (the Supreme Court of Israel). It is reflective of case law, which is the law of the land based on former rulings. It’s a “this is how we do it based on such and such a case, like “Brown vs the Board of Education” which set the standard that considers State sponsored segregation to be a direct violation of the 14th amendment, which guarantees all citizens equal protections under the law. But, if we wanted to read what the different justices had to say and how they came to their conclusion, and what arguments are and are not considered authoritative, then we would look at the transcripts of the deliberations—and that is a good way to look at the second half of the Talmud, the Gemara, which was compiled by 600 CE. And this is why you find messed up stuff in the Gemara which never saw the light of day as far as practice goes—stuff like the one Rabbi who was shot down for saying that it is only sex between adult males that is forbidden by Lev 18:22 and that pedophilia is okay. No one agreed with him, but it is included in there as shot down just in case someone tries to make that argument again!

When the Greeks took over Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, they brought some really good things with them. The Rabbi/disciple relationship comes straight out of the Philosopher/disciple phenomena of ancient Greece. The way they used law codes instead of wisdom literature to guide judges, ensuring (or supposed to) fairer rulings than when things are simply left up to individual judges. Our own law codes come from the Greek system. And so do the rulings we see in the Talmud. Once a society becomes large enough and complicated enough, wisdom codes tend to become very problematic—and that’s what the instructions of the Torah represent wisdom codes. The “law codes” of Hammurabi, Lipit-Ishtar, the Hittites, and the surrounding ancient Near Eastern nations generally relied on wisdom sayings instead of law codes. Rulers would write of the decisions made during their reign that reflected righteousness and justice and those sayings were more guidelines and really not always hard and fast rules. I mean, even Yahweh breaks those guidelines on a regular basis because wisdom is situational and it cannot be legislated. Is all stick collecting prohibited on the Sabbath—no, wisdom understands that people have different reasons and different motivations. Doing it because you are trying to get ahead on the week’s work is entirely different from having a child suddenly take sick and needing to keep a blazing fire going to keep the child alive. Heck, everyone would be gathering sticks in that situation! I sure would!

Firstborn laws are routinely disregarded by God, who chooses whom He wants and when He wants. Boaz was able to marry Ruth because the ban on Moabites was a wisdom ruling and not a legal ruling—and David was only able to become King for that same reason. Wisdom rulings are about principles. In principle, the Israelites shouldn’t have intermarried with the Moabites, but in practice, sometimes it is the right thing to do. Speeding laws, on the other hand, do not recognize circumstances when it is okay to go 80mph in a school zone. And we are all okay with that, right? Was the sexual prohibition list of Lev 18 a legally binding and complete list of sex crimes one shouldn’t commit? Absolutely not, and many cults have exploited the lack of mention of children so as to say that sex with a child isn’t forbidden. A law code would have been amended to deal with that but a wisdom code tells us that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is forbidden and all the examples are just driving that concept home. No one should have ever gone looking for exceptions.

The presence of polygyny (multiple wives) is acknowledged as a reality and controlled but never legislated as good or even okay. The wisdom of Torah as a whole shows polygyny to be a hot mess and not an ideal. But if we are misusing Torah as a law code, we are free to do whatever isn’t expressly prohibited as long as we can argue that it wouldn’t bother us if it happened to us. Which is nothing but a hypothetical argument of convenience. Wisdom demands more of us, and so the wisdom codes of Torah were written down for the benefit of those who had proven themselves worthy and capable of judging their neighbors. The wisdom codes of the Torah didn’t lock the judges in (usually) but gave them principles from which to derive situational wisdom. That’s what we see with Solomon, as he asked for wisdom and not a comprehensive understanding of all the do’s and don’ts. Law codes don’t allow wisdom. Juries aren’t supposed to allow themselves to be compromised by extenuating circumstances. The way we view laws in the modern world, therefore, doesn’t represent the world of the Torah at all. A fantastic book on this is John Walton’s The Lost World of Torah (affiliate link). A community can run according to wisdom rulings as long as the judges are impartial and honest and merciful to all parties involved. But a nation can’t. That’s why we had some states absolutely outlawing slavery from the start (Vermont) and other states created for the express purpose of being slave states (Missouri). It’s why hate crimes had to be made federal crimes so that local law enforcement could no longer prosecute or legally ignore lynchings according to their own sensibilities. The Emmet Till lynching is a good example of why that sort of law was needed and long overdue because, without it, a community can decide that murder is okay as long as everyone approves but that whistling at a white woman is grounds for state-sanctioned mob violence.

This is why the greatest two commandments aren’t “Do not murder” and “Do not—whatever” and instead are the commands to love God and neighbor. Because when we are honest, wisdom doesn’t allow us to harm a neighbor and therefore pretty much covers everything and anything oppressive and cruel and unfair. It is only when we decide to treat the Torah like a modern comprehensive law code that we look to it to see how we can and cannot legally get away with violating the command to love others. But in the first century, as we see from the teachings of Yeshua, that’s exactly what they were doing. The Hillel Pharisees were endorsing “divorce your wife for any cause” while the Shammaite Pharisees were sticking to the wisdom of the code and saying, “Dudes, it’s obvious that it is only allowed for major transgression.” The Pharisees were marrying their nieces because there was no specific prohibition, which is super gross, and the Qumran community was outraged over it. So, when we read the Sermon on the Mount (coming full circle here), Yeshua was directly contradicting an interpretation of the Torah that is focused on using it to see what you can get away with. He took the wisdom of Torah to a whole other level that, frankly, the original audience couldn’t have dealt with. I mean, they had enough problems with the very few that they were given in the first place. Heck, they had problems with just the ten commandments.

Yeshua commanded that we be guided by wisdom, love of neighbor, and love of God and so His sermons weren’t just commentary on Torah, they were a restoration of Torah to the category of wisdom literature where to do certain things allowed by Torah loopholes becomes unthinkable. Why would any man who loves his wife give her a rival and her children rivals and divide family resources? It becomes a non-option. Why would someone sin against their neighbor and then go apologize to God about it and think that’s enough? Why would a person governed by love and self-sacrifice consider it okay to look at other people as sexual objects, and especially when we know how many men and women involved in the porn industry are trafficked and abused? Who would come up with a complicated set of rules for when it is okay to break an oath? And where is the wisdom or shalom (peace and wholeness) in a world where revenge is the norm and there is no forgiveness? Jesus is the fulfillment of the Torah not because He struck it down but because He brought it back to its beginnings as wisdom—and living by wisdom is a lot harder than living by a law code. Living by wisdom is more restrictive and requires mature character. This is why we actually prefer law codes and have tried to force Torah into that sort of box.

Next week, we are going to talk about the Psalms and the categories that help us read them as intended. See you then.



Episode 7: Eunuchs in the Kingdom–What Messiah had to say about divorce and being single

Why on earth did Yeshua/Jesus teach about eunuchs after denouncing the Hillelite ruling on divorce (which will be a big part of this teaching)? Maybe a better question is–would He approve of our tendencies to treat single believers like they are second class citizens, or diseased and in need of a cure? Hold on to your hats, this one will get a bit controversial as we look into the marriage controversies during the first-century.

Here’s the link to that article I talked about: https://foreverymom.com/marriage/enough-enough-church-stop-enabling-abusive-men-gary-thomas/

Here is my very rough transcript–please forgive any grammar and spelling 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 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.

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.

I was recently studying Matthew Chapter 20 and came across Yeshua’s/Jesus’s “Eunuch teaching” tacked on at the end of His rebuke of Hillel’s divorce for “any cause” ruling.

3 And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” 4 He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 5 and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?6 So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” 7 They said to him, “Why then did Moses command one to give a certificate of divorce and to send her away?”8 He said to them, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another, commits adultery.”10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.” 11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

Although the focus of this teaching today is the very culturally scandalous idea that a person can be single and serve God (something that is still strangely looked down on in many circles today), we can’t really do that without a bit of background about the situation on the ground in the first century.

There were two factions of Pharisees—the schools of Hillel and Shammai, both founded in the first century BCE, so before the common era. Shammai was far stricter than Hillel in every sense, whereas Hillel was generally more liberal. Quite often, we see Yeshua siding with the more liberal House of Hillel when questions are raised—with one notable exception.

Gittin 90a, based on Gittin Chap 9, Mishnah 10 (Get meaning the divorce documents)

MISHNA: Beit Shammai say: A man may not divorce his wife unless he finds out about her having engaged in a matter of forbidden sexual intercourse [devar erva], i.e., she committed adultery or is suspected of doing so, as it is stated: “Because he has found some unseemly matter [ervat davar] in her, and he writes her a scroll of severance” (Deuteronomy 24:1).

ובית הלל אומרים אפילו הקדיחה תבשילו שנאמר כי מצא בה ערות דבר

And Beit Hillel say: He may divorce her even due to a minor issue, e.g., because she burned or over-salted his dish, as it is stated: “Because he has found some unseemly matter in her,” meaning that he found any type of shortcoming in her.

ר’ עקיבא אומר אפי’ מצא אחרת נאה הימנה שנאמר (דברים כד, א) והיה אם לא תמצא חן בעיניו:

Rabbi Akiva says: He may divorce her even if he found another woman who is better looking than her and wishes to marry her, as it is stated in that verse: “And it comes to pass, if she finds no favor in his eyes” (Deuteronomy 24:1).

So, we see this terrible problem going on during the lifetime of Yeshua, and after, since the Hillel ruling is the official Halakah (although I am not aware of anyone who practices this heartless ruling today). Men felt that God, through Moses, gave them the right to divorce not just for sexual infidelity, but for “any cause.” A woman could be dumped for absolutely any reason—from actual wrongdoing to simply aging. Such a ruling strikes at the heart of God’s continual cry through the prophets against oppression.

Their question is, “Is it lawful for us to leave our wives for any cause?” They are concerned with legalism, what do they have the legal right to do as opposed to what they should do. The Deuteronomy 24 case law, let’s look at that real quick here:

“Suppose a man takes a wife and marries her. Now if she doesn’t find favor in his eyes because he has found something indecent in her, he is to write her a certificate of divorce, hand it to her and send her out from his house. 2 When she leaves his house, she may go and become another man’s wife. 3 Now suppose the second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, and he hands it to her and she leaves his house—or suppose the second husband who took her to be his wife dies. 4 Then her former husband, who sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled—for that would be detestable before Adonai. You are not to bring guilt on the land that Adonai your God is giving you as an inheritance.”

Whereas Hellenized Judaism had come to twist and turn Torah into some pretty creative laws, they often ignored the plain meaning of passages—namely that this was not giving permission for a man to divorce, but instead discussing what a man was required to do IF he divorced a woman who was “indecent.” The woman clearly needs to be indecent, and it needs to have been found in her, not merely suspected. So, IF a man finds himself in this situation, and IF he chooses to divorce her, this is what he must do—send her out with a certificate of divorce leaving her free to remarry—and this is what he must never do—namely, remarry her after she has had sexual relations with a new husband because that specifically makes her forbidden to him (the meaning of defiled, which sounds worse than it is). But the school of Hillel was taking the matter entirely out of context in order to make literally anything a matter of indecency so that they could obtain younger, prettier, more socially advantageous wives who just might be better cooks, or whatever…

Yeshua pointed out to them that they were looking at Torah entirely wrong (siding with Shammai here) and that Moses didn’t give them his blessing to divorce (nor did God), but gave them permission. Very different. Divorce wasn’t God’s goal—even if it did become the goal of the Hillelites. Moses gave men an out if their wives were promiscuous, and he also gave the women the right to be tested by the Sotah, so men couldn’t just accuse without hardcore evidence. In reality, the Torah makes divorce hard and removed it from the ANE whims of men. That was forgotten in the first century.  But this was the world that the disciples and all these men had grown up in. To them, it was unthinkable that there should be any restrictions on casual divorce. Josephus, as I have mentioned previously, was a priest, a Pharisee—and married four times. Think about this the next time you assume that the Samaritan woman at the well was a loose woman. Women were so easily divorced and cast aside, that it was shameful. If the husband did not desire to return the ketubah money received from her father, he might just send her away without a Get, leaving her without much alternative to shacking up with some guy willing to feed her.

So, Yeshua points out that this is not a matter of law at all, but permission in a worst-case scenario. The Hillelites were trying to “proof-text”—a form of cherry-picking where one uses Scripture not to find out what is true and good, but in order to justify what they wanted to do. We can see how shocked the disciples were to hear that this wasn’t acceptable:

10 The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry.”

Translated: “Dude, if we have to remain married to the same gal forever as long as she is faithful, it’s just better not to marry anyone.

How cavalier! First-century Israel was only marginally monogamous in all too many cases. When one enters into marriage with an eye, the actual expectation beforehand, to getting out and getting a new partner whenever it gets boring or whatever, how is that any different than adultery? It is monogamy only in the loosest of terms—and really more like serial adultery. These guys had created a letter of the law type of system that gave them the illusion of holiness while taking up and discarding women at will. Yeshua was telling them that this made them, the guys, adulterers—married only in the loosest of terms and certainly not in God’s eyes, except to their first wives with whom they had dealt cruelly and falsely.

As Yeshua said, divorce is permitted, but it is not a goal, nor is it to be seen as a way to satisfy worldly desires. We don’t have time to talk about it, but I recently read an amazing article called “Dear Church: It’s time to stop enabling abusive men” by a man named Gary Thomas about one of the forms of “hardness of heart” we humans inflict upon another, and a good reason for why divorce is permitted in the Torah.

But I said today’s teaching was really about something else so here goes:

11 But he said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”

So, what is a eunuch? A Eunuch can take one of two forms in antiquity. (1) Men might be born without the ability to reproduce. Perhaps their testicles never descend, or they are deformed in this way or that. To serve as a priest was forbidden by men with crushed testicles because physical perfection was required before the altar, even though they could eat of all the holy tithes set aside for priests. Hermaphrodites were not unknown and are even discussed in the Mishnah. They would not marry. (2) of course, court officials in the ancient world and especially those in contact with royal women, were actually made eunuchs, meaning their testicles were removed. There is a chance that Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were eunuchs, but it is only a theory based on 2 Kings 20:18 and Is 39:7. Certainly, we see eunuchs mentioned often in the book of Esther. Jezebel had eunuchs in her service (2 Kings 9).

It isn’t until we get to Is 56 that we see eunuchs being spoken of as assets in the Kingdom

56 This is what the Lord says: “Maintain justice and do what is right, for my salvation is close at hand and my righteousness will soon be revealed. Blessed is the one who does this—the person who holds it fast, who keeps the Sabbath without desecrating it, and keeps their hands from doing any evil.” 3 Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.” And let no eunuch complain, “I am only a dry tree.” For this is what the Lord says: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant—to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.

So, Yeshua was not pulling this reference to eunuchs out of nowhere—He was, however, expanding the definition of the honored and accepted eunuch to include the single believer who was unmarried and therefore not reproducing—which was what was “wrong” in antiquity with being a eunuch. Yeshua flat out upended their world here, even if it isn’t obvious to us. Judaism has never embraced celibacy (well, except for within certain Essene groups—but not all). In fact, Jews considered it an eternal commandment, and not an option, to be fruitful and multiply and therefore considered marriage to be a commandment as well. So, to put a seal of approval on not marrying, not having children, saying you could serve God without all that—it was surprising. Certainly there were exceptions, like Anna who was widowed and serving in the Temple,  but in general, this was not something that would have been celebrated or acceptable.

And so why, with Yeshua being so clear here, and Paul echoing the sentiments to the Corinthians, that one can serve God without marriage and children, do we still treat single believers as though they have a disease that we need to cure? Instead of simply being another facet of the Body? An entirely legitimate facet differing only in marital status?

Let’s look at some words that have been used for the unmarried, not so long ago and even today in some cultures: spinster, old maid, perpetual bachelor. Obviously, the men have it better in this regard.

So why do married people perpetuate the myth that being with another person is always better than being alone when married people know darned well that it isn’t true. Yes, a great marriage is great, but there is no loneliness more terrible than having married just to marry and finding yourself in an entirely different type of loneliness. I hear from women all the time—just heard from a friend who was a widow yesterday, how the women in her family who are single, divorced, or widowed are so terrified of being alone that they chase after any available man. Regardless of suitability. Just so that they won’t be single, as though it is worse than being in a terrible relationship with a guy who isn’t relationship material.

Because, in the congregations of Messiah, it really does tend to be a married people club, just as it is, even more, a married people with children club. Being barren, I know what it is to always be on the outside when women start talking about pregnancy stories, birth stories, and breastfeeding adventures. I should imagine that being single in congregations can be exponentially worse. Especially when married ladies decide that their most important purpose in life is to come up with ways of setting up their single friends with whatever single guy they happen to know. It’s akin to admitting illness on social media and having everyone decide to diagnose you and offer you oftentimes questionable advice.

Here’s the hardcore, irrefutable fact. Women outnumber men in almost every single culture, and a lot of men are determined not to marry. Let’s up the ante—in congregations, women GREATLY outnumber the men. So, out of one side of our mouths, married women are telling their single friends that they need to get married and not be alone and have kids before their biological clock runs out (very questionable reasons for pursuing marriage, frankly, especially given the growing infertility rates). On the other hand, we are telling them not to be unequally yoked, when we can all see that there is a desperate shortage of male believers in congregations as it is. It’s the ultimate Catch-22 situation. You have to get married, but there aren’t enough men to go around, and especially not enough believing men. We drive them to internet relationships, and I have seen enough of them end in some really scary ways that I think we ladies ought to just mind our own business.

And don’t get me going about my sister in Africa. I have been hearing her woes for many years about how, even though she is a minister of the Gospel, hardworking and dedicated, all the married ladies (including her own mom) think she is somehow “less than” because she hasn’t fallen in love and gotten married. That’s really messed up when we stop and think about it. All her service to God is nothing compared to her marital status, and I am betting that a lot of the ladies judging her aren’t even happily married. Marriage should not be a status symbol or a measure of worth. Not among the Body of Messiah.

In Biblical times, a woman was guaranteed a marriage IF she came from an honorable family and her father could put up a dowry. You didn’t have to have another person fall in love with you, who just happened to be the same person you were also in love with. Love didn’t enter into it. Marriage was a contract between families, and that’s it. No romance. None of what we would consider love at all. Lucky if they knew and liked one another beforehand.

Being married isn’t a requirement, it isn’t always possible and therefore we need to stop judging people based on it. In some congregations, it comes pretty darned close to discrimination. No one should be judged or seen through any non-sinful facet of their lives. I personally have no clue on earth how I ended up married. Sure wasn’t based on merit, and still isn’t.

Let’s talk real quick about some unmarried brothers and sisters who make us all look bad in comparison.

Sam Alberry. Mother Theresa. Amy Carmichael. Corrie and Betsie ten Boom. Gladys Aylward. Yeshua. Paul. Jeremiah. CS Lewis (until he was 58 years old)

These beautiful saints were/are single and did/do incredible works for the Kingdom BECAUSE they were/are able to devote themselves fully to God.

An unmarried believer isn’t a single or divorced person who happens to be a believer, but instead, a believer who just happens to be single or divorced. We ought to define them by the weightier matter and not the lesser. They aren’t our personal projects to hitch up, as though a full and beautiful life can only be had in marriage, but co-laborers working in the service of the greatest and most fulfilling relationship of all. We need to include them as members of our family, on equal footing, because they are.

In short, they don’t need to be fixed because they aren’t broken. We need to stop setting people up for disappointment and feeling like failures over this thing that is really outside anyone’s control. Personally, I am not married because of my inherent worth, but in spite of many, many, many deep flaws. I am not as wonderful as a multitude of single people. Yeshua is very clear—no one has to marry. It isn’t a requirement for Kingdom legitimacy or for happiness, or for true spiritual fruitfulness and it certainly isn’t a litmus test for worth. It can’t possibly be! Everyone out there has a true soulmate, and it is our Savior, period. If we find a human who comes in second, great. Yeshua isn’t some sort of platitude or consolation prize—and shame on us if we see the divine relationship as somehow “less than” and our single brothers and sisters as somehow broken, or charity cases—when they are neither. We need to accept them as who they are—and great googly moogly, invite them over to dinner just as we would another married couple, without trying to set them up with someone. They deserve the opportunity to be seen as what they are, brothers and sisters in Messiah who aren’t just sociological experiments for wannabe matchmakers. Right? Of course, right.



Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Week 3

This week I spoke about something near and dear to my heart, namely the very destructive doctrine that says “Unless you are keeping all of the commandments, your prayers aren’t getting heard.” We know from Scripture that this is patently untrue, yet this heartless doctrine from one cherry-picked verse has had some unintended consequences. We also explored Messiah’s troublesome disciples, name it /claim it theology and the devastating impact on the special needs community, a defense of Paul, and the dangers of becoming obsessed with Torah study to the exclusion of Yeshua/Jesus. On a personal note, I shared a story of heartbreak from nineteen years ago.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 15–Gal 3:5

Are our prayers really an abomination if we don’t keep every single commandment?

So then, the One who gives you the Ruach and works miracles among you—does He do it because of your deeds based on Torah or your hearing based on trust and faithfulness? (Gal 3:5, TLV)

There is an alarming teaching out there in some circles that misrepresents God’s character based on a misunderstanding of a proverb:

If one turns away his ear from hearing the law, even his prayer is an abomination. (Pro 28:9, ESV)

The heart of the teaching is this–that anyone who doesn’t obey any one of the commandments is “turning away his ear from hearing the law” and that their prayers are not heard by God and so any healings or whatever that they receive are not from God. This is a really dangerous doctrine, for a number of reasons.

One, there is a big difference between someone who turns their ear away from hearing God’s commandments, and someone who in the integrity of their heart has been trained to see some of the commandments as no longer for today. In such a person’s mind, they are not breaking any commandments. Their conscience is clear. If they are guilty of anything, it is being blinded in an area–as are we all if we want to be honest.

Two, none of us are keeping all of God’s commandments. If you have no parapet all the way around your roof–are your prayers an abomination? If you have a toilet in your home instead of walking outside the camp, shovel in hand, are your prayers an abomination? If brother in laws aren’t marrying their childless dead brother’s wife? If all males don’t go to Jerusalem three times a year…you get the drift. We can come up with reasons why we don’t do those things–valid reasons in our day and age–but are those reasons any more valid than the reason of people actually not being aware that they are breaking a commandment? We have reasoned away keeping a law, so are we any different than anyone else? Why do we give ourselves a big fat pass while condemning others?

Three, in Matthew 12, we see Messiah working a great miracle of delivering the mute and deaf man from demonic torment. Being unable to deny the miracle, the Pharisees start questioning the source of the deliverance. They say it isn’t by the power of God that Yeshua performed His miracle, but by the power of Beelzebul (the KJV mistranslates this as Beelzebub based on their Latin source material, completely bypassing a really interesting insult), and Yeshua immediately rebukes them and warns about the dangers of blaspheming (slandering) the Holy Spirit. In an attempt to say, “Sure, he performed a miracle, but not authorized by the Spirit of God,” they found themselves attributing a great sign to hasatan, the adversary, instead.

This is the dangerous ground we walk when we limit the love and generosity of God towards His people through legalistic interpretations of the Word, especially any single cherry-picked verse and especially a proverb when many of them directly contradict one another (ie. should we rebuke a fool or not?). Taking one proverb which applied to a generation who were raised with God’s laws as their constitution, the very fabric of their society, and even then only to people who knew and were able to culturally keep every aspect of the commandments and willfully refused to do so and then applying that to our generation–we leave ourselves literally “without a prayer” whenever we fail to keep even a single commandment. If their failure to keep a commandment is to be equated with turning their ears away from hearing the law, then how much less without excuse are we who claim to be guides to the blind and yet are transgressors ourselves?

“Oh, when we do it, it is okay because…” Oh really? That’s some conveniently selective mercy we are preaching there…

Truth is, that God is merciful and hears our prayers regardless of our current state of blindness. As He heard the prayers of David who had a teraph (idol) in his bedroom (I Sam 19:13) big enough to masquerade as a man in bed, so He hears our prayers when we, through blindness, ignorance or cultural accommodations, do not keep every single one of the commandments. We have to remember the goodness that God has generously poured out on ourselves time and time again–do we attribute the miracles in our own lives to Beelzebul? Or just those performed in the lives of others? We are none of us Torah-observant, not one of us. Although we might keep a few more commandments than someone else, or just different ones than they do, we must not fool ourselves because we do turn a blind eye to those commandments that are inconvenient or impossible, or even illegal to perform in our day and age.

This is where the “trust and faithfulness” part of Gal 3:5 comes in. If we interpret Proverbs 28:9 as some do, then none of us are receiving miracles, and deliverances in response to prayer from God. Not one of us. We have all turned aside for one reason or another. We have to trust in God’s goodness despite this and credit Him when goodness comes to us. If we do not, then we run the risk of attributing God’s merciful works in our lives to the evil one. Do we dare even go there after the Savior’s warning to the Pharisees who were nitpicking Him while they had their own workarounds that prevented them from keeping all of God’s commandments?

Let’s not forget the words of Yeshua to the man He healed at the Bethsaida pool:

Afterward, Jesus found the man at the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well. Stop sinning, or something worse may happen to you.” (John 5:14, BSB)

God hears the prayers of sinners. God works miracles for sinners. Good thing too, or He would be too disgusted to turn His ear to our prayers with as ridiculous, unmerciful, ungrateful and presumptuous as we are. Ungrateful and presumptuous? Yes, of course, what else should we call it when we ignore the clear warning of Gal 3:5 and attribute our miracles received to our observance of the commandments–and in so doing make them earned rewards instead of gifts bestowed upon our terminally unworthy selves.

And that is why we can trust Him–because He is bigger than the legalistic misinterpretation of a proverb.

 

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 16–Ro 8:17

Did you ever notice that Yeshua’s/Jesus’s disciples were all too often at odds with Him?

I was rereading Richard Horsley’s Jesus and Empire and he made that comment, about how it was a consistent theme of the Gospels. It really struck me, that Yeshua was teaching and leading a bunch of men who were at cross-purposes with Him.

They wanted power and authority, while He wanted them to be servants.

They wanted to call down fire from heaven against those who rejected them, while He came to save those very people.

They didn’t want Him to die, while that was why He came.

They believed they were following Him, but in some ways all they were doing was listening to His teachings and traveling with Him. They really didn’t get it. They thought they were following the Lion of Judah who would physically conquer the enemies of Israel and return the Kingdom to them–and they thought they would have places of authority and honor, even over one another. They wanted to nuke the Samaritans for refusing to receive them. They didn’t want it all to end in intra-Jewish bloodshed before Yeshua could amass a peasant revolt, finally overturning Roman rule and ending the exile that kept them as virtual slaves within their own borders. They wanted the Lion who destroys, while He came as the suffering Lamb.

They honestly thought they were acting in His best interests, when they were actually at cross-purposes with Him–and acting in their own flesh. It was their own interests that they pursued, their own future positions of power that they were jockeying for, and their own hatred that they were nursing.

And they could heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and deliver people from demonic bondage (Matt 10:8)

I want that to really sink in. They had signs and wonders at their disposal, and the message of the Kingdom, but they weren’t living it. They still weren’t getting it, however much they preached it.

After His resurrection, in Matthew 28:9 and Acts 1:8, He told them to preach to the ends of the earth–specifically told them to teach the nations (the Gentiles) but it took persecution at home by the hand of Saul (later Paul) to even get them to leave Jerusalem. And this was after the big outpouring of the Spirit (as opposed to the minor outpouring they received that gave them the authority to work miracles). Even after Peter’s wake-up call, he still drew back from table fellowship with the Gentile converts in Galatia. So did Barnabus.

So here’s the point.

Are we also at odds with our Savior? If they, of all people, were so clueless before and after the resurrection, can we afford to be so sure of ourselves?

Here’s the other point.

Imagine the patience required to put up with all of this nonsense from all of us. We still want the Lion of Judah, right now, but we are still living in the times of the Lamb of God, who suffered and is also calling us to suffering.

And if children, also heirs—heirs of God and joint-heirs with Messiah—if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him. (Ro 8:17, TLV)

Staggering.

 

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 18–Eph 3:12

There is a huge difference between “naming and claiming” and humbly praying with hope in our hearts. We need to come to see prayer as an opportunity.

…in (Messiah) whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. (Eph 3:12, ESV)

I want to hit this again since people have been asking questions lately. As many special needs parents are prone to do, and indeed people in crisis situations in general, over the years I had grown very cynical in my prayers, despite having seen miracles in my life. It is a terrible burden to be a believer in a world where sickness and infirmity is regarded by the perennially healthy automatically as a curse, or a sign of unresolved sin, or some other such nonsense. There are people around whom it is not safe to partake in the sufferings of Christ that we hear so much about.

They tell us that if we had enough faith, we could cure our kids–or ourselves, through prayer and so we pray and pray and pray. Believe me, almost no one prays like the mom of a disabled child. Not praying isn’t the problem! Nor is our unresolved sin, or else prostitutes would never give birth to healthy children, right? But folks don’t really think it through, and so parents who are already exhausted and heartbroken get to feel humiliated by certain elements in the Body as well. A true case of adding insult to injury, and the antithesis of the compassion and encouragement that is supposed to flow to us through the sufferings of Messiah.

…who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. (2 Cor 1:4-5, ESV)

So anyway, we who are already in a sense afflicted have to endure treatment that causes us, quite without our awareness, to become cynical and bitter in prayer. Cynical because we can no longer bear to hope day by day only to have our hopes crushed, and bitter because we have searched high and low for sin, and we have done everything we were told would work–generally by people who suffer no such afflictions themselves and are just passing on what they have heard. They live believing that their health is proof of their goodness when in reality their health is quite possibly a test of compassion and gratitude that they are failing miserably.

When God showed me my cynicism and bitterness in prayer, I was floored. I hadn’t always been that way, but false and presumptuous expectations had made me into this person who prayed without hope, out of a sense of obligation, because I felt I needed to pray in order to be a good mom even though I was overcome with the grief that my prayers on behalf of my beloved son seemed to go unanswered (in the affirmative) day after day after day.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life. (Pro 13:12, ESV)

That verse is the reason why special needs families (whether due to disability or chronic illness) know both lows and highs that most people cannot imagine. No parent knows happiness like the parent of a child who has been tested cancer free, or (like me) has seen their child walk, run, and skip who was never supposed to be able to stand without leg braces or any number of other huge victories that are just normal facts of life for most.

But when the Spirit impressed upon me the truth of what my prayers had slowly become over so many years, namely bitter and cynical, there was also relief and rescue. I finally came to understand prayer.

Prayer is not what the prosperity preachers and their disciples teach–namely an opportunity to claim blessings that we feel as though we deserve (when clearly we don’t even deserve eternal life but are getting that anyway through the goodness of Yeshua/Jesus). Prayer is an opportunity.

I want to repeat that. Prayer is an opportunity. An astounding opportunity. We live in a world where the lost greatly outnumber the saved. Less than a third of humanity knows and has accepted the Gospel of the Kingdom through the testimony of our Savior. The prayers of the lost towards their gods, our God may hear them but He doesn’t actively turn His ear to those prayers. We are different, whether we really realize it or not.

Yeshua took us from people praying in a sort of random way to who knows what and who, to people with access to the throne of the One True God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. We have access to the throne of the King of the Universe who owes us nothing, and from whom everything is an unearned and undeserved gift, even each breath. Yet, Yeshua saved us through our belief of the most insane story ever told. We actually believed that the Creator of the universe would send His own beloved Divine Son, with Him from before the Creation of the world to live among us, showing His own character when we really weren’t getting it–to die on our behalf so that we wouldn’t have to face permanent death separated from Him. That’s an insane story, and would require us to believe in an impossible sort of love that is just beyond our comprehension.

But that insane story also needs to come with an awareness that we have already been given everything that we never deserved–the world to come aka eternal life. Anything else is a bountiful gift, relatively nothing in comparison. We need to start praying with that understanding, that we have already had our cups filled to overflowing, no matter how badly damaged we are, or our loved ones are. We want more because we love them and ourselves, we do, but we err when we listen to those who equate receiving divine healing and general good health with automatically having God’s particular favor.

Are we really to believe that God has no regard for people with Down Syndrome or Cerebral Palsy, but only for those born healthy? Yeshua told us that we would be judged based upon how we treat such people–sounds like they are specially beloved to me (Matt 25:31-46). And it sounds like the rest of us are the ones being judged, and not them.

That our prayers are heard at all is a miracle, that we have access to even be heard in such a place. That we, who have been given so much, are given permission through our faith in Yeshua, to ask for even more. It’s mind-boggling. That’s why we have hope–not because we are promised what we are asking for, but because we have been given permission and even encouragement to ask. Being able to ask gives us hope.

Think of a King behind insurmountable walls with no gates. He has made himself completely inaccessible, except to those born inside the walls. When Yeshua died for those of us outside of the Covenant, bringing us into the Covenant, He made the outsiders insiders, and blew a hole in the impenetrable wall. Now we can come in and have access to ask for the fulfillment of our righteous desires–all we had to do was enter by the way He made. Scaling the wall or trying to enter illegally would never have gained us the ear of the King–but when the Son lets you in, you get heard.

It’s as though someone would come to us saying, “I know and love your son..” –wouldn’t they have our attention?

That doesn’t mean we receive every petition, or even most of them, but it does mean that we (unlike most of the world) get the opportunity to ask. And so we can hope that we will get what we ask for, someday, instead of having to live in despair. But every new day is a chance to petition the King anew, hoping that today will be the day.

 

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 19–the Epistles

In defense of our brother Paul.

We’ve been reading Paul primarily for the wrong reasons. It is a mistake to read Paul only to prove the Law is done away with. It is also wrong to read Paul only to prove the Law is still in effect. It is also wrong to read Paul only to focus on conquering and understanding the confusing passages.

So how should the overwhelming majority of us read Paul? We should approach him as a Jewish brother in Messiah who went out into the world of pagan gentiles and had to diligently teach them to live Biblically, how to love one another in radical new ways, and how to live faithfully by new standards that were almost completely at odds with everything they had always known.

If we read Paul in that way, we will become better conformed to the image of Messiah, as his writings are incredibly damaging to our flesh and if anyone is entirely comfortable about who they are and how they behave towards others while reading him, they aren’t looking hard enough.

Paul, unlike the other disciples, knew that you could keep all the laws according to even the strictest standards and still be deplorable on the inside–and that it would manifest itself on the outside sooner or later. As such, he knew the dangers of leading the former pagans into a solely works based system of observance. He had to teach them how to be God-fearing not only on the outside but on the inside.

If we will allow it, he will also teach us as well. But if we attack Paul’s writings as though they are an obstacle or a tool to promote any other agenda than how to become radically loving image-bearers, then we are really missing what is most valuable about Paul.

I guess I would summarize it like this–if we are using Paul to justify ourselves, if we are using any part of the Bible for self-justification, then I think our focus is off. We shouldn’t even have a focus of living defensively like that, as long as our consciences are clear. Paul is there to teach us how to be better ambassadors of our King, not how to be right in an argument, or look clever, or to beat in someone else’s brains with what we think we have figured out.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 20

This is my saddest day of the year. It is always really hard for me. My first baby was due 19 years ago today, but I spent it mourning the loss of my third baby a few days earlier.

This was also the day I was baptized by the Holy Spirit, right there in my room as I was insane with grief. I imagine God saved my life that day. I laid on the floor, just inconsolable, having been a Christian for just barely over a year. I wanted to die. I felt like a murderer, like my body was killing my babies. Not on purpose, of course, but I felt like I had failed my precious little ones. Everything was supposed to be so simple. I didn’t know that my womb was misshapen, that I didn’t make more than a few days worth of pregnancy hormones a month, and that I had a scoliosis centered around the vertebrae that housed the nerves that connected my spine to my reproductive system. But even with correcting what we could, it would never be enough in the future to save any of my other pregnancies.

I laid there on the floor. Near suicidal. Wanting to die more than I wanted anything other than my children. I choked out the most difficult prayer of my life.

“God, if it is not Your will for me to be a mother, I can accept it, but I have to know or I will die. I am dying.”

It was then that I felt the Holy Spirit come down on me in power and I prophesied. There would be children, but never of my own body. I still mourned, but I lived. I had hope, even in the depths of my grief.

My beloved sons whom we adopted will be 18 in March, and I wouldn’t trade them for the world. I would die a thousand deaths for them. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t miss the babies that I never held. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t real, or that I didn’t love them. I still feel the loss to this day and probably always will. I love them, I loved them all from the moment I realized I was pregnant–and I would have given my own life if even one of them could have survived. Been thinking about this all day but couldn’t even write it down until now.

Marinating in Messiah for a Year–Day 21

I think I know why some people become so obsessed with Torah to the neglect of Yeshua/Jesus. It’s actually the same reason why some people prefer Paul to Messiah. Please hold back any pitchfork and torch action and hear me out. I am very much preaching from my own experiences here.

I mean, anyone who has been around the HRM (Hebrew Roots Movement) or Messianic Judaism long enough will know someone who has ditched Messiah altogether in order to convert to Judaism, but I never really understood why it happened until I started focusing so much on the Gospels about nine months ago with deep studies into Matthew. (and this is not a forum for bashing the HRM, MJ, or the rest of Christianity in general)

I mean, at first people become engrossed in Torah because it is largely neglected in churches and we feel that we have been deprived of it and that explains the first couple of years where we behave in a largely insufferable fashion–but after that, many still don’t go back and revisit the Gospels with the same passion that they exhibit when they dive into and defend the Torah. We see a lot of problems with families where the kids just never get a glance at the Savior and what He actually taught, said and did, except to show where He can be found in the Torah, in order to justify the study of Torah–we forget how we benefitted from all those years focusing only on the One who gave His life so that we could have eternal life. As we didn’t have the Torah as foundation in order to build upon it with Yeshua, they don’t have the foundational knowledge of Yeshua to give the Torah meaning.

But anyway. Focusing on the Gospels and Epistles, I see how hard they are to read for anyone who has gotten used to the Torah for a very disturbing reason–Torah is doable whereas the standard set in the Gospels and Epistles is most decidedly not something we will ever achieve. The Gospels and Epistles, for all the hope imparted, leave us terminally humbled. And just when we were feeling so proud for having “figured out” this Torah stuff.

The way most people read Torah, as a series of regulations by which we show our allegiance to God, and which really aren’t that difficult to keep at first glance or at a plain text level, give us the idea that we really can be perfect if we just do X, Y, and Z. We can be better than others, who some now label as rebellious pagans, by virtue of the commandments. We can eat clean. We can practice keeping the Feasts. We can take the seventh day Sabbath off of work. Men can wear tassels. We can put a mezuzah up on the doorpost. Not really very difficult, as long as we have an amenable work schedule and enough vacation days. We can observe those rules even while being rotten, horrible, vermicious knids. We can look down on the people who aren’t observing those rules according to our standards. The Torah gives us a way to artificially be “better than” and “more obedient than” others who might be working their little tails off feeding the poor, doing missions work, and volunteering in hospitals and such.

Oh, but then Messiah had to come and torpedo our flimsy little boat of self-righteousness. “It’s good that you are doing those things, BUT…” oh those terrible buts, and our collective but has grown obese, “BUT…you’re missing it. You don’t have love and charity and justice flowing from your heart. You aren’t actually getting nekkid and committing adultery, but you are looking at that gal and thinking about “what if.” You divorced your wife when no indecency was found in her and used Moses as an excuse to do it. You don’t commit murder, but you sure love to slander and accuse people, and hate them in your heart.”

Yes, of course, we hate people. I can admit it. There was a time when I actually couldn’t admit it without justifying it with my very next breath. For many years, I was a believer AND I lusted. There were years where I cared not a fig for the lost–I only cared about bringing people over to my way of thinking, as though I could convert people who were already converted. Oh, and I could tell you worse than that, but you get the drift.

It isn’t Torah that challenged that type of thinking, except with a few vague references to loving your neighbor and circumcising the heart in the midst of all the do’s and don’ts that outline basic eternal standards of decent behavior towards one another. It’s Yeshua. It’s Jesus. Jesus tells us that conforming on the outside is a sham if we are still self-congratulating villains on the inside, and no one keeping the rules can stomach being labeled a villain. How like the Pharisees we are!

It’s the same reason why some of the people who believe that the commandments are no longer for today (even though mainstream Christians keep almost all that can still be kept, so they really don’t believe what they were taught that they believe–it’s just a mantra) like to skim through Paul and neglect the actual hard-core teachings of the Savior. Their version of Paul (as long as you skip those passages where he condemns gossip, slander, envy, jealousy, outbursts of anger, being divisive over side issues, etc) tells them exactly what a focus on Torah tells some people–that they are okay. There really isn’t that much of a difference between people who think they are okay because they keep rules from people who think they are okay because they believe in certain things without having to obey. Jesus was huge on the importance of obedience, but He stressed that it had to be inside and out, a heart change issue.

In other words, a person can change their behavior to externally keep the Torah laws, but only a changed person can hope to honor them inside and out, in spirit and in truth, in thought as well as action. No one wanted to hear that. Paul teaches the same thing, and no one who believes they can be perfect through eternal law-keeping wants to really hear that either.

And so, on the extremes of this situation, we get people falling away–on one hand, we have people falling away and denying Messiah, and on the other hand we have people falling away into gross sin and rebellion. Most people don’t go either route, but we still tend to be an unbalanced lot for the exact same reason–we don’t really want to hear the message of the Savior and Paul, that He died in order to remake us into new creations who could keep the commandments not as external rules, but as reflections of a changed heart.

But that’s exactly why Yeshua is the light of the world, shining light into the darkest and most deceptive place on earth–our heart.



Miracles, Dust-Shaking, and Paul: Voice in the Ancient World Video Series

At some point, I will follow this up with a teaching in writing but as for now you will have to make due with the two videos I put up on youtube.

Understanding the ancient dynamic of “voice” – namely, who had the authority to speak and where and when and what about — in the ancient world is a real paradigm buster. Tune in to learn about the purpose of miracles and why some prophets worked them and others did not. Why were miracles commonplace as long as the Church was an outsider organization? What changed? Exactly what was the function of miracles in the early church? You might be very surprised.

Part 1: Miracles and Voice in the Ancient World

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9AMhiVi3ps?feature=oembed&w=1080&h=608]

Part 2: Dust-shaking and Paul’s “bragging”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JvTc9iCMJQ?feature=oembed&w=1080&h=608]



Novus Homo: The ‘New Man’ of Rome with Respect to Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians

Novus homoFirst of all, credit where credit is due. I am not the person who noticed this. My friend and teacher Rico Cortes of Wisdom in Torah ministries contacted me on Tuesday morning and asked if I wanted some homework.  Unlike my 14 year old sons, I actually love to do homework and so I jumped at the chance. Rico said, “Homo Novus – research it and I want to know if you see what I see.” I told him that I would get to it after school, not knowing what to expect, and went off to make the boys breakfast. While they were eating I snooped around and within about 30 minutes my jaw was hanging down and I responded to him with something like, “Oh my gosh, this is phenomenal,” but no one had written about it. There are no scholarly papers linking this piece of historical context to the First Century Biblical writings that I could find. So what I am going to present to you is something that Rico noticed and did the original footwork on. I put my findings into writing and sent them to him so that he could look over what I was seeing and we found that we were in agreement. He went ahead and shared what I wrote to him on his facebook page, and will be incorporating it into a much larger teaching on his website www.wisdomintorah.com very soon – it is going to be mindblowing and so if you are not already a site member, you want to become a site member. Everything I write, I write because Rico instilled me with a passion for learning as much as humanly possible about the Word of our King and God. So without further ado, here is what Rico figured out and I wrote in witness of:

Roman leadership (administrative authority) during the years of the Early Republic was restricted to the Patrician class (aristocracy) and certainly at no time in the Roman Empire do we ever see a complete eradication of the caste system, although at times advancements were indeed made. The years of 494 to 287 BC brought a great civil struggle between the Patrician class and the Plebians (commoners) which did eventually result in the granting of rights of Plebians to run for public office.

Of course, running for office and achieving office were two entirely different things and it was a rare event for a commoner to break in to the world of Roman politics. It was not until the passage of Lex Gabinia in 139 BC that secret ballots allowed Roman citizens to vote their conscience instead of being required to vote for the candidate of their patron’s choice. Still, even in the wake of this new legislation only the rare plebian was able to climb his way to the top echelon of government power – the Consul, which gave a man automatic entry into the Senate.

Such men who achieved this were called novus homo – ‘new men’ – the first in their families to achieve Senatorial status.  There were two types of novus homo – the first came from well-connected equestrian (or greater) families and the second came from families on the outside – the aforementioned plebians. Here’s the catch, they were Senators (called ‘small senators’) but they weren’t in the ‘in crowd’ – the caste system that made it so hard for them to achieve success still held them back. They had the elected position, they had the recognition, they had the authority – but they were still treated like second class citizens for a few generations.

How does this relate to Paul and the Ephesians? Ephesians 2:11-22 details the problem going on throughout the mixed assemblies of Asia – a problem related to another caste system. In this case, the caste system was not Roman patrician vs Roman plebian, but Jewish believers (and nonbelievers) in Yeshua vs believing yet uncircumcised former gentiles. In city after city we see this same problem of a caste system between believers with a definite legal wall of separation between the groups. The edicts of Shammai had really solidified existing Jewish prejudice against Gentiles to the point that, even when said Gentiles lived an entirely Jewish life in obedience to Torah Law to the exclusion of all idolatrous practices, they were not considered to truly be Jews unless they underwent formal conversion. In essence, the problem facing first century converts was much the same as was faced by the novus homo of the Roman Senate. They had a place, but it was resented and sometimes even undermined by the existing aristocracy.

11 Wherefore remember, that ye being in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called the Circumcision in the flesh made by hands; 12 that at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world: 13 but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood of Christ. 14 For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; 15 having abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances; for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace; 16 and that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross, having slain the enmity thereby: 17 and came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh. 18 for through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father. 19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God; 20 and are built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief corner stone; 21 in whom all the building fitly framed together groweth unto an holy temple in the Lord: 22 in whom ye also are builded together for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Paul was a Roman citizen living among a population all too aware of the unjust Roman caste system – they would understand all too well the allusion that Paul was making to the political situation in Rome and to the difference between the equity of the Kingdom of Heaven under the great King YHVH and the Empire of Rome under the divine-pretender emperors. Gentile converts were being brought into the Kingdom in droves, but what status did they have? Were they regarded by God as johnny-come-lately’s, charity cases, or there merely to be a servant class to God’s chosen people – forever second best – a very distant second best? No, like any novus homo, they were chosen members of the upper echelon of humanity, not only full citizens of the Kingdom but on an equal level with the established jewry. What did that mean? It meant full authority, the same access to the Father through the mediatorship of Yeshua. Unlike the ‘new men’ elected as Consuls (and therefore automatically made members of the Senate), when they received election through Yeshua that middle wall of petition was broken down, and the man-made ordinances that set up a genetically based caste system was abolished because unlike Rome, God is no respecter of persons:

Acts 10 34 Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: 35 but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.

Here we see the precedent in Acts 10 – Cornelius and his family are righteous commandment keeping gentiles – ger tzadik – but they are excluded from the fullness of Jewish community life because Cornelius, as a Roman Centurian, is uncircumcised. When the Spirit falls on Cornelius’ entire family, it was an act over-ruling the ordinances of men – Cornelius was elected as a full citizen, and so was his entire family. Peter, realizing this, stays in his home and eats with his family. Peter, far from treating Cornelius like a Roman ‘new man’ who was grudgingly acknowledged but never accepted, embraces Cornelius’ family and shares the intimacy of table fellowship that would have been, up to this time, forbidden to them.

We see Paul fighting this same battle again and again, a battle against both his Jewish brethren who very much wanted to see and enforce things in terms of ‘them vs us’ and the Gentile converts who kept falling for it and assuming the Jews were correct. Yeshua, however, didn’t merely make ‘new men’ out of the Gentiles – the language is plain:

‘for to make in himself of twain one new man’

Yeshua made ‘new men’ of both Jews and Gentiles – it is through Him that we came to the Father. He preached to those who were near, and to those who were far off – holding each to the same standard, preaching the same message. We were called by the same message to the same life, the same rights and the same authority as believers – different parts of the Body with different functions according to His gifts to each man and yet all equal citizens, none above another.

 

Gifford, Paul Review of T. P. Wiseman’s New Men in the Roman Senate, Constellations Vol 2 No 2 (Winter 2011) pp 154-156

http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100240795

Gruen, Erich S, Review: New Men in the Roman Senate, 139 B.C.-14 A.D. by T. P. Wiseman The Classical Journal Vol. 69, No. 3 (Feb. – Mar., 1974), pp. 251-253

Unknown author, The Novus Homo: a study in politics and social mobility in ancient Rome

Wikipedia entry for Novus Homo