A quick side note: I’ve been wrestling with this post for over a month, and my many thanks go out to Allan Stanglin, Bryan Nix, and Rabbi Joshua Brumbach for their help. They wrestled with this passage along side of me and helped me find a glimpse into the mind of God.
There are certainly some passages in the New Testament which are obscure and hard to understand. A good example of this is the entire Book of Revelation – there are too many opinions about the meaning of this book to count. Another example is the short Book of Jude. It references apocryphal books, talks about things that aren’t in the Bible, and makes some strange leaps and connections. In this post I’d like to look at one particular phrase from Jude in the light of its Jewish context.
In the land of Texas there lived a man whose name was James. This man was a nice guy and tried to be upright; he feared God and shunned evil.
One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them.
Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant James? There is no one on earth like him; he is a nice guy and tries to be upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
“Does James fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands. But stretch out your hand and deny him an iPhone, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, then. Give all his friends and coworkers iPhones, but keep him from being able to switch from Verizon to AT&T.”
When you read the Bible you begin to see the story-within-the-story. What I mean by that is that stories in the histories and prophets of the Tanakh are often first told in the Torah. These new stories retell the same one in the Torah but add new insights to the precepts of God. These stories show us the meaning of God’s will in our lives through a lived-out story. An example is how the rabbis have viewed the story of Jonah as a retelling of Noah, but in an entirely new light. In Noah, the one man (and his family) was saved from the flood – in Jonah the one man is plunged into the flood. In Noah, the wicked would be destroyed – in Jonah, the wicked would be saved. The comparisons can go on and on (perhaps the subject of a future post). But once you understand this idea of stories being retold in new ways, you begin to see them all over the place.
At our Sunday evening church service, our preacher Gordon Dabbs was continuing his series on David’s life, this week focusing on David’s son, Absalom. While I listened to his sermon, his words triggered something in my mind and I found a Torah parallel to this story that I will now share with you. My thanks to Gordon for sharing his sermon which triggered my thoughts.
I’ve often heard it said that people have a “God-shaped hole” in their hearts, and that they try to fill it with various things, none of which are a perfect fit, and thus leave them unsatisfied. I had never really liked the metaphor because it’s rather lacking. It makes people’s struggles seem very one-dimensional, as if all I have to do to solve all my problems is to merely turn to God and all of a sudden I won’t want those other things because the “God-shaped hole” is now perfectly filled. That, of course, is simply not true.
But what is true, is that people look for redemption (that is, a way to escape/forget about/feel good about their problems and sins) every day. And the world offers up its solutions. Below is one such solution that jumped out at me.
An Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Shlomo Riskin, Chief Rabbi of Efrat, Israel, speaks about his fascination with Rabbi Jesus and even says that “Jews and Christians are the root and the branch”, which of course Paul writes in Romans 11. This is a great video, which highlights the growing trend in Judaism to take a serious look at Jesus. Enjoy. (the video was posted on Dec. 28th, 2009)
There are many word-pictures in the Bible to illustrate to the human mind what God is like. One of the biggest we see is God as our shepherd. I’d like to examine something that perhaps you have never thought of regarding God shepherding His people.
In Matthew 21:19-22 (and also in Mark 11) we find the story of Jesus cursing a fig tree because he couldn’t find any fruit on it. This at first seems inane. Why would the supposed Son of God get so upset over not finding any fruit that he would lash out and curse it, a seemingly careless abuse of his God-given powers? Did he have a lapse of judgment? Or was this action, as was every action, a carefully planned and perfectly executed teaching for his talmidim (disciples)? But what does it mean?
If you want to understand a teacher, first endeavor to understand their teaching methods. If you do not understand how they taught, then their points will largely go over your head. You may be able to get the broader concepts, but the fine points will be lost to you. Rabbis in the time of Jesus had specific teaching styles they used, and if you understand them, you will understand their teachings. Jesus is one such rabbi.
Almost everyone knows what Hanukkah is. Every year we see it right alongside of Christmas. But few Christians know anything about Hanukkah, and even fewer know the connections between Hanukkah and the Messiah, Jesus. As I have studied the subject over the course of the last year, I have come to the realization that Hanukkah is far more important than we (Christians) give it credit for. Saturday was Shabbat Hanukkah and I visited Baruch HaShem Messianic Synagogue. I learned many new things from Rabbi Marty about Hanukkah, one of which I would like to share with you here, after a brief version of the Hanukkah story to set it up.
If you are a student of the New Testament then you will immediately recognize the phrase “the laying on of hands,” but you may wonder where this practice came from. Once we read through the Gospels and arrive in Acts we find this peculiar act where the Apostles lay their hands on people and they receive either the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:18), or it is some sort of giving of authority (Acts 6:6). Perhaps the most peculiar thing about this is that people seemed to know what was going on when they did it. In other words: it wasn’t a brand-new process. Rather, this was an established tradition that dates back to the time of the Patriarchs, known as giving s’mikhah.
