Do You See All These Things?

Matthew 24:1-2

Yehoshua/Jesus left the Temple and was walking away when his talmudim/disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings.  ”Do you see all these things?” he asked…

Yehoshua left the Temple and was walking away.  He did not offer the prophecies that follow concerning the Temple and the end of the world, its judgement and salvation, to those who were worshipping within the Temple on that occasion — those who did not expect judgement to come first on the House of the Lord/Hashem.

His talmudim/disciples were also unprepared for this and were not expecting it, yet their preparation was in following Yehoshua.  He gave his prophecies to his talmudim/disciples only when he was questioned by them.  He was walking away from the Temple because he was about to leave Jerusalem desolate (Zephaniah 3) and return to his Father who had sent him.

Had Yehoshua failed because he was not received by his own, and therefore the Temple would have to be destroyed?  No!  It was unto this end that he was sent into the world.  The Temple would be destroyed because it was made to be one in the word of prophecy with his body.  As his body would be raised again, so the Temple would be raised again.

Out of Yehoshua’s death would be salvation for Israel.  Out of his rejection would be the reconciling of the world.  All of Matthew 24 should be read in this light.

Since the Temple was built to be destroyed, why was it built at all?  Heaven and Earth were created in order that God might dwell with/ את /Et his dear creatures.  This is the pattern of purpose for the Dwelling Place of God that is revealed through the Temple.

God did not make the world in vain but to be inhabited, Isaiah 45:18.  God created the corruptible world to be a seed that He could re-create into an incorruptible world.  Even if death entered through sin, as indeed it did, God would re-create the world through redemption, which indeed He did and is continuing to do by unfolding and revealing that redemption.  This is the pattern of judgement and salvation revealed by the history and the future of the Temple.

Matthew 24:2 specifically

“Do you see all of these things..?”  Our experience of the Time World / Temple is an aspect itself of that very Time World / Temple.  Yehoshua’s teaching and prophecy framed that experience for his talmudim/disciples and for us.  We must experience death and resurrection with minds and hearts and souls and strength that is, altogether as one Adam, learning.  Don’t allow this to be too deep for you.  Understand it.  Our experiencing redemption as conscious souls, learning repentance, through history, through prophecy, through being subject to judgement, through justice, through mercy, all this is essential to re-creation, the re-creation of the Time World, the Temple above and below, the regeneration of the seed of the universe.

How We Go On To Perfect Maturity

by Fergal OP via Flickr

First read my Notes on The Sermon on The Mount. They can be found on my Hearing Seven Thunders blog here, or on my Mellow Wolf Matthew Files site, here.

From the understanding presented in these notes on the Sermon on the Mount it can be seen that to go on to perfect maturity we need be attached to the Messiah of Israel in the actions of God whereby he brings good news to Israel – and so to the world.  This is the good news of forgiveness to Israel and of faith for the world.

We cannot attain unto these actions on our own, as individuals.  Although we may “turn the other cheek” as individuals and in relation to the events and people in our lives as individuals, this will not bring the revelation of the defeat of the fear of death to the world.  Only God’s own design of “turning the other cheek” by and with the Messiah of Israel toward corporate Humanity, as He chose and nurtured it and called it His own Humanity, can bring the revelation of the victory of faith over fear to the whole world.  This is Messiah’s godly action of turning the other cheek to Israel and then Israel’s godly action of turning the other cheek with him to Rome and to all the nations, and all our turning the other cheek with the Messiah of Israel and with Israel to all Humanity in its enmity toward the God of Israel.  For if we turn the other cheek in our own name we are the blind leading the blind into the ditch.  If we do so by attachment to the Messiah of Israel we are a light set on a hill, opening the way for the whole world unto the God of Israel, the God of righteousness, justice and mercy, that the world might come before Him in repentance and hope and not in defiance and rebellion.

God will bring this testimony about in a full and complete final witness.  First, He will bring it about as a witness to Jerusalem and Judah by his ingathered remnant of the followers of the Messiah of Israel in a role like that of the son of Joseph.  Then He will bring it about through the witness of Jerusalem and Judah, together with all Israel, a witness to all nations, and then the world will know that the God of Israel is the Creator of heaven and earth.

We can only go on unto perfection with the Messiah of Israel with Israel

The Straight Gate

Eastern <Hulda> gates    Wikipedia

Through the calling of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Adam, for the sake of repentance, is given power to establish righteousness in This World at every point of openness in the Law, for every moment of question of what the will of God is in Israel, for corporate Adam.  But not one point of openness or question in the Law in This World is the gate into the World To Come.  For that gate is composed of the combination of all points of openness and every point designed for questioning and searching in the Law – all combined into one.  And the power to establish righteousness at that point, in order that Adam might walk uprightly through that gate, in accordance with the Law of God, is given only to the True Tzaddik, the True Righteous One, the Son of Adam.

For the gate of the point of the Law that opens into the World To Come can only be opened from the side of the World To Come.

Now the antinomian says, If it is true that only the Son of Adam can open the gate into the World To Come, and if it is true that gate into the World To Come must be opened from that side, then all that they do who labor to establish righteousness at every point of the Law they do in vain.  But the truth is that the gate into the World To Come is straight and the way unto it is narrow, like a narrow bridge that crosses over the sin of This World and is not defiled by it.  Every point of openness in the Law of God is only a point of openness for the sake of presenting a lesson in repentance for Adam, and the lessons of repentance for Adam would be infinite and endless were it not for the knowledge of the soul of the Son of Adam.  For only by the knowledge of the soul of the Son of Adam can all the lessons of repentance in every moment of question and searching in the Law of God be gathered into one lesson that has a beginning and an end.

Thus every point of openness and question in the Law must be decided and every lesson of repentance for Adam must be learned. And all must be learned according to the measure of the knowledge of the soul of the Son of Adam.

Until Adam’s lessons of repentance are all learned according to the measure of the knowledge of the soul of the Son of Adam the Son of Adam will not open fully the gate into the World To Come.  For until that time Adam will not be ready and prepared to find it.  Should Adam enter through that gate to eat of the Tree of Life before their corporate repentance was complete, before it had completely prepared them for the judgment of Truth, they would not find that Tree to be life to them but would find it to be eternal destruction.

Antinominanism therefore is found to be the evil inclination in Adam toward resisting repentance, and those who fight in the end for antinomianism are found to be fighting against the soul of the Son of Adam.

Therefore, to straighten the way for Adam on the left hand and to straighten the way for Adam on the right hand, the Son of Adam elevates the lowest sinner from the dunghill to the place of the Temple mount, but he does not cause them to enter into the Temple immediately but causes them to wait there.  He does this in order that the truth of God’s glorious grace is magnified in Israel, lest the wisdom of those who are wise in the lessons of Adam’s corporate repentance is over magnified in the last days.  Nevertheless, he does not allow those whom he raises up by the demonstration of God’s grace alone to the exalted hights of the Temple mount to enter immediately into the Temple but causes them to wait at the wall of the gate until those who come up through all the points of repentance in the Law arrive and become their teachers and receive from them the charity of a share in the gift that has been given to them.  For, “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” and only then when all the souls of Adam have become one in one school will the soul of Adam be measured according to the soul of the Son of Adam and be prepared in repentance for the full opening of the gate into the World To Come.

Corporate Israel = Torah Israel

1.  “Corporate” = {[man/woman ] w/G-d} = 1st commandment > ["Hear oh Israel, the Lord your God is one Lord ](and you shall) Love the Lord your God with (all your being) and your fellow as yourself…” -> This opens the question of whether this corporate nature is itself the first commandment as the commandment (as it were) of breath being given to Adam, which is then = (once Israel uniquely receives it) “I am the Lord Your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage”.  (Not that the breath of G-d is exactly the word of G-d to Adam, but it is one with the word, the commandment to Adam to go on to perfectly become Adam.  It is this to which Ephesians 4 then ultimately looks back.

Psalms of Israel in Hebrew and Latin (Blessing Israel and the nations)  –

This question about the relationship of Deuteronomy 5:6 and 6:4-5 is the question of the relationship of Israel (and the calling of Israel as the witness of HaShem, the calling of Israel to repentance according to the Mt. Sinai revelation of the Torah), to Adam as originally created, (as representing the nations, as well as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob according to their origin in Adam, {which is something that God will not replace but will sanctify and redeem in the redemption of Israel as the only chosen corporate portion of Adam}).

2.  Corporate Adam = What Adam would be.  This is to say, Adam, corporately speaking, was created as potential.  When the rabbis say that circumcision is the completion of Adam and that God left the act of this completion up to Adam it can be understood as a certain kind of a truth-metaphor to indicate that in many aspects Adam was completed only as the perfect potential Adam.  To begin with Adam was not complete with only the male and was only potential until they were two, male and female, but the two were not altogether complete until they reproduced and not until they produced one child but produced the world of Adam:  “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” was an aspect of the complete Adam as the perfect potential.  Thus the commandment, the word of G-d was an essential ingredient in the actual identity of Adam becoming Adam, according to the principle of Adam realizing the potential of Adam in obedience to the commandment.

3.  What does the word, “corporate” mean?  Literally, it means, “bodily.”  We must understand it by way of usage to mean bodily but where more than one individual is included.  So, when it is written, “The two shall be one flesh” this is saying that they shall be a corporate entity.  Furthermore, we cannot think that this is fully realized in the relationship between man and woman only, for it is clearly also realized between parents and children – and ultimately between the perfect global Adam family nation. Nor can we think that this precludes the spiritual and only has bearing upon the physical.  Rather, just as the corporate aspect in the physical is to be fruitful and multiply, so the individuals who compose this corporate entity are to love each other as themselves.  Thus, corporate Adam is not realized until it is corporate Israel and corporate Israel is not realized until it is Torah Israel, until there is no longer that which nullifies the corporate, which is to say the breaking of the commandment.  Thus, Torah Israel is the Messianic Israel to come, which is hidden with Mashiach in G-d.

In Summary

4.  The commandment to be fruitful and multiply is necessarily a commandment to be governed by love, first love of the Creator and His word, and secondly, accordingly, love of one another.  Any other understanding is temptation to imagine and fear another power other than the power of the one and only Creator.

5.  Only on the basis of this knowledge can the significance of the special calling of Israel and the separation of Israel through the special relationship with the Creator of heaven and earth be fully understood.  And only as the significance and purpose of this calling of Israel is fully understood can it be fully served.

Sotah 5b – Psalms 51:17

by Getty Images via @daylife

“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and crushed heart, O God, You will not despise.”

The Talmud teaches, here that now that the Temple is destroyed, one who brings a broken heart and spirit before God is regarded as having brought whatever sacrifice is needed in their life. The Christian asks how this Judaism is possible. If one does not look up to the one lifted up on the pole, as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, the Christian asks, how can his or her repentance be complete?

Open the link below to read this document (in progress) from my paper Let Us Go On.

Included subjects:

• Regeneration of both Jewish and Christian believers
• Not two covenants but two givings of the one covenant
• The attitude of regeneration
• What atonement is
• What “I will have mercy and not sacrifice” means
• more

Sotah 5b – Psalms 51:17 the full article ___updated June 24, 2009

Bamidbar

by Getty Images via @daylife

G-d’s commandment of the firstborn, of the Levite, of the Tabernacle, etc., is Israel. This is to say, The commandment brings Israel to G-d and so Israel is Israel – brings Israel to G-d in accordance in each commandment with the “permitted purpose,” and so Israel is Israel.  This is the meaning of corporate Israel…  Corporate Israel is the expression and testimony that all that exists in heaven and earth exists by the will of G-d and is governed by the will of G-d.  To this all the Festivals of Israel testify, (see Rabbi Nachman Likutey Moharan 2 Lesson 4

Bamidbar >Firstborn > Read more

Is The Torah Written On Our Hearts? part one

View from Mount Sinai   Wikipedia

Christianity, as a gentile institution, has a long and somewhat convoluted relationship with the Torah.  Torah has, in English, traditionally been translated and interpreted as the Law of God.  While this translation allows English speaking non-Jews to think about the covenant and commandments given to Israel at Mount Sinai in their own English terms of reference and not to have to study and learn what the Torah meant and means to the Jewish people, it can, at the same time, be misleading even in terms of the English language.  The word, “law” and the concept behind it has a wide variety of connotations and associations to different people in different English speaking nations.  The same can be said about the corresponding terms in other western languages, and indeed in all gentile languages.  One connotation of the word, “law” and the concept of law that is universal amongst all nations, apart from Israel, is that the law is made by  the political forces that form the government of the given nation.  Law and laws are human creations.  This point alone is enough to start us off with a good understanding of why gentile language translations of the Torah of God can evoke misleading ideas.  The word, “law” if used to translate the Hebrew word, “torah,” can leave a person to imagine that the Torah, or Law, of God is something that God created and added to His creation after He had created it – the way human legislators might add laws to a nation after it is already a nation.

If a person were inclined to think that the Torah was merely added to Creation after Creation already existed, Proverbs chapter 8 could be presented in order to correct this idea.  However, the pertinent passage in Proverbs 8 is necessarily written in poetic language and might not have the intended impact unless it were clearly stated that the passage teaches that Creation is made, from beginning to end, according to the precepts of the Torah.  For the Torah is not a dictionary of crimes but a design for life.  This is a challenging teaching of Holy Scripture for Christianity, as a gentile institution, to deal with, and while it has been mostly avoided by Christian teachers, we will have to come back to it again and again.

Whether or not this teaching of Holy Scripture is immediately received or grasped, it can be shown that it is not the English word, “law” that is well suited for bringing a person to this understanding.  Indeed, our sense today is, and rightly so, that laws have to do with crimes and not with sins.  That is to say,  it is not family rules or social or religious customs that constitute crimes but only such actions as deemed by courts to violate specifically written laws.  We do not understand the case to be so much, as Paul said, that by the law is the knowledge of sin, but rather, by the law universally undesired action is made a crime.  Since this is our fundamental concept of law, it is hard for us to think in terms of such a concept being the blueprint of Creation.  If we do try to think this, we have gone way of base.  In fact, it would be better for us to translate the word “Torah” in the context of Proverbs 8, if we must do so, as “Design“, rather than as “Law“.  Creation was made according to the Torah, the Design, of God.  But that Design is not a design that is purposed primarily to define sin or crime.  It is a design that is purposed primarily to illumine the way of Godly love.

Justification for Human Existence ?

Sepher Torah from Theresienstadt Concentration Camp Wikipedia

Give the arrogant the job of sustaining their existence or generating even a moment of their own life.  Tell the sinner who takes their own life and existence for granted and are so ready to claim the right to do things their own way, to pursue their own pleasure and security and to defy anyone to stop them, that in three minutes they will cease to exist unless at that moment they do the work of making themselves to exist.  Their mouth would slack, their eyes would gap, for they know they have no access to such power as they would need to cause themselves to exist for even an instant.   But to do this job would require more than mere power.  It would require the ability to justify one’s existence as good and sustainably good for all the worlds.  Indeed, we know that our existence, our living existence, our living conscious existence, our living conscious free will existence must be good for the creation, not just for a moment but for ever and ever, or else it would have been better had we never been born, never created.  Therefore we have no justification of our existence and with every fiber of our being we can only hope that God does.  For if God does not provide a justification for human life, it is an evil thing that we exist.

This is the truth.  Because we know that it is the truth, perhaps we should consider that it is not so much rank arrogance as a dreadful fear that makes us want to cover over this reality and simply take life for granted, to be brash and crude about life and live by an ideology of materialism.  According to the Torah of God and even according to human laws written through human conscience, there are sins or crimes that are more wicked and less wicked.  Perhaps our true wickedness is not one consisting of a mature and knowing arrogance but of a small and cringing fearfulness of the shame of our own evil inclination.            – Genesis 3

Judaism wrestles with this shame and seeks to overcome the immaturity of the guilty, cringing fear by learning how to obey the Creator’s commandments to Israel – and to do so with a consciousness that even the human inclination to evil must be brought into human service if we will succeed in obeying God with all our heart all our mind and all our soul and strength.  Christianity turns full force to fall upon the Great Tzaddik, the Great Righteous Son of Adam, to justify life for all his brothers and sisters who cannot justify life for themselves.    ∆ references on Genesis 3 /Tanya/Likuety Moharan #— /Revelation 2 and 3 > overcome = overcome cringing fear of death/no-fearful can enter into divine shalom.

The Torah and The Resurrection

Notes to God that fill the cracks… Getty Images via @daylife

What Is The Definition of Corporate Humanity?

There are many ways in which various nations, peoples and cultures define Humanity or the Human Race.  Some start with the individual human being, some with the male-female pair, some with the family or tribal collective.  But there is only one people who truly begin their definition of Humanity, the corporate entity, with God.  And that is Israel, the Jewish People.  This definition is only hinted at in the creation story itself, when we are told that God created the first Adam in his image and in his likeness, making the Adam male and female.  The Jewish definition of corporate Humanity as beginning with God is only really made explicit on Mount Sinai, as stated in the first of the ten commandments, where we read of God speaking to the nation Israel as one entity, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.  You shall have no other gods before me.”  Here we see that Israel does not and cannot exist as a corporate entity of Humanity without being defined by God in his action and in his spoken definition of that action.  God defines Israel as a corporate human entity in relation to Himself, and Israel’s definition of Humanity then becomes an obedient confession and acknowledgment of this definition.  This is the very well-spring of the Torah.

Unlike definitions of Humanity that are modeled on and built on the individual or the male-female pair, or even on the collective family, tribe, nation or planetary population, the Jewish definition of corporate Humanity is not a fixed and static definition but has all the potential of becoming implicit in a foundational relationship of identity with the Living God.  Thus the Torah definition of corporate Humanity looks both backward to the first creation of Adam and forward to a creation of Adam in full spiritual and physical immortality and incorruptibility, where Humanity through the blessing of being identified with God can live in holy intimacy with God and bless all creatures and all creation in bringing all things together with them into that eternal, incorruptible intimacy with the Living God.  This is the salvation and healing of Israel, the resurrection of the dead, and the new creation of all things.

Cornerstone

The Tashlich Prayer Getty Images via @daylife

The cornerstone principle in the foundation of faith in Christ/Messiah/Mashiach is repentance from dead works and faith toward God. If we are going to build up the new Adam spoken of in Ephesians 2 and 4 starting from this cornerstone, we are going to need to look at this principle in the context of the experience of the Jew and in the context of the experience of the non-Jew who believes that Yehoshua is the Jewish Messiah.

Usually it seems a mystery to a Jew what the writings of the apostles, the emissaries of Yehoshua, would want to offer to them. Already they have known the grace and forgiveness of God and have received a religion of repentance. If they have trusted in their own righteousness or in their own performance of the mitzvot (commandments) where they ought to have trusted in the mercy of God alone, they already have a religion that will teach them that they will need to repent of this. Already they have perfect hope and faith in the coming of the Messiah, even if they have not seen him. Why then do they need a Messiah to die and rise again, they may wonder.

There is much that can be said about the promises in the prophets of the new expression of God’s covenant with Israel, and expression that would be associated with the Messiah. Much can be said about what, according to the prophets, that new expression of the covenant would do for the nation and for the individual Jew. To begin with all that we will say is that, without the death and resurrection of her Messiah, Israel could never have fulfilled the promise of God to Abraham, “In your seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed” (Gen.26:4). The blessing intended by the word of God in this promise was not just the kind of blessing that brings a good influence. It was the blessing of justification and life, instead of the condemnation and death that Adam introduced into the world.

The argument might be made that Israel could have been saved from ending in spiritual death without the Messiah having to die and rise again. How could this argument be made? It could be made by saying that, the truth is that in the end it is God’s covenant which he made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that guarantees Israel’s salvation. The covenant is eternal and irrevocable, for God is a God of mercy and will have compassion upon His people as He has promised by covenant to do without needing to be appeased, as it were, by either Moses or Mashiach offering his own life in the place of God’s people. This argument is true. Yet by definition it only guarantees an eternal relationship between God and Israel. It does not hold when it comes to the salvation (blessing) of the nations other than Israel. For at no time did God ever make a covenant with the nations to promise them blessing. (Appeal cannot be made to the covenant that God made with Noah and his family, for, even if the promises of that covenant are understood as having an eternal as well as temporal application, Israel could possibly be the only beneficiary of the eternal application of that covenant in the end.)

This consideration alone brings out Israel’s need for a new articulation of God’s covenant with them. For it appears that Israel proved by much failure that, at least without Messiah, it could not bring about the salvation of the nations from spiritual death. Yet the promise that Israel would represent this salvation was no less unconditionally given to Abraham than the promise that Israel itself would be blessed (saved from spiritual death – and ultimately physical death). How could it be possible that Messiah would be able to do what Israel as a nation had failed to do – bring the blessing of spiritual life to the nations? Only two answers to this question could ever be conceived. Either Messiah would have to lead all the nations to convert to Judaism, to be circumcised and cease forever being distinct nations, or else God would have to articulate the covenant that he made with Israel in such a way as to bless Israel and the nations equally on the same gracious basis.

Now we know that Christianity, before it became a separate religion, arose out of the teaching that the first possibility could not fulfill God’s will to justify life, and that God accomplished His will of blessing all nations through the death and resurrection of the Messiah of Israel. But this was as far as Christianity in isolation from Israel ever developed in its understanding. Staying at this point and never developing further in its understanding meant that Christian theology became a theology of replacing Israel as God’s servant and source for blessing the nations with Israel’s Messiah apart from Israel, and then replacing Israel as the receptical of God’s redemptive plans for the world with the Christian church.

Historically, when Christianity developed into a gentile institution, it simply never went on from the first principles of the doctrines of the Messiah (Christ). The questions of each of these doctrines have seemed to return again and again, the understanding seeming to break down and then needing to be relaid. This is especially true of the cornerstone doctrine of repentance from dead works and faith toward God. Thus it continues to remain perplexing, most of the time, to the Jewish person what the idea of an executed messiah could ever have to offer them.

Later, I will pursue further the question of the meaning of repentance from dead works in context of the perspective of the Jewish experience. At this point I would like to begin to look at this cornerstone of faith in the Messiah of Israel from the perspective of the non-Jewish person. I will begin by looking first at this question historically.