The Three-Hundred-Twenty-Fourth (Life)

This week we’re going to expound on last week’s topic, in a way. We’ll be looking at Yeshua’s ministry again, only from a slightly different angle. Whereas last week, we talked about deciding whether or not we should play the worldly games we encounter every day, this week, we’re going to try and figure out what He meant when He was talking about life.

Yeshua talked about YHWH being the God of the living, not the dead (Matthew 22:32). He talked about living water (John 4:10), and He called Himself living bread (John 6:51). He stated that coming to Him can give you life (John 5:40), and talked about a narrow gate leading to life (Matthew 7:14).

Yeshua also talked about “enter[ing] life” crippled or missing body parts (Matthew 18:8-9, Mark 9:43-45). In a very interesting interaction, someone asks Him about eternal life and He responds that keeping the commandments is required to enter life, not specifying eternality (Matthew 19:16-17). Right after this interaction, in a conversation with His disciples, He specified eternal life when talking about what will happen in the “regeneration” (Matthew 19:28-29, Mark 10:29-30).

John wrote that whoever rejects Yeshua will not see life. More than that, the wrath of YHWH remains on them (John 3:36). In his gospel, Yeshua talks about someone believing in Him having crossed over from death to life (John 5:24). In one of the many verses that clearly distinguishes YHWH the Father from Yeshua the Son, Yeshua talks about YHWH granting Him to have life in Himself (John 5:26).

There are many other examples, but just from these you can start to see some interesting things going on. There is life in Yeshua. If you listen to Him and believe in Him, you, who are currently alive because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do those things, will transition from death to life. However, there seems to be a distinguishing of that life and eternal life.

So, what’s going on here? I think a lot of times we, myself included until just this week, combine Yeshua’s non-eternal life references with His eternal life references. I don’t think that’s what He intended though.

Let’s jump back for a moment to Jacob and Esau. What was one of the main differences between those two brothers? Besides their body hair (Genesis 27:11), they lived life with very different priorities.

Isaac’s sons were at each other practically since conception, and their continued struggling throughout life was prophesied before their birth (Genesis 25:22-23). It’s easy to chalk up some of their interactions simply to their brotherly fighting, but that would miss an important aspect of what the interactions showed about their character. Let’s take a look at a couple of them.

In one of the most talked about events today, we see Esau come in while Jacob was cooking stew, starving. He wants something to eat so bad that he agrees to sell his birthright to his brother for a bowl of the stew. Being a bit overdramatic, Esau justifies himself by saying he’ll die anyway without the stew, and dying would make his birthright meaningless (Genesis 25:29-34).

Another very popular event today is when Jacob fulfilled the terms of that sale of stew to Esau by pretending to be Esau and having their father bless him (Genesis 27:18-29). Esau cried out, having lost his blessing (Genesis 27:34), and the writer of Hebrews tells us these were tears lacking repentance (Hebrews 12:16-17). Despite being emotional about his loss, he did not repent for selling his birthright for a bowl of stew.

We find out elsewhere also that while YHWH loved Jacob, He hated Esau (Romans 9:13, Malachi 1:2-3). Why do we think that was? Was it just always in His plan to have Jacob be the conduit for the blessing He promised to Abraham, or was it something Esau did…or maybe a certain way he lived?

You see, Esau lived according to the moment and his flesh, with no desire or motivation to live for something higher. Elsewhere, we also see he took wives that caused grief to his parents (Genesis 26:34-35). He did what was right in his own eyes, with no thought to his parents or even to YHWH, as we learned in Hebrews, he was godless.

Do you think Esau was living a life of…life? Or do you think he was living a life of death? If there is actually a distinction of life and eternal life in what Yeshua was teaching, this is the question we need to ask of ourselves and how we live. To go back to last week’s topic, a life of death would be one in which we choose to play the worldly games and believe that’s the only way for us to survive in this life.

However, this is not the only life that we, as believers, know about. There’s also the eternal life that happens after the current life we’re living in our corrupted bodies. The question is, what gives us life now and eternal life?

It seems, according to Yeshua, that obtaining both of those lives is dependent on us listening to and believing in Him. When approached by one of His disciples requesting to first bury his father who had died, His response was, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead,” (Matthew 8:22). He was already making a distinction between life and death even in that statement: following Him is life, and everything else is death.

What does following Him, listening to and believing in Him, mean? And how does it give us life? We know from the example of Esau that living according to the flesh is one aspect of living a life of death, but what does living a life of life mean; what does it look like?

The answer to the first question is easy: do what He did. His primary purpose was to show us how to live, so do that! The reason He is the bread of life, that He called Himself that, is because He was connecting Himself to the words of Moses.

In a verse quoted by Yeshua when challenged by Satan in the wilderness, Moses stated that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of YHWH (Deuteronomy 8:3). In other words, Yeshua was saying that He was the word coming from YHWH, or to put it another way, He was showing us how to live according to the word from YHWH. He lived every commandment perfectly, and if we want to move from death to life in our current, corrupted bodies, we should strive to do the same.

These days, Christianity presents these commandments, at least most of them, as unnecessary and even burdensome. That’s not something that Yeshua preached, however. So, how do the commandments give us life?

There’s a couple ways this happens. First, there are commandments that help us to be healthy, like burying your waste, for example (Deuteronomy 23:13). Second, it gives us a mindset shift.

I saw a video the other day of someone in the military getting a vaccine shot. He held up a piece of paper in the video as the technician gave him the shot, and it stated that he was doing this under duress based on him and his family’s livelihood being on the line if he were to refuse to get it. Did the piece of paper help him in the end? Did it prevent him from being injected, or protect him from getting injured because of it?

Obviously not. Did he feel that he had no other choice than to get it? Clearly.

Making YHWH’s commandments our first priority when living our lives changes our mindset such that we realize that things that once seemed to be the only option are actually not. It does that by causing us to trust in YHWH to take care of us rather than trusting in what the world tells us we have to do in order to live. That individual that allowed them to inject him would instead trust that either YHWH will somehow enable him to keep his job without the shot or would provide him another job if he ended up being discharged from the military.

This brings us to the last question that we asked ourselves: what does it look like to have life? Imagine putting all your trust, for literally everything in your life, in an all-powerful, all-knowing being. What would your attitude be? How would you live your life?

For one, you wouldn’t worry about anything…sounds familiar, doesn’t it? You’d also have hope for the future, both the near future while you’re still in this body and the far future when you transition to eternal life. You’d know YHWH has plans for you better than you could ever imagine, and your hope and excitement is based on the anticipation of finding out what those plans are.

You’d love your neighbor, helping him or her with whatever they needed, even to your own detriment because you know YHWH would make sure you’re taken care of. You’d be confident based on the authority you hold as one of His children. You’d be at peace, knowing that He provides, He protects, and He loves His people.

This is the life that Yeshua was teaching about, the one we can have in our current, corrupted bodies. We need to ask ourselves if we are living like Esau, or if we are living like Yeshua. We can have a life that death doesn’t even have the ability to stop, but it starts today by doing what Yeshua did!

We hope you have a great week! Shabbat shalom and YHWH bless you!

-Rob and Sara Gene

The Gospel

We are born sinful as a result of Adam and Eve’s sin (Genesis 2:17, 3:6, 1 John 1:8)

The consequence of sin, which is unavoidable through our own works, is death (Romans 6:23)

Yeshua, the Son of YHWH, lived sinless and was put to death (Hebrews 4:15)

His death, therefore, cleanses us of sin that would have required our death (2 Corinthians 5:21)

He rose on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:4)

Because of His resurrection, we are confident in our future resurrection and eternal life (1 Corinthians 15:17-18, John 3:16)