The Two-Hundred-Fifty-Second (Specifics)

We’ve got an important topic this week…not that they aren’t all important…but this week we’re going to look at something that it took me awhile to learn about scripture.  We talk a lot in our studies about specific words and how they mean specific things and how sometimes a word gets translated a certain way that doesn’t really give the full idea of what the word meant in the original language.  All that is very important as you’re studying scripture, and this week’s study doesn’t change that.  We’re just going to look at how in some cases we have to look at the feeling behind what scripture is saying rather than holding to a concrete and specific meaning of a word or phrase.

If that introduction is confusing or cryptic to you, don’t worry!  We’ll get into specific examples as we go through this study.  We’ve also got some interesting connections to make between the events of the Israelites and certain “main characters” and the events of the first century and how they apply to us as believers today.  

So, what do we mean by looking at the feeling behind what scripture is saying?  The first thing to remember is what we’ve talked about time and again in previous studies.  All scripture is breathed by YHWH (2 Timothy 3:16), inspired by Him, and as a result it carries His thoughts and feelings into it.  Yes, He only speaks truth (John 17:17) and therefore can only inspire truth in scripture, but because His ways and thoughts are so much higher than us (Isaiah 55:8-9), sometimes we cannot fully understand that truth or align it with our own knowledge due to our limitations.

Let’s look at one example that we just studied recently.  When we took a look at what death means in scripture, we saw that YHWH told Adam if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “in that day” he would die (Genesis 2:16-17).  We also saw that Adam lived to be 930 years old (Genesis 5:5).  We know that YHWH only speaks truth, and therefore both of these things must be true.  So, while we don’t initially understand what both of these things being true means about how things work in the universe both spiritually and physically, we are able to use these facts in combination with other facts in scripture to figure out how things work.

In the case of the study on death, we were able to put together what truth makes the most sense behind those two statements being true, and that’s one of the most important things to recognize about this.  As stated earlier, we, as man, have a limit to our knowledge based on our experiences and what we believe to be true from others.  We very well could have come to the wrong conclusion of the truth about death because there is some other aspect that has not been made known to us previously.  At some point though, we either decide that we have enough evidence to draw the right conclusions or we admit that we can’t draw a conclusion because there’s not enough evidence.  In the former case, drawing a conclusion, we as believers must make sure the Holy Spirit is involved in that decision.  

In other scriptural studies, the truth behind things might seem obvious, but once you add additional information you either decide you need to adjust your understanding of the truth or you decide the additional information is associated with a different truth and so there is no correlation to what you already think the truth is.  This situation is a little confusing to describe in general terms, so let’s take a look at another example.  

I came across a statement in scripture the other day that seemed very absolute.  During the Israelite’s wilderness journey, there was a descendant of Aaron, the high priest, who took it upon himself to exact judgment against an Israelite and the Midianite woman he brought into his family (Numbers 25:6-8).  The judgment was death due to the fact that the Midianites engaged in paganism, worshipping other gods, and YHWH commanded the Israelites not to take from them any wives because they would influence the Israelites into adopting paganism into their lives.

As a result of Phinehas’s action, YHWH established a covenant with him which He called a “permanent priesthood” (Numbers 25:13).  The Hebrew word here used for permanent is olam, and is used in all situations to mean forever, or everlasting.  However, you may be asking yourself the same question I asked.  Namely, how can this priesthood be permanent, forever, or everlasting, when the Old Covenant, the one establishing the priesthood as a precursor and representation of the future perfect priesthood of Yeshua, has been made nothing?  No longer are priests required because Yeshua is our priest, and if priests aren’t required then the priesthood of man is abolished and therefore Phinehas’s “everlasting” priesthood cannot be everlasting.

When we encounter this type of language our instinct has to be first and foremost to accept it at face value: in some way shape or form Phinehas' priesthood is forever.  The reason we have to do that is because it came straight from YHWH.  So, we search scripture to try and make that make sense, but what we find is that there is not enough information to form a conclusion as to how it is considered still in existence.

We might think, perhaps it was made everlasting because there was a descendant of Phinehas in the genealogy of Yeshua.  Going down this path, we find that it seems Phinehas had a son named Eleazar (Ezra 8:33), and there is an Eleazar listed in Matthew’s genealogy of Yeshua (Matthew 1:15), but this Eleazar is much too late in the genealogy to be the son of Phinehas.  We also might think that the wording YHWH used may mean the everlasting part was only associated with Phinehas and his descendants.  In other words, at some point the line of Phinehas stopped, he had no more descendants, and therefore YHWH’s covenant was not broken because He had fulfilled it with Phinehas and all his descendants.

If that were the case, we would need evidence that at some point there ceased to be descendants from the line of Phinehas.  In general, this seems like a very unlikely scenario, but if you know anything about the Israelites and their genealogies, you know that this is nearly an impossibility.  Very rarely, if ever, do you see entire lines of descendants stopped.  They may get exiled and dispersed among the nations, but that doesn’t mean they ceased to continue to procreate descendants.  

So, we have to conclude that we cannot come to a conclusion as to how this particular covenant of YHWH was fulfilled.  There are things outside our knowledge and understanding that prevent us from achieving that.  By all accounts, it seems to us that this covenant could not have been fulfilled, but we know that YHWH does not break covenants.  Man might (and did) break covenants with YHWH, but He does not break them, and even so, in this case there were no requirements for a man to fulfill in this covenant; nothing for man to break.

The point behind this is that there is language in scripture that on its face seems completely obvious as to the truth behind it.  This language exists in all types of scripture, from commandments to prophecy.  However, the true meaning behind it does not, and cannot, align with that supposedly obvious truth.  We have to look at the feeling and intention behind the scripture in order to determine its true meaning.  If we don’t, then we’ll miss what YHWH intended us to learn from scripture.  Another great example is prophecy.  There are words in prophecy like "all" and "everything" that were used to prophesy about events that we know have already occurred, but the fulfillment of the prophecy did not involve what we today would consider "all" or "everything."  This is a key problem people have in terms of coming up with interpretations of Revelation, for example.

We’ve looked previously at many of the things in scripture that believers like to associate only with Israel.  When it comes to certain aspects, we like to take ahold of them and apply them to our lives despite the fact that Israel is the only people they are associated with in scripture, but with other aspects we’re perfectly fine stating that they don’t apply to us because we’re not descendants of Israel.  Would a believer dare say that the account of Moses, Joshua, and the Israelites being delivered from the Egyptians and brought into the promised land has nothing to do with us?  Of course not.  But when it comes to judgment for turning to other gods or violating YHWH’s commands, we firmly lay hold to our status of being under grace and believe these consequences don’t apply to us.

We’ll pick specific words and phrases in scripture, draw a dividing line between “dispensations,” and sitting very confident in our “rightly dividing” YHWH’s word (2 Timothy 2:15).  Meanwhile, we miss the feeling and intention behind His word, and what He wanted us to understand from it.  What if I told you there’s scriptural proof that you can’t rest on your laurels of how a particular word or phrase in scripture only means a specific thing or is only associated with a specific person or people?

As the Israelites moved into the Promised Land, YHWH had specific commandments for them to follow.  The main commandment was to rid the land of its current inhabitants and leave no person behind.  To go along with this commandment, He told them to destroy all things associated with those people (Exodus 23:24).  As is the nature of man, his rebelliousness, the Israelites didn’t always do this.

When destroying Jericho, Joshua repeated this commandment of YHWH to the people to remind them that they had to destroy everything in the city (Joshua 6:17-19), but one Israelite, named Achan, failed to do this (Joshua 7:1).  Because of that, when the Israelites came upon the next city they were to attack, they failed (Joshua 7:3-5).  Initially confused, Joshua came to YHWH and asked why this happened (Joshua 7:7-9), and He answered that it was because of one man’s failure to follow His command (Joshua 7:10-12).

Now, you may think to yourself, that makes perfect sense.  The consequence of not following YHWH’s commandment is that they would no longer succeed in battle.  When you look at scripture though, the specific words, and the seemingly obvious truth behind them, tell a different story.

If you read the commandment out of Exodus, you don’t see this consequence specified.  While there is verbiage about enemies and their defeat, all the language suggests that YHWH and His messenger will be the one doing the fighting and annihilating (Exodus 23:22-23, 27-30).  So you think, ok, sure, but He did give some consequences, called curses, later on, didn’t He?  Yes, He did, but again, the specific words don’t associate these curses with what Achan did before the Israelites went up against Ai and lost.

We looked at blessings and curses before, but if you don’t recall, the specific words before the curses were described were that they would come into effect if the Israelites didn’t follow the commandments given that day (Deuteronomy 28:15), and if you read through those commandments there is nothing about destroying the inanimate things in the cities they conquer.  There is a commandment about destroying anything that breathes in the cities given to them as inheritance (Deuteronomy 20:16), but not destroying the items in the cities.  So, based on the specific words stated in scripture, the curse of being defeated before their enemies (Deuteronomy 28:25) should not apply, yet this curse came upon them anyway.

As you can see, the feeling and intention behind YHWH’s words was the only thing that could lead an Israelite to believe that if he kept something of a people given to destruction for his inheritance a curse would be brought upon him.  If he tried to use legalism to somehow state that what he was doing was ok, because the specific words associated with the curse were not related to what he did, he would end up in the wrong and under that curse.  It’s no different for us as believers.  If we try to use legalism to “sea lawyer” our way through scripture, picking and choosing which things apply to us based on specific words or phrases, we’re going to find ourselves under a curse, despite the confidence in our status of being under grace.

If that’s not clear to you yet, let’s take a moment to flip the coin and think about these people in Jericho and Ai (which the Israelites eventually defeated).  How many of them do you think were living their lives thinking they were good?  We don’t have a lot of information for these particular people, but chances are there were at least some.  They were living their lives, thinking they were doing everything right, when all of a sudden some random group of people comes to their city and kills every last one of them (except Rahab and her people, of course).  

Even if you can’t bring yourself to believe that at least a few of them thought they were doing everything right, at a minimum you can agree that they were not under the Law given to Moses, right?  We know from the Law that the consequence of worshipping other gods, which the people of Jericho and Ai did, is death.  These people weren’t expected to follow the Law, yet their consequence was death just the same.  The reason YHWH gave for the Israelites to destroy all the people and things in the land given to them for inheritance was because of their worship of other gods (Deuteronomy 20:16-18).

If there were individuals left alive in these cities, what do you think would be their assessment on why this horrible thing happened to their city?  What do you think they would tell their kids when they asked why all their family and friends were killed?  I’ll tell you what I think they would say: “well son, sometimes bad things just happen.”  Or, “sometimes bad things happen to good people.”  

Legalism comes in many different forms, and we as believers need to make sure we don’t find ourselves in it.  It’s not just believing that righteousness requires following all commandments to a tee, it’s also weaseling out of the feeling and intention behind YHWH’s word because of the particular words or phrases used.  We don't like it when a guilty person is freed in the legal system based on a technicality, and YHWH doesn't like it when one of His believers chooses disobedience because they think there's a technicality that allows them to be disobedient to Him.  

My personal belief, and you certainly don’t have to agree with me, is that many, if not all, of the bad things that happen to people, especially believers, are actually consequences of disobedience to YHWH.  The question you have to ask the Holy Spirit to show you the answer to, is what am I being disobedient in?

Shabbat shalom and YHWH bless you!

-Rob and Sara Gene