The Two-Hundred-Fifty-Sixth (Light to the World)

I’m at the point in scriptural history, as I’m reading through scripture chronologically, where David has been anointed the next king of Israel and Saul is being tormented.  As I’ve read through the various events of that time, centered around David, there have been some interesting things that have come up.  Those things, and a recent scientific discovery, are the subject of this week’s study.

The basis for the title this week is a recent discovery in the field of bioscience.  If you didn’t see it already, it turns out that they’ve discovered living beings actually give off what’s called Ultraweak Photon Emissions (UPEs) while alive.  Upon death, the UPEs are no longer there, for the most part.  When I first read that news, my mind immediately went to Yeshua’s statement of being the light of the world (Matthew 5:14-16).

We’ll get into that concept of being the light of the world, but first, to be clear, no, I don’t believe this is what Yeshua was talking about.  For one thing, this UPE phenomenon exists not just in humans but in animals as well.  Also, this phenomenon exists regardless of an individual’s spiritual salvation.  In other words, the children of disobedience have UPE as well as the children of YHWH, and Yeshua was specifying a certain people group as being a light to other, worldly people.

The thing that made it interesting to me is the possible connection to YHWH.  As much as it’s hard for us to wrap our head around the concept of YHWH being an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful, omni-present God, there’s an interesting theory as to how that all might work.  In fact, scripture even hints or suggests that this theory could be true.

When you read a verse written by Paul that states all things were created in Him (Colossians 1:16) and then that all things in Him consist, or hold together (Colossians 1:17), how does that even work?  Our limited human mind can’t even comprehend a being that is unlimited, so trying to make complete sense of how everything was created in YHWH and He holds everything together is nearly an impossible task.  Making it even harder are the visions we read about in scripture from prophets.  Visions like that of Ezekiel, where he sees YHWH as a whole bunch of different things all at once, all put together, including a rainbow, fire, a glowing upper body, and all somehow coalescing into what looked like a man (Ezekiel 1:26-28).

To me, given what we know about YHWH’s characteristic lack of limitations, all the visions given to man show YHWH as being like a man so that we can actually make sense of the fact that He is a being and not some non-descript ethereal thing.  Had we nothing to relate to with Him, how could we ever hope to have a relationship with Him?  Yes, we know from Genesis that we are created in His image (Genesis 1:26), and man has tried to correlate that with what we think we understand, like YHWH having three parts and man having three parts, but given that YHWH is Spirit (John 4:24) and not physical, it doesn’t make sense to me that He always looks like a man.  I believe He takes that form to help us better connect with Him, but I don’t believe that’s how He always looks.

We also have other verses that we have to fit into our understanding of YHWH.  For example, John writes that YHWH is Light (1 John 1:5).  While the context of this statement seems to indicate a metaphor of light being good and darkness being evil, what if this statement is also just true on its face?  What if YHWH is actually light and what we see as UPEs explains how all things are in Him and are held together, according to Paul?  When they did that study on UPEs, they even found them to emanate from the leaves of plants!  

The other thing to consider regarding this possibility is the number of pagan views and beliefs that include an all-powerful being that exists as nature itself.  We know that the beliefs stemming from this core fundamental belief are heresy, for instance like being able to ask the universe for something and then receive it, but we also know that many pagan views actually originate with some hint of truth behind them.  It’s the characteristic of Satan in which he doesn’t actually create anything but uses what YHWH created to form his own world, luring people into it by including a bit of truth but then quickly adding falsehood to convince people YHWH does not exist.

Clearly, this is all theoretical and by no means are we able to prove it, but all these thoughts combined in my head and connected with what I happened to be reading in scripture this week.  The particular passage that really connected to me was when David had fled from Saul and ended up taking refuge in a cave.  It states that his brothers and the rest of those in his father’s house heard about it and went to him there, but it also then states that he became the leader of all who were in distress, or anguish, in debt, and in discontent (which, interestingly, is literally “bitter in soul” in the Hebrew) (1 Samuel 22:1-2).    

While the scripture doesn’t specify whether or not these people heard the same news as David’s family, regardless of that fact, I found it interesting that they all went to David in a cave.  They gathered to him, in his fear, in his anxiety, and in his uncertainty as to what was going to happen to him (he was always asking YHWH what he should do and what was to come).  And I wondered if everything being in YHWH meant that was how He influenced events in the world, how He held everything together.  We see situations where spiritual messengers from Him visit man, but we know also from scripture that there is another category of influence that doesn’t involve those beings.  Perhaps, this is how He influences someone’s heart, which we see time and time again in scripture, or maybe this is how He communicates with us via our conscience.

Yes, David was a popular person at the time, since news of his success in warfare spread across Israel and especially for his triumph over Goliath, but let’s think about how people act today.  After all, in terms of desires, motivations, and how people react to things, we’re not much different, if at all, from those in ancient Israel.  Do you see people in debt leaving their homes or wherever they’re living to go find someone in a cave just because he is a good fighter?  Can you picture a person in distress today dropping everything in their life to go to a man in a remote place?  And what were all these people thinking?  What were they hoping to get out of going to be with David?

This is where things started to connect for me to Yeshua’s words.  He was speaking to the crowds, but referencing believers, those obedient to YHWH, calling them “the light of the world.”  He also gives the imagery of putting a light on a stand, rather than under a basket, so all are able to use the illumination it provides so they can see.  Then, He connects it to what that means for how we should live in the world.  Being a light leads people to the light, and by that I mean YHWH, Yeshua, and the hope of their salvation.  To put it simply, you become a reflection of the gospel.

Now, you may wonder how I got that from a distressed David in a cave!  It’s the fact that people gathered to him.  David may not have been a light at that point, in fact, other than the occasional light of writing his psalms and speaking to YHWH he was probably full of the darkness of depression and worry, but YHWH still gathered people to him.  Imagine how many more people YHWH would gather to us if we were the light!

The other thing that really stuck out to me about what I was reading is how connected David and Yeshua really are in terms of events in their lives.  It’s hard to get that realization unless you really dig into it, and the only way it came to me was because of how the chronological Bible I’m reading inserts the psalms David wrote into the events in which he wrote them.  The connection between the fact that people gathered to David for leadership in a similar way to people gathering to Yeshua for leadership is not obvious, but when you read on after those events about Saul slaying priests (1 Samuel 22:6-19) and the psalm David wrote about that (Psalm 52), and you see what is the first connection to David being an olive tree, your mind starts putting the pieces together (Psalm 52:8).  

And of course, as things like this usually do, this connects us back to last week’s study.  If you remember, last week we left it at the exciting prospect of looking at how Paul’s definition of “all Israel” improves our understanding of other parts of scripture.  I started to take a look at that, and I have since come to believe that Paul’s definition was not unique to him.  I think all believers at the time had this same concept of “all Israel.”

The reason this connects to David being an olive tree, if you don’t recall from last week’s study, is Paul’s use of the olive root imagery in connection with his view of all Israel (Romans 11:1-24).  David calling himself an olive tree may or may not be where Paul’s explanation originated from, but the commonality between them can’t be ignored.  It’s not just the fact that the same type of tree was chosen, it’s also that Paul’s whole reasoning was centered around a true faith in YHWH and obedience to Him.  The olive root represented that, and those grafted in were only grafted based on having faith in and being obedient to YHWH.  The imagery in David’s psalm is very clearly one of faith and obedience regarding the olive tree as it states his loving devotion to YHWH when talking about being an olive tree flourishing in His house.

As stated earlier, the letters in the New Testament seem to confirm that Paul wasn’t the only one to hold this view about the definition of “all Israel.”  A lot of Christians today try to use the authorship of certain letters to pick and choose the things we should be following today, but when we actually take a look at it, it turns out some of the apostles we thought were only speaking to Jews were actually not discriminating between Jew and Gentile.  

Take Peter, for example.  Regardless of the fact that he was actually the one to first preach to the Gentiles (Acts 15:7), the tendency is for Christians to look at Paul’s statements in Galatians as defining that Peter would only preach/write to Jews and Paul would only preach/write to Gentiles (Galatians 2:7-8).  However, when we look at some of the statements Peter made in his letters, we get a different picture.

In Peter’s first epistle, he writes to his audience about their “passions of former ignorance” (1 Peter 1:14).  The Greek word for “passions” here is one that can mean desires, impulses, or even lusts.  You could possibly take Peter’s statement to mean something related to a typical Jew’s disposition or life at the time, but when you come to his statement in the same letter about his audience not being a people at one time (1 Peter 2:10) you cannot easily explain that away to mean something Jewish.  The Jews, and more broadly Israel, were always a people to YHWH.

Looking at Peter’s addressing of that letter, you do see him use the word “elect,” but he also calls out the “dispersion,” which is more commonly called the Diaspora and typically is understood to be referencing when the people of Israel were dispersed from the land of Israel due to YHWH’s judgment on them for their disobedience.  This is clearly an Israel-related term.  How do we reconcile that he seems to be addressing people related to Israel but also people that were once not a people?  In that statement, he referenced Hosea (Hosea 2:23), and Paul clearly connects that verse to the Gentiles (Romans 9:25).

It's important to recognize though, that this statement by Hosea is amongst prophecy that also clearly references Israel and YHWH’s plan for mercy (Hosea 2).  All these connections call into question the validity of believing in a future restoration of ethnic Israel.  As we stated last week, we know YHWH can do all things and technically could identify everyone that is actually descendant from the twelve tribes, but what if all His prophecy that people take to mean a restoration of ethnic Israel, is actually fulfilled in the body of believers and Paul’s view of “all Israel” is the explanation for how that worked?

Even just on the surface, the implications for that in Christianity are enormous.  What if rather than “standing with Israel” we instead are supposed to focus on bringing Israel to Yeshua just like any other nation?  Personally, I am of the mind that if we call ourselves a Christian nation we should use Christian values when interacting with all other nations, regardless of who they are.  I wonder how different the world would be if we did that.

Let’s not just look at Peter’s letter, though.  It seems James is writing to a nonexistent people in his.  He addresses his letter very blatantly to the twelve tribes, but even in his time there were ten of those tribes that were dispersed and lost among the Gentiles with no way of being reconstituted (James 1:1).  Who was he writing to?  We found out last week that in the mind of the Jew at the time there was a difference between using the term Jew and using the term Israel.  One meant all tribes and the other meant either one or two tribes (as the tribe of Benjamin was sometimes included).  Not to mention the fact that James doesn’t just say Israel, he actually gives the number of tribes he’s writing to!

What can we make of James’ writing except that he had to also be writing to Gentiles and considering them to be a part of the twelve tribes, what Paul called “all Israel”?  And to go along with that, what does that mean for us about picking and choosing things we think are for Jewish believers versus things we think are for Gentile believers?  Remember, way back in a study long ago, we realized that believers in the first century were not only attending synagogue, they were told to follow some guidelines that were based on YHWH’s commandments given to Moses (Acts 15:19-21).  As you can see, the picture of how Jewish and Gentile believers were to be faithful and obedient to YHWH in the exact same way has always been there.  Paul wasn’t kidding when he said there is neither Jew nor Greek in Yeshua (Galatians 3:28), but Christianity today bears little resemblance to how first century believers were worshipping, despite what some scholars or theologians will tell you.

We’ll close this week with a reminder to seek out truth and let the Holy Spirit lead you in that search.  Even in the first century, merely decades or even just years after Yeshua’s death and resurrection, there were false teachers working their way into the body of believers (Jude 1:4).  But when we find that truth, we must remember to live it.  We must be that light not only to the world, but to Christians.  By being that light, YHWH will lead people to you for them to find the truth, just as He led people to David and just as He led people to Yeshua.  

Shabbat shalom and YHWH bless you!

-Rob and Sara Gene