#42 UNDERSTANDING TORAH LIVING + Dr. James Sedlacek

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Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the

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Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding

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God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.

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Now, I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the make the

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Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our creator, better. Hello, hello.

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Welcome everybody to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Bellino. And today, I am so honored to have

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Dr. James Sedlacek back again, this time to discuss the Torah living and which parts of the

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Torah in the Old Testament are we supposed to still live out today as Gentiles within the new covenant of Jesus, you know, the shellfish, the linen clothing, all of these rules, which ones do we keep, which ones do we not?

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Is it an all or nothing situation? I feel like I've never gotten clarity on this. So, Dr. James Sedlacek, you are an honored guest.

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You are always welcome back. Every time you come back on, we have such great conversations. You were just here talking about Revelation and understanding other

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Jewish texts. I'm so excited to see what we uncover today. We've got a great list of questions, but how you doing?

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I am doing great. I'm always excited to get clarity in my faith, especially with the way that you simply lay out all of these explanations.

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To give you a little bit of background, the reason that this is a topic that we're going to talk about today is because in this journey,

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I started discussing with all types of Christians and somebody pulled me aside and we had a long conversation on living biblically, you know, here we are biblically speaking, but are we biblically living?

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And if I am to truly follow the Bible, doesn't that mean I should still obey what's happening in the

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Old Testament? And this includes all of the things listed in Exodus, in Numbers, the types of festivals, the types of food that we are and aren't supposed to eat.

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I feel like it always goes back to Leviticus, you know, man shall not lay with another man, but also should not eat shellfish.

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So it gets a little muddy as an early Christian on, well, what do I not obey? And what do

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I do obey? If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it well. And I think that I've heard whispers that there's a new covenant.

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So I've had discussions with people and they've defended both sides. You know, this is what the church tells us to obey.

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We're not even supposed to go to church. We're supposed to obey the Bible. So let's stop, you know, getting wrapped up in the

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Christianity of it all. Let's just focus on the raw text. But I've also heard that, you know, there's a new covenant when

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Jesus came around. So we're here today to get answers. So how do you feel about this topic? Have you been teaching on it?

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So there's several things I'll explore tonight. One is the, first of all, the idea of what is the

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Torah? What is it for Jews and what is it for Gentiles? Second thing is the law of God universal and the law of God specifically for the

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Jews. And then another theme to explore is the value of the

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Jewish rituals, festivals. And thirdly, that question, did

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Jesus or Paul take the Torah and pitch it? What am I supposed to do with those statements?

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And, you know, and I want to suggest a few things when we get to that topic. I'm prepared to talk about all of those things.

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Perfect. Beautifully laid out. Thank you for that. That really sets us up nicely. So Torah Living, you amazingly, we had a moment a few episodes ago where you were the light bulb moment for me, that the first five books of the

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Bible are the Torah. And for me, that really bridged my religion with my

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Jewish brothers and sisters. And so right now I'm rereading the Bible, starting at the beginning, and it is crazy, the

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God that they experienced then, you know, and I understand they had to bring them out of slavery and paganism, polytheism, all the things, but the

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God that we experience in the gospels is, it's like night and day. So how are we to approach, use, apply the

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Torah as Gentiles and Jews in general? Yes. And a lot of things get put in Jesus's mouth.

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So I want to start with something that the gospel of Matthew has in his mouth.

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Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.

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So whatever we land on in our understanding of the Torah, we should not go to the understanding that Jesus somehow abolished it.

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He was clear that that was not what he was doing. And when you say abolish the law, you mean like come in and say, forget everything that God told

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Moses, I'm writing new rules. He's not saying that. He's not saying that. And he's not saying pitch the

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Torah. That has been an interpretation. And I understand how some of this develops theologically, because, you know, if you understand

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Galatians a certain way, you're going to want to say that about Jesus in the gospels.

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And we'll talk more about that text later. I do teach Galatians as a course. I teach it as a

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Greek exegesis course as well for a different institution. But there's some terms in there that are often translated one way when there's a range of ways to translate them.

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And when you consider Paul within rabbinic milieu, he more likely would have been using that word a different way.

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So it's a translation issue. Yeah. There is a translation issue in the heart of Galatians that causes people to misread

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Jesus in the gospels. Now you think, why does Galatians impact Matthew?

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Well, if you get into a habit of translating something a certain way, you're going to misread it in other texts too.

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All right. First of all, let's talk about the Torah, what it is, and how does it shape

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Jewish life and faith? A lot of people will, when you see the word Torah, it's a

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Hebrew word, a lot of people translating it just write law underneath. That isn't the best translation.

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In Hebrew language, Torah is law, not Torah. Torah is instruction.

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And as soon as we realize the distinction between instruction and law, then we stop misreading all those

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New Testament references to law. Whoa. That's the first time. Wow.

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That's the first time. So Torah is instruction. Think about it. Is the story of God creating the heaven and the earth a law?

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No, it's a story. It's in the Torah. What about the story of Abraham coming from Ur of the

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Chaldeans over to find the land he does not know. Is that a law? No, it's a story.

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Well, it's even hard to call that instruction. Yeah, right. I would call it a story versus like God wrote out the

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Ikea instructions. Right. It's not a kit that you put together with a little instruction manual, but there are probably the best place where I have seen this in modern practice is people who do something called narrative theology.

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And what they do is they look at the story and tell you what's going on in the story through theological lens.

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And that is the way that the stories are instructions for us. A lot of times we read them as if they're flat stories and we want to hurry past them to the exciting parts.

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It's like, well, this is a boring story. Why? What am I supposed to get out of it? Well, a lot of times it is if you're asking the right questions in the story, you will learn things from it.

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Abraham has a choice. What does Abraham choose when he has multiple options? And this is how you understand the beginnings of something called faith.

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Because when you get down to it, how do you define faith in a mosaic environment to Israelites in the wilderness?

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How do you define faith? Well, you can define it by noting Abel's sacrifice, noting

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Abraham's journey, noting Isaac's faithfulness, noting Jacob's obedience, and you start building a case for faith.

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What is faith? Otherwise you don't have a way to explain such a theological concept.

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So you're instructing them by using these case studies, these examples. I like that you said case study.

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Most of the stories in the Torah can be case studies for developing theological thought. Not just revealing

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God's character? Not just, no. Even God's expectations of humans are as well.

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We can determine these from the stories. And we can also determine things that are good against what is best.

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In other words, there's characters that do things in the story they shouldn't have. And one person's reaction is, well, that's in the

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Bible. It must be good. No. What happened to them in the story? It was bad. You mean like Jonah, for example?

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Yeah, running away to Joppa, or Sarah not trusting God's promise that she was going to give birth, sending her maidservant in.

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You know, we often misread the stories because we're not analyzing them in the lens of faith and faithfulness.

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And when we see the failure in faith or faithfulness, that is part of that story, and whatever we pull from it.

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But the instruction books, there are some laws in them. I think there's 613 total commandments.

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We think of the Ten Commandments, so there's a total of 613 in the Book of the

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Torah, in the five books of Moses. But the Ten Commandments are kind of like a gold standard on morality.

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And then all of the other instructions and laws related to the instructions are specific to governing how

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Israel is going to move forward. So including civil practice, legal practice, religious practice, and there's a whole list of things that go into religion because you've got the worship, and then you've got sacrifice and atonement, which is different.

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And so you've got a lot of laws on how all of these things are done. Dress code, food, and a lot of very specific things.

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So just kind of want to think a little bit about the Torah is more than just one category of literature.

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It's got stories, it's got laws, it's got some step -by -step instructions too. Particular sacrifices have multiple steps, and they're told in a step -by -step fashion so you don't get the steps out of order or mess them up.

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Yeah, I think it's a little difficult. Again, this is my Sunday School mind that takes things literally, so you kind of expanded out with these explanations.

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But when I read that Aaron's sons were cast ablaze because they lit some unauthorized incense, to me that seems like a, you must follow this rule, not a suggestion.

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Yeah, I would say these are not suggestions. Okay, so when you say instruction, I definitely interpret that as suggestions, but you're saying when they say

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Torah means instruction, that means a spectrum of legalities versus suggestions.

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Yeah, I would say there's a spectrum in there as well, because there's some wiggle room in places.

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So there's not wiggle room for one area, and that is bringing unclean into the presence of the holy.

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So any time you mix those two, it's kabam. It's a flash. It's a big problem.

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So God sets boundaries, and we didn't think of this being part of tonight's thing, but the thing that goes wrong in the

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Garden of Eden is a disruption of the boundaries God put in place, and so God sets more boundaries and more fine -grained boundaries within the

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Torah to within the Mosaic Code, and so thinking about God and holiness is a system of interconnected boundaries between things.

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So there's a boundary between the Levites and the rest of the Israelites. There's a further boundary between the ordinary

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Levite and the priest, and then there's boundaries in the temple between where people can be and where just select people can be, and so you've got those boundaries.

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Mixing those up is a problem. There's inner circles within the inner circles that God, and that's from a purity standpoint of God wants the holy to remain holy.

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He's very strict about what seeps in and what seeps out. There are certain things that cannot seep at all. Yes, and it's very specific about the ritual that must be performed by the priest prior to doing their priestly duty.

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They cannot bring uncleanness or filth into the temple. They cannot. So all of that is part of it, and the place where we see this in modern societies outside the zone of religion is in medical practice.

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Oh, that's a great point. You don't contaminate a wound. You don't contaminate one patient with the other patient's disease.

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Oh, that's a great example. Most of the restrictions in the workplace for the medical field are very parallel to this kind of thing in the door.

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You don't mix things because it causes harm. It causes destruction or it causes some kind of problem.

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That is such a good headspace to put this in because for me, I'm like, what can I not do and do or else

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I'm going to be set ablaze? It seems like a very restrictive baseline for how to live and be a

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Christian that you almost don't want to even follow it, but then you look at the medical practice and you have to follow those because I'm not about to get

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Yeah, and if the medical personnel are caught not following those rules, they are not treated lightly.

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So they must. They must prevent contamination and they must prevent infection any way that they can.

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Do you think that speaks to the, I want to say, the contagiousness of evil, of sin, of commonality?

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What is being taken off the way that you were trying to avoid a viral contagion in your home that is being also taken off to avoid any contagion in the tabernacle?

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The contagiousness of sin and evil is a big theme in Jewish literature. So the idea that evil can spread through immunity is the same as uncleanness.

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So let's say someone's a leper and they are unclean. Well, they can't go around to all of the social gatherings, shaking hands and hugging each other because what's going to happen is the whole village is going to have lepers.

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This is a necrotic skin tissue problem and it's very contagious. So there were rules to separate those people on the outer edges of the town.

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Their family members would cover up carefully, go set food down nearby, step back so that the lepers could come out and get their food and go back into their tent or wherever they're staying.

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There would be things like lepervilles, little villages for lepers to live. And if they got better, then they came out, they showed themselves to the priest, they were declared clean, and then after a few days, that's the quarantine period, they were allowed to reenter society.

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And you couldn't be more similar with people who had COVID and then waited the seven days post -fever and then began, you know, get back into society and declared safe again.

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Was all of it accurate? Everybody's always in a fizz whether it was exactly accurate. Well, we don't know, but we know it helped some people and it worked in many instances.

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When you say, did it work like the leprosy quarantine period? I was thinking about COVID. A lot of people were arguing whether the seven day quarantine actually makes sense.

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Does it really work? I think I was fever free at three days. You might admit, you know, we don't know all of the things.

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Trying to tell people don't go out until you're fever free means that 30 % of the people won't bother to pay attention.

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So that's why they came up with seven days or in some nations, four days. I forget who did seven, who did four.

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Anyway, it's because of that. They're trying to really trim down the numbers and those went away.

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So thinking about the specific things, well, first of all, let's think about universal things because the

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Torah doesn't begin with the Jews. It begins with Adam, the father of all humanity. He's the mother of all humanity.

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Of course, obviously. Yes. And then it takes us through humanity's sin, multi -generational problems, freeing

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Noah's flood society and the mess that was there, and then judgment. So that we understand that there's a problem in the human race called sin.

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There's a moral thing. It's contagious. In multiple generations, it gets really out of hand.

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And then when judgment comes, it's inevitable. Then there's always, well, presumably always, but generally a way to escape it.

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But there's not many people that found. It was Noah and his family and his sons and their wives.

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It was eight people. It wasn't a lot of people. So anyway, Noah and his family come out and they're still not Jews. This is still the human race as a whole.

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Then you go to Babel. This is still all of the nations. And then there's a mistake made there by the humans and God scatters them, their languages, and we're still not

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Jews. And then God calls Abraham, calls him to a place where he does not know.

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Technically, he's not a Jew either, but he becomes the forefather of the Jews. Until we get to Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, then we can say, okay, he's the first Israelite.

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But Abraham is the father of faith that leads them there because he goes to where he doesn't know.

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God shows him, he goes to the land of Israel. Isaac grows up there. Jacob grows up there.

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And so then Jacob eventually moves with his family to Egypt. Once you get into Egypt, a new problem is there.

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The Israelites were connected to Joseph originally, who was famous, who helped a lot of people, but there came along a

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Pharaoh that didn't really care about this Joseph. He decided to enslave all of the

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Israelites. Then there's the Exodus story, the great escape. And so when you get through here to the story, so far, you haven't had very many laws.

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You're all the way into Exodus. Abraham got some commandments. They were a few.

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That is a lot of history with no official Jews. Yeah. And so when you're in Exodus and they come out of Egypt and Moses begins writing the

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Torah, we can always quibble whether he wrote Genesis from older sources or whether he was putting his own spin on the

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Genesis events. Those kind of quibbles do happen. But the thing is, is when

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Moses compiles this thing, Jewish identity is in these texts. From those earlier stories?

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Yeah. The earlier stories simply set it up, but their earlier individuals are not

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Jews. They are part of the world population. So what would you call everybody before, sorry, with the

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Israelites, you said Joseph was, or yeah, Joseph was the official

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Israelite. And then Moses kind of wrote the laws for the Jewish instructions. What would you, everybody with Tower of Babel and Noah, you just call them the first humans or do they even have like a.

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They didn't have names that stayed in history where their name got recorded. Well, Genesis lists a few tribal names related to the nations, but they're just called the nations.

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And so the term in Hebrew is the nations. And this was what existed after Babel and everybody scattered.

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There were a certain number of nations formed. Yeah. These nations were just always called the nations.

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You wouldn't call them ancient Near Eastern cultures? Some of them would probably be the ancient Near East cultures eventually, but not all of them.

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Some of them would have moved far beyond what we recognize as ancient Near East. Some of them would have been moved into South Africa.

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Some would have moved to what we call Asia. Some would have moved to Russia and across to what is now

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Europe. So the peoples moved from the different nations that came from Babel.

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So the way to understand the Torah is, it is some specific instructions to Jews because they are being called out and separated from the nations.

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And then there is some connection points back to the nations. So this document that we call the

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Torah has two components. What is specifically to those called out from the nations, and then what is back to the nations.

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And so this is one thing that I don't see verbalized much in the New Testament debates, whether Gentile Christians need to pick up their

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Torah and read it and live by some of it or not. You know, those debates don't usually bring this up, but within the

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Torah there was always things that were for Jews specifically and things that were for humanity as a whole, because this story has come down through all of humanity until God began to call out

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Abraham. So you've got two pieces to the Torah, and it's tricky deciding as you read through it, what belongs to each part.

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So I'm relying mostly on Jewish scholarship, what they would see as central to their own necessity and what was central to humanity as a whole.

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There are many ways to decide what pieces go to whom. I couldn't begin to unravel all of the different ways.

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There's not just one, so that's good to know. Yeah, and it can be tricky wading through what does a

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Gentile need to do in the Torah. It isn't a clear -cut subject. That explains my confusion.

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Yeah, sure. It's not a clear -cut subject. However, I think two extremes should be avoided.

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One is to do everything that's in the Torah, because some of the things in the Torah are specific to Jewish identity.

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If you're not a Jew, unless you're going to go join a Jewish synagogue and become a

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Jew, you probably ought to leave those things for Jews to do. Hey listeners, we don't run ads on this podcast because we want to keep the focus on the content you love, but if you believe in what we're doing and want to support, there's a simple way.

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Just contribute whatever feels right for you through the listener support link in the show notes. Your support keeps the

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Bible being talked about, and we're so grateful for it. Thank you so much. Now, back to the show.

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So obvious, but I needed you to say that to understand it. Yeah, so for example,

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I'm not sitting here with a yarmulke on. I've got my headset on. Now, there's a difference if you're going to go fellowship at a

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Jewish synagogue, because you don't do unfellowshipping things while you're having fellowship.

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Romans 14 is a good instruction manual for that sort of thing. But if you decide you want to go fellowship at a

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Jewish synagogue, learn something about Jewish practices, and adhere to those practices in order to have fellowship.

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Wearing of the yarmulke would be ordinary for me if I was in a synagogue. But as a

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Gentile follower of Christ, I wouldn't want to. I've even thought, what about show and tell?

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People don't know these things. Maybe I could put on everything and show them what it's like. Well, that can be fine, but there's also some context where it can be offensive.

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What do you mean show and tell? Like you put on the yarmulke? Like if I go to church and show people what a yarmulke is and show them what a yarmulke is.

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Like a Christian church and show them the Jewish. Okay. It could be a helpful culture exposure, but then the question is, if I'm in a class teaching world religions, am

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I going to do that for every faith group? And I probably am not. So this is one of those honesty check questions.

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If you're not going to dress up as every faith group on the planet to explain them to somebody, you probably shouldn't do it to just mimic

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Jews. It can be offensive. Not all Jews are offended by it, but there have been incidences where some offenses have been understood from it.

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So don't just go doing everything in the Torah and trying to pass yourself off as Jewish if you're not.

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Be honest. Be honest with yourself, what you are, who you are, and what you're trying to accomplish.

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If you decide to have fellowship at a synagogue, then a deeper level of practice is culturally necessary.

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So certain clothes, certain attitudes, certain statements you should say, that kind of thing.

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If you went to visit the Queen of England when she was around, you wouldn't go in saying all kinds of nonsense.

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You would need to learn the proper decorum in the court to see the Queen, right? So the same thing would happen to any member of any other faith.

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So you learn what is typical and socially acceptable and how not to be offensive.

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It helps to have a guide. You know somebody, get to know somebody, and you can learn how not to be offensive. So that's the first thing

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I would say. The other extreme is to take the Torah, put it on a shelf, never open it, never do anything inside it.

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Which as a Sunday school Christian, I did. Many, many have. And I have had excellent teachers teach me that the only thing

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I needed to worry about was Matthew to Revelation, and they weren't sure about Revelation. Okay.

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It's common. It's commonly taught. And I tried to make sure in my own education path that I gave equal attention to both the

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Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, both in my language preparation and in my understanding of the contents of what's in each.

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I just did that because I thought, why not? It seemed to be a good thing to do. Double the workload.

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Why not? Yeah, there's that. But the payoff is that I immediately and repeatedly was able to connect dots between the two that a lot of folks who were just in one or the other weren't talking about.

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So that's the other thing. And just to reiterate, because we talked about this a couple episodes, like a while ago, is when you go into either becoming a pastor or a theologian, you only study the

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New Testament, or you only study the Old Testament. Because I think a common churchgoer thinks that a pastor knows the entire

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Bible and how it works. And that's just not how the education is set up. Hey guys,

29:11

Cass here. Are you feeling like your faith life is on buffering mode, waiting for that next level, but stuck in spiritual dial -up?

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29:40

Because you can't raise your hand in church. Biblically Heard. No. In seminaries, most seminaries anywhere, a person goes, let's say they take the gold standard while they're there.

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Not everybody does, but let's say they take the gold standard. That is a Master's of Divinity. That is the degree for pastor preparation, probably for 500 years.

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And that's the gold standard. In the Master of Divinity program, you would typically be an

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Old Testament major, a New Testament major, a theology major, a practical ministries major, a counseling major, more or less lately.

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Those five things are not the same thing. And depending on which track you did, the other four are almost foreign subjects to you.

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Oh, in a Master's of Divinity, you only pick one of those five? One of the five. That is standard. And probably 96 % or better of our pastors in training, that's what they had to choose from.

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And do you think they typically go towards like the ministries route? It depends because practical ministries is very appealing because it helps you do a lot of functions of a pastor better.

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Mm -hmm. So that one's appealing. And you can divide that one further into adult ministry or youth ministry.

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They have tracks for both, which is fine. So in that case, you're not even touching the Old Testament. Not much.

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You may touch on topics that are contained in the Old Testament, but you're not learning the biblical languages or how to explain the

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Bible as a whole. That piece of the process or content area is missing.

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So to bring us back, today, we can't take all of it and we can't take none of it.

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But as a Gentile today, I still want to be obedient. And as you said at the beginning,

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Jesus came to fulfill the law. So which part do I need to obey? Do I need to start doing my jubilee?

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Do I need to start planning for that or my festival of Let me go into what's specific to Jews and what is universal first.

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The mitzvot, or the 613 commandments, as we mentioned earlier, are primarily understood as part of the covenant between God and Israel.

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So these are covenant stipulations. In other words, there's an overarching covenant, and these are the amendments.

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That's not the best word. The line items that belong to that covenant. So we have to understand that individual laws are elements of a much bigger covenant.

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So it applies uniquely to Israel. So within this, there's the ritual observances, the dietary laws,

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Sabbath specifics, the circumcision. And for an issue that comes up in the

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New Testament, this is one that does. Circumcision versus uncircumcision is a big thing.

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And so paying attention to the whys, that Paul and some others are suggesting to the

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Gentiles not to go get circumcised, it's because in Jesus's body, he made a way for both

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Jews and Gentiles to come to God. That's the language that's there.

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And so if a Gentile is saying, oh, let me go get circumcised, it's as if he already has a way to God this way.

33:16

So why is he trying to go this way when he doesn't have to? Is there like a way to read the scripture and be like, okay, shellfish just for the

33:23

Israelites. Okay. Homosexuality, universal. Or my reading goes wrong, and I'm characterizing that the wrong way.

33:30

Well, there's a couple of things that several scholars have used. For example, if it's addressed in the

33:38

New Testament and the Old Testament, it probably still matters. And I know most people aren't comfortable with probably, but that's the way that it's verbalized in scholarship.

33:49

And that's because nobody wants to be a hundred percent certain they're right, at least not scholars, not the real ones.

33:54

Pretty big claim to claim God there. Yeah. It's most likely still matters to Gentile Christians.

34:01

Now some things that rabbis through the centuries, we're talking about pre -New

34:07

Testament and post -New Testament for Gentiles to do. There are seven

34:13

Noahide laws. We can find traces of them in the stories of Noah, which predate the

34:19

Jews, which predate Babel, which means it applies to all human everywhere. Okay.

34:26

That's a good way to put it. No idolatry. This was given to Noah. Yeah. In other words, the stories of Noah provide examples of doing these things well.

34:37

Okay. Okay. I'm back with you. Yeah. And so no idolatry. Worship God and God alone.

34:43

No idols. That one is universal. We see it in stories before there are such things as Jews.

34:50

And we see it come up again and again in the New Testament. Most of the little phrases we have trouble understanding in Revelation have to do with mixing idols with the new

35:01

Christian fellowships. Get them out of here. Don't have anything to do with idols. Stay away.

35:06

Prohibition of murder. Murder was a problem in Cain and Abel's story. And murder is a problem in the

35:13

Abraham narratives as well. And you can see that it isn't the right thing to do before you ever get to Exodus and Moses and the

35:22

Ten Commandments. So this is a command that's understood for all people everywhere.

35:29

Theft. Prohibition of theft. Prohibition of sexual immorality.

35:35

Now, this one is tricky to define outside the Torah, outside of the

35:40

Mosaic formulation, because the way people used to be married in antiquity is different than how people are married today.

35:50

And how divorces were in antiquity is different from how they work today. There's some muddy areas there that are not easily solved.

35:59

But at a minimum, it meant faithfulness to somebody as opposed to unfaithfulness.

36:05

And that's the thing that rabbis from antiquity all the way to the present have been linking with idolatry.

36:13

Unfaithfulness in marriage, unfaithfulness to God. And they've been linking those two discussions.

36:20

Some of the exact nitty -gritty details are not always brought up.

36:26

But the basic idea of unfaithfulness in marriage, that's the piece of it that's emphasized the most heavily.

36:33

Blasphemy. The prohibition of saying that God is evil or that something about God is unholy.

36:40

Mixing what is holy with the profane. That's the two things that you got to keep separate, the unclean and the holy.

36:48

Wouldn't that mix with idolatry as well? Yeah, it's a problem with idols. It's mixing the unholy with the holy.

36:54

It goes back to that system of boundaries. And so whatever boundaries

37:00

God has created for his own being, we should respect those, whether we're Gentile or Jew. And whatever boundaries

37:08

God has created for our own behavior next to our fellow man, we should respect those because we should respect that our fellow man is made in God's image, just like we are.

37:19

So if I say, I'm worshiping God, I don't need to worry about the Torah, but I can go murder my neighbor.

37:26

Well, then you can go killing off the image of God and you still worship God. It's like there's something at odds with yourself here on this.

37:35

So it really doesn't work. It's interesting. It seems like almost the idolatry, the murder, the blasphemy, the adultery, you can do all of those actions to God.

37:45

You can. Spiritual adultery is often the bigger theme when you start seeing it in rabbinic literature.

37:52

So I think maybe I'm looking for clues on how to navigate this when you read it.

37:57

Like, okay, which one applies to me? Can I do this to God? Do you think that's a good tag for me to use?

38:05

Yeah, I think that's a good principle. A lot of times in theological reading, I've used this thing, there's a specific application here, but there's an underlying universal principle.

38:17

And as soon as you identify that universal principle, it's much easier to know what to do with each specific circumstance.

38:24

It's the universal principle. And for me, it's you don't mix the holy with the unholy.

38:30

If you got unholy going on, you need to get that stuff cleaned. Now go be in fellowship with holy.

38:38

We have to think about spending time with God the same way we do with going to grandma's dinner.

38:45

Everybody set out the nice tablecloth, the plates, and you're not going to go in there with your muddy boots and put them on the table.

38:52

It's not going to work. And so you have a holy event to go to or be part of or be in fellowship with, get ready.

39:01

The other one is a marriage metaphor. You see the marriage and the wedding feast, which is part of the marriage ceremony in Jewish custom.

39:10

And I think in many cultures, customs have a feast after the wedding, right? Well, you have the bride and groom are the ones who get together and plan this thing and set up what's going to happen and how it's going to happen, who's going to sit where.

39:24

If you go in and you want to pick your own table and you want to sit between the bride and groom, put your feet on the table, you're probably going to get escorted out.

39:34

Yeah. Yeah. And we have to think that some human divine interactions are like that.

39:41

God's got his way. He wants us to do it. Let's just do it that way. It's not that hard. All right.

39:47

So we have prohibition of eating meat. Just like the last thing on that, I think that is such a great explanation that you just have to take at face value.

39:56

There is no room for, well, I think God can, and this is like an extreme version and it's up for debate.

40:02

I'm not saying that this is the rules, but like, well, God can love me in my sweatpants at church. I've definitely worn sweatpants at church, okay?

40:07

I'm not going to say that I've never done that, but it is like the extreme example of that, of like, well,

40:13

God can take me in this way because it's God and God loves me. So anything goes because he loves me.

40:18

Whereas in some circumstances there is a decorum. Yeah. And we also have to remember that when the

40:25

Israelites walked out of Egypt, God didn't land all this on them at once. Oh, what do you mean? This was stuff that was gradually revealed and practiced and trained.

40:35

The whole time they're in the wilderness, they're still not in Israel. It's 40 years of preparation to go into Israel and do some of these things.

40:42

Some of them are in waiting. I guess when I read the original, like Moses goes up, he gets the

40:48

Ark of the Covenant, he comes down, he sees that they're already worshiping something else. 3 ,000 people are slayed.

40:53

He goes back up. God gives him a new one. To me, that's like the span of six months. Am I reading that wrong?

40:59

There are some things that happen rapidly, but not every single clause of the

41:04

Torah is something they can actually do yet. There are some things that have to wait until they get into the land and do.

41:11

Yeah. I imagine building the tabernacle according to these exact dimensions took quite a while. And the

41:17

Feast of the Firstfruits, one of the first, we're going to talk about those a little bit, but the Feast of the Firstfruits, you can't do that until you've harvested something.

41:24

You can't harvest anything in the wilderness, so you've got to wait 40 years to be able to do that one. Wow. Yeah.

41:30

So it's like some of this stuff is coming over time.

41:35

And the other thing is, is to a certain degree, God helps us get ready for the next phase.

41:43

And so trusting Him to help us get ready for that is part of the journey.

41:49

You've got a sermon in there somewhere. Yeah. I think sometimes people think, okay, I read the list.

41:56

I'm going to do the list to the best of my ability. Ah, that's horrible trying to do all this stuff. You're going to have an overload and a meltdown.

42:04

It's like, maybe take a step back and realize that all of us are people in process.

42:11

We're in process and approach this honestly. And realize that for Gentile Christians, some of this is muddy water.

42:18

How much do I do? How much do I not do? And you're saying that sometimes that's a process. Yeah. That's like a sanctification process that we're in.

42:25

We're not supposed to get it right on day one. We won't. Yeah. We won't. So assuring.

42:31

Wow. So the other thing is in Jewish understanding of the Torah, Gentiles are invited to do these things.

42:39

So keep that in mind as well. Now, eating meat from a living animal, and by that we mean an animal that still has its blood in it.

42:48

So this was prohibited in Noah's day. Like a bloody steak? Is that literally what we're talking about?

42:55

That's tricky. It's tricky to get into because there's some Noah given, this is a command

43:00

God gave Noah when he opened up meat as part of the food humans should eat.

43:06

Noah 9 -4, or Genesis 9 -4 in the story of Noah. He says, do not take of the animal while its lifeblood is still in it.

43:14

Now, that's the question. What is that usually? And do not eat animals that are strangled. Well, what is the deal with strangling?

43:23

If you do strangle an animal, the blood doesn't run out, and the blood sits in the meat so that when you cut it up and cook it, you're going to have lots of blood in there.

43:33

So the Jewish approach to this was cutting of the animal in a specific way so that it bleeds out, so that the blood is not in the meat, and then you can eat your steak.

43:46

Why can't you eat blood? Is it because blood is just as a whole considered unclean, or is there like a bigger element there?

43:52

It's a bigger element. It has to do with life and the meaning of life, and if you're consuming life while you've killed something, you have mixed the metaphor of life and death, and you shouldn't mix life and death.

44:04

It's got a lot to do with life and death. And so if blood is supposed to be the source of life, don't make it become a celebration of death.

44:13

So if lifeblood flows out of an animal, let it go to the ground and just eat the meat. Well, how does that pertain to a woman's menstruation?

44:22

There's differences, but in Leviticus, that becomes an issue for uncleanness, and if you think about the ancient world and people's bathing customs and things like that, it's easy to imagine how there could be some medical uncleanness that comes in.

44:39

So that was more like hygienic versus this is more like symbolic of life and death. Yeah, life and death.

44:45

So blood is the life force, and for any way that we can, we should respect it as a source of life and not use it as some other thing.

44:53

I can see how maybe people can start idolizing blood then, like the women that paint blood on their face and do weird things with that.

45:01

That becomes an idol. Well, there are pagan rituals. Some of them, not all of them, involve drinking a bowl of blood from the sacrifice animal.

45:10

And so in God's word, that is prohibited. Because it's the direct celebration of death while you're living.

45:18

Yeah. And it kind of gives us a way to think about how do we treat animals?

45:25

Do we treat them as a resource, or do we respect the fact that they have a life? And that comes in there.

45:31

And this is something told to Noah, and it's interesting because in the New Testament, when they're trying to sort out in Jerusalem what

45:39

Gentiles should do versus Jews, this one comes up again. It comes out of the

45:44

Jerusalem Council to be given to all churches. So we shouldn't be eating bloody steaks?

45:50

Well, the bloody steak part, that's the tricky thing. What is the difference between a rare steak and a steak engorged with blood?

45:58

There is a big difference. And you may not know, you may have to ask somebody who's cooking it, was this animal drained?

46:07

Oh, so it's more preparation. This is in the preparation. Got it. Okay. But having a rare steak, it's going to have some red juice.

46:13

It doesn't mean that it's blood that was just left in the meat that were drained. Very interesting.

46:19

Most butchers are going to drain it because it's sanitary and it's easier to preserve the meat if you do so.

46:25

They're not going to leave blood in the steak. So for a Gentile to abide by that law, that's actually pretty easy to do.

46:34

And the other one is to have governance and a fair way of executing judgment and justice.

46:41

And even though the specifics might differ, there are several traits of human government that are in the

46:47

Torah that a lot of governments today actually use. Democratic process, trained judges, no bribes to the judge or they lose their job, all kinds of things that are exactly what

47:02

I read in the Torah. And yet this is how you decide cases and what's fair. And so there were restrictions in the

47:10

Torah that they didn't violate, but within the realm of where they did make decisions, the village elders did these things democratically.

47:17

So the idea of establishing a local government, a county level, city level, town level that is representative of your population and democratic in its process was normal.

47:30

And it's specified in the Torah. And today many governments do this. And so we imitate a lot of the things in the

47:36

Torah without actually thinking that we do. And so a fair system of judgment, a fair system of trial, and a representative system of legislation.

47:48

And so those are all in the Torah as well. Now, the exact details of it are different because they have to appoint certain people from each tribe, and then within each tribe, from each clan.

47:59

So in most of our societies, we don't know what tribe or clan we're from. So we just randomly elect people as we choose.

48:07

But we also don't have tribal and clan lands the way that Israel did.

48:13

And so that's still very similar. And it's still doing a lot of the things that are in the

48:19

Torah. So I'm thinking in some areas of legal, some areas of judicial, some areas of moral, we have direct commands even before the time of Moses or stories that gave examples of these things.

48:34

And then we also see them pop up again in the New Testament. So the ones that do pop up,

48:40

I would take those as mandatory. You see them popping up in Noah's day, you see them in the

48:46

Torah, you see them in the New Testament. They are inside the covenant and outside that covenant.

48:53

Well, wouldn't you just say to that person, like, wouldn't it be fair just to read the New Testament then and obey what pops up there?

49:00

Well, you can do that to an extent. But one of my later points is going to be that there's going to be a lot of the

49:07

Bible we just won't understand unless we have familiarized ourselves with some of the

49:13

Torah. Oh, bringing us back to the education aspect of it. Okay. Yeah.

49:19

And the Torah has a lot of things that were never mandated to Gentiles in the

49:25

New Testament that are actually quite useful. And I want to Noahide stuff, the ones that were around from Noah's day to through the

49:37

New Testament, thinking about the festivals and the holy days and things like that.

49:44

So chronologically, we have Pesach, and I'm starting in April rather than in Rosh Hashanah, but Pesach is there.

49:53

Unleavened bread is next. First fruits, Shavuot, that's the

49:58

Feast of Weeks. We often call it Pentecost. Rosh Hashanah, Jewish New Year, Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, Sukkot, the

50:08

Day of the Feast of Tabernacles, Hanukkah, and Purim. Purim is the one that lands usually in February or March.

50:16

So you've got those, that's the chronological order of them. But what are they for?

50:23

What do they do? What can I benefit from by doing them or at least familiarizing myself with them?

50:29

First of all, when you read your New Testament, these events are connected to almost every event in the

50:36

New Testament. And if you don't realize what they are or the chronological cycle of them, then it's very hard to understand why

50:45

Jesus is saying half the things he does. I don't even, because you can think of Passover and maybe

50:51

Yom Kippur and definitely the Sabbath, but I don't remember him ever referencing the Jubilee or the first fruits or the

50:58

Day of Trumpets. And some of the theology that Paul is saying in his letters don't make sense unless we know some of the others.

51:05

And so Jesus mentioned some, Paul mentioned some, John in Revelation ties some of these together in the prophetic vision.

51:13

And so it's good to know not only what each one is, but be familiar with the cycle.

51:20

And for a Gentile Christian, some of these are excellent to participate in to help us, to remind us regularly throughout the year of what

51:30

God has done and will do for us. Oh, so it's okay as a

51:36

Gentile to celebrate this. Yeah. There isn't any one of them that a Gentile can't celebrate.

51:42

But there's, the Gentile doesn't have to celebrate them to be obedient. There's never been a requirement for a

51:48

Gentile to celebrate these. But they're always welcome to.

51:54

And it's interesting when Gentile Christians want to use the label Christ follower.

52:01

I'm a Christ follower. Sometimes I'll ask them, oh, so you've been to Hanukkah. And it's like, no,

52:06

I've never done that before. I said, oh, but you said you were a Christ follower. Jesus went to Hanukkah and it's in the

52:13

Gospel of John. If you're going to follow Christ, follow Jesus, do what Jesus did. There's some things you might know that he did.

52:21

One of the things Jesus was known for is fulfilling the Torah, doing the

52:27

Torah. There's some, we'll get more to this on the next segment, but there's some words that are often poorly translated.

52:33

And because we have a, I want to call this a knee -jerk reaction. Every time we see the word law, knee -jerk, oh, that's the

52:41

Torah. It isn't always. There's so many different things to call law that we need to be aware of a wider array of possibilities.

52:50

And Torah's best translation isn't law, it's instruction. So even if law sometimes gets used to translate

52:57

Torah, it's done so because it is an option to translate it that way.

53:02

If the focus is on the legal code, then many times people use that word to refer to the

53:09

Torah. But you talk to rabbis generally today that are English speaking, you're going to find out that there's a little aversion to saying law.

53:18

And it's not the best translation because you're only talking now about the 613 commandments.

53:26

Perhaps you're not talking about all of Torah anymore. And so it's not the best translation, and it's not what law in the

53:34

New Testament always means. It doesn't always mean Torah. So we'll say more about it, but the

53:41

Passover, to not know what Passover is or Pesach, it becomes very difficult to interpret the last week of Jesus's ministry in all four of the

53:53

Gospels. Jesus is participating in Passover as he has the

53:59

Last Supper of Jesus, as he enters into his trials and all of this. This has been

54:04

Passover this is what's going on that week. And catching the details for what is

54:11

Jewish Passover to a Jewish person and connecting it to what's happening in Christ's final week is so insightful to understand what is happening there.

54:22

So we have this in Exodus 12, 13, also Deuteronomy 16, the details on how to commemorate.

54:30

But what's it for? It's there to commemorate getting out of Egypt, leaving slavery behind.

54:35

Also Divine Providence, when there doesn't seem to be a way in sight how you're going to get out of slavery.

54:44

First of all, Moses is almost killed as a baby. He barely makes it, you know, by a miracle floating on a basket in a river full of crocodiles.

54:55

He somehow isn't eaten. And then a princess of Egypt finds him, and then his story begins.

55:01

So he's got this to start with, and then he murders a guy. I mean, and he's known for the murder.

55:08

They're hunting for him. He has to flee the country. Not an optimal hero for the story.

55:13

Chances are he won't get to do anything. But yet he's the one God calls. He comes back to Egypt, and he stands down the mighty

55:20

Pharaoh with his brother at his side, Aaron. And they do what

55:26

God says, and the gods of Egypt are defeated one by one in a showdown in front of Pharaoh.

55:33

Then the Israelites walk out after the tent is in play. Even then, it's uncertain.

55:39

They get out there, they come up against the sea, and then there's Pharaoh's army right behind them. There isn't any reason they should have succeeded.

55:48

And when we realize that there isn't any reason that they should have succeeded, then we begin to see how much they had to depend on God for the ends.

55:57

When Jesus is saying, Father, if it be your will, take this cup from me, we have to realize that he may not be able to unsee or fully see how

56:08

God has got his back. It's mirroring the same dependence on the divine for an answer, because this thing looks humanly impossible.

56:17

Not to mention being dead and rising again. I mean, that's that whole thing. No, I just spoke with Dr.

56:25

Gary Yates, and we were talking about Moses, and he's like, well, Moses is such a prominent figure because the Exodus is such a huge event.

56:33

People being freed from slavery, walking to the promised land. We don't see an event that big until the resurrection.

56:40

So you saying that this was occurring during Passover. It's no accident.

56:47

It's no accident that these two things are coinciding. Yeah. I can't think it's accidental.

56:53

Is the end of the world going to happen on Easter? Because that's one certain thing. Well, it's one of the options some people have thought, but I don't know.

57:03

I don't have a firm opinion on it. Of course. Wow. The interconnectedness and the complexity of God is just awe -striking.

57:10

We have next is the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Its purpose, it has to do with haste.

57:15

Everything needs to be done in a hurry. This was what they ate and packed for the flight out of Egypt.

57:22

Well, you don't have time to make the bread rise before you bake it, and you got to do things in a hurry.

57:28

So you don't do things that cause the bread to need to be raised. So it's unleavened bread.

57:33

It's flat bread. It's like a right? So this is where you can go to a store and get matzah.

57:40

Matzah is the Jewish unleavened bread. They sell it in boxes all the time. Some people take it for communion, because it is the actual bread that was used.

57:50

It's not the rice wafer that most churches have, or the little, I don't know what it is, but it's a little cracker about that tall, and it's square, and I'm not 100 % sure it's unleavened, because it looks like it raised up a half -inch.

58:06

I don't know. Anyway, a lot of folks are doing various things with it, but it's supposed to be unleavened bread at Passover.

58:13

So when Jesus breaks bread and drinks wine with his disciples, it's matzah that he's breaking, and it's that bread.

58:21

So what is the purpose of this bread? It's all about things are done in a haste. And so when he's finished, well, at some point in the meal, what does he tell

58:30

Judas to do? Go and hastily do what you gotta do. But it's the theme of the bread is haste, and it's like this stuff should catch our eye and realize, yeah, these things connect, but it doesn't catch our eye because sometimes translations in the

58:48

New Testament are different than the old, and we don't catch them. Because you only read your New Testament. Yeah.

58:54

And then the other one is we don't realize that these events have significance in the moment, and all of these events in Jesus's ministry are connected to the

59:05

Jewish cycle of rituals and feasts. I am so grateful for you to point these things out.

59:11

I don't know if my mind could have wrapped that far from the Old Testament to the New Testament. So thank you for spelling this out.

59:17

You're welcome. So the purpose of the matzah or the unleavened bread, the festival is called

59:23

Chag HaMatzot. Matzot is plural for matzah, but the point of it is to let go, have some spiritual preparation, and let go of pride, puffiness, and ego.

59:35

And when Jesus goes out to the garden and says, not my will, but thine, preparation, spiritual preparation, letting go of self and focusing on what

59:45

God wants instead of what we want. It really does all point back to Jesus. Oh, my Lord. Feast of the

59:50

First Fruits, Tikarim. This is also in the same time period as Passover, but its purpose is gratitude for agricultural harvest.

59:59

Now, this is not the harvest of vegetables. This is an early harvest of one of the grains that you can make bread from.

01:00:08

And so it happens in April. It happens early in the year. And so it's a time of offering

01:00:15

God what came first, and then being thankful for what you have. And so a lot of times the idea of thanksgiving, the idea of dependence on the divine providence, sending the rains on time, because that very first harvest can go bad.

01:00:33

Because if those early rains don't hit when they should, you're not going to get that early harvest in.

01:00:38

You've got to wait for the next. Because it won't even sprout, or because it'll go rotten. Nothing will happen.

01:00:44

You don't have enough moisture in the soil to make anything happen. So you miss a whole cycle. And so it's the first barley harvest, actually, the same one that's mentioned in the story of Ruth.

01:00:55

And just to kind of connect some things here, when God was bringing people together to be the ancestors for the divine king, divinely appointed

01:01:04

King David, he's bringing them together at this First Fruits. Oh, my gosh.

01:01:09

Yeah. And so when Jesus is joining himself with his disciples, and he's talking about,

01:01:17

I'm about to go away, and someone's coming, a spirit is coming who will teach you all things.

01:01:24

Well, this is happening at the same time Ruth and Boaz are getting to know each other, and they're going to bring forth

01:01:31

David eventually. She brings forth Obed, who begets Jesse, who begets David. But that's the story of Ruth.

01:01:37

The reason we have it in the Bible is it's an origin story for David. How did

01:01:43

David get here? Who were his ancestors? Oh, we got this story of Ruth, and this is the best one to point to for David's origin story.

01:01:52

And so we have that, and things happen. The whole story goes down at the bakery.

01:01:58

That's when it happens. And farmers would bring their produce to the temple. And again, we're talking about that first barley harvest.

01:02:05

Next is the Feast of Shavuot. This word means weeks, plural, because it's seven weeks after the first one when we started.

01:02:15

So seven weeks plus one day, right? So it's 50 days. And this word in Greek means 10 days.

01:02:21

Well, what happens at Shavuot? It commemorates the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

01:02:28

That was the main festival for that. Because that took 40 days? Because that's when

01:02:33

Moses was on Mount Sinai at this time of the year, getting the Torah, getting the first part of the

01:02:40

Torah from God. And so the Feast of Shavuot celebrates that moment. So the

01:02:45

Feast of Shavuot, 50 days exactly after Passover. So you go seven weeks, and then the next day is the big day.

01:02:55

It celebrates divine revelation. It celebrates the covenant between God and Israel.

01:03:01

It traditionally involves an all -night Torah study, which is culminated in the morning. And it also connects to the next harvest, which is wheat.

01:03:10

So the barley harvest is done. The wheat harvest is now ready. So the time between your first barley harvest and your first wheat harvest is about 50 days.

01:03:21

This is when the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples who were up all night fasting and praying for the reception of the

01:03:29

Spirit. But the Holy Spirit falls on them on this day, on the day of Pentecost, or the end of the

01:03:35

Shavuot. And so they get anointed with the Holy Spirit on the day of wheat harvest.

01:03:41

For the Festival of the Weeks? Yes. During the time of the Festival of Weeks, is it also at the same time that Pentecost occurs?

01:03:48

Pentecost, yes, yes. Pentecost is the name of the 50th day. So it happens right there.

01:03:54

There's preparations. There's like some type of, you know how like a lot of Christians celebrate

01:03:59

Lent? Well, it's kind of like this through Shavuot. And then the 50th day is the main celebration.

01:04:06

So once the wheat harvest comes, because mostly your wheat harvest is the one you're going to turn into bread the most.

01:04:14

So it's now you break out and you have some kind of celebration. But there's an all -night

01:04:19

Torah study in the night prior to the morning. And so it's like the disciples who are in the upper room fasting and praying, they are participating in this anticipating something new.

01:04:33

So on the celebration of the day God speaks to Moses with the

01:04:38

Torah, the Holy Spirit speaks through the disciples to everyone else.

01:04:44

This is so meta to listen to disciples celebrating an ancient festival, and now us celebrating

01:04:51

Passover that occurred when disciples were celebrating a different festival. Like this is, now we celebrate

01:04:59

Easter at the same time that they were celebrating Passover. This is wild.

01:05:05

It's stacked. This is insane. Every time Christians partake of communion at church, they are celebrating one piece of the meal

01:05:15

Jesus was celebrating with his disciples in the last supper. Jesus was celebrating the

01:05:20

Seder service, which belongs to Passover. And it's a long meal. It's got four moves throughout the course of the meal.

01:05:29

But it's at the third course where he would have stood up and said this about the wine and the wafer.

01:05:37

But these words are not part of the typical Seder service. They're part of a marriage vow. And he uses them in the middle of this because this is the way he's inaugurating with his disciples a new pact or treaty or covenant as we call it.

01:05:52

The like, take my body is part of a Jewish marriage vow? Yeah.

01:05:57

Oh my gosh. And it's a pledge between the spouses in a marriage vow.

01:06:03

And so that's the words that Jesus is using between himself and his disciples. And this is why years later,

01:06:10

Paul is talking about the groom and the bride with Christ in the church. Sorry, that like made me so emotional to hear.

01:06:18

I don't know what that was. Whoa. Yeah. Paul uses two metaphors frequently to talk about Jesus and the church.

01:06:25

He talks about the head and the body. And then he also talks about the bride and the groom. And what

01:06:30

Jesus does in the middle of that Seder service is evoke the words of a marriage vow, joining himself to his believers.

01:06:38

Wow. I have never known that. That is so beautiful. Wow. And so it's like today, modern

01:06:44

Jewish wedding ceremonies will use those verses from the Seder service? No, not necessarily.

01:06:50

They will use the traditional wedding vows and they'll use Seder service as a separate thing.

01:06:57

So what Jesus did there is he brought words from the marriage vow and used them during the third course of the

01:07:03

Seder service. So he mixed two things because he was trying to do something different that night. But your typical

01:07:10

Jewish ceremony would keep the marriage vow in just the wedding ceremony and then have the

01:07:15

Seder meal as its own thing. So they would keep them as separate things. So that's the words of it.

01:07:22

And so what I would invite Christians to do, Gentile Christians to do, is at least once celebrate the whole

01:07:29

Seder service with your community. Do that once. Bring somebody in that knows what it is.

01:07:36

Usually any of the Messianic Jewish groups can do this quite well and they're comfortable doing it.

01:07:41

You may find someone that's not Messianic Jewish, different group of Jewish, that might be willing to do it. But I know the

01:07:47

Messianic Jewish groups are comfortable doing it. Most of the ones I know are Messianic Jewish.

01:07:53

So participate in a full Seder service. Would this be during Easter then or before Easter?

01:07:59

Yeah, it would be around Easter time. It would be during Pesach or the Passover. And if they do it, they will be sure to reenact

01:08:09

Jesus's version of it. Oh my gosh, I can't handle that. And it's wonderful. You should do it at least once.

01:08:15

I would say do it more than once, but definitely do it once so that you have an idea what communion is even all about.

01:08:23

Because most people have no idea. They're doing it, but they don't know what it is or what they're doing, or even what it's a part of.

01:08:29

But the communion service, Holy Communion, Eucharist, whatever name you're used to calling it, Lord's Supper, the two things that are done in Christian circles is you have the wine, you have the wafer, you have a few words to say for both, a moment to reflect internally on preparing oneself for God, and then you take the wafer and the wine.

01:08:50

This is such a small part of the Seder service. You should get the whole experience.

01:08:56

That's what I would say, because a lot of connections between things are lost the way things are explained typically in Christian churches.

01:09:06

So with all these festivals, I think that it was very clear at the beginning that you were essentially saying, listen, as a

01:09:12

Gentile, you don't have to, but I think it's nice to. It's nice to have, especially when you see the understandings and overlaps between the

01:09:19

Old Testament and the New. I feel a lot less convicted as a

01:09:24

Christian that hasn't celebrated any of these festivals, but also a lot more excited to actually celebrate them.

01:09:30

I think it was through that connectivity and that overlap and the stacking that you really mapped out.

01:09:36

I don't think I would have figured that on my own. I don't think that's preached enough. And so I'm really grateful for the awareness because now

01:09:43

I feel like I can celebrate these things with the full awareness of why and how.

01:09:49

And I'll have an answer to my mother when she asks, am I becoming Jewish? You know what I mean? I can do that within my

01:09:54

Christian faith now while still honoring what I am and honoring what I'm not. Do you think, what would be your biggest message to the

01:10:01

Christians that are trying to honor? Because I think the Jewish, they know, they kind of stay within their lane. They know exactly the

01:10:07

Torah, but I think as Christians, since the Torah is included, what would be your message to them as far as knowing what they are, knowing what their art, and not offending anybody, but still obeying

01:10:18

God? I think the healthiest approach to investigate these things as a group is to investigate them with the idea,

01:10:27

I'm doing this to help identify better with Jesus because he did this.

01:10:32

And he did this in order to do certain things. But if I do this, then I can better understand what he was trying to tell everybody.

01:10:41

And that brings us right back to that Matthew quote, that he was not to abolish the law. He was here to fulfill it.

01:10:46

Yeah. And there's two more festivals, Sukkot and Hanukkah. And Sukkot is one of my favorites.

01:10:52

It's the Feast of Tabernacles. No, it's all right. It's quite all right. Because this is the one where people go out and they build a tent or bring a tent and they stay in it for a few days.

01:11:03

And that sounds very bizarre to us. It's like, how is that religious? It sounds like camping. But it's like, it's celebrating the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.

01:11:13

When they were headed to somewhere, they knew where they were headed, but they weren't able to enter. Their kids would get to go in, but not them.

01:11:21

And so they were celebrating the, let's make sure our kids get there, even if we can't.

01:11:27

We're going to die in the wilderness, but we're going to make sure our kids get there. Why do I feel like that's not said outright?

01:11:33

And the thing is, is Jesus had some important words to say, because at Sukkot, you're celebrating several of the key wilderness things.

01:11:43

So the Ten Commandments, particularly the water from the rock and the manna from heaven. That's the three big things that you celebrate.

01:11:50

And in the Gospel of John, this is what Jesus is doing. He's at Sukkot when he says,

01:11:57

I'm the bread of life. I'm the living water. That one will keep you spinning.

01:12:04

But when Jesus is saying these things, they're not abstract things. These are connected to the festival he's at and the feast he's celebrating.

01:12:12

Don't they get misconstrued as cannibalism? No, no, it's not cannibalism.

01:12:19

Jesus is taking people's attention and saying, you're focused on the literal bread and that literal water.

01:12:25

I want you to re -steer your focus to the spiritual one. Oh, my wheels are spinning.

01:12:32

I'll leave off the Hanukkah and the Purim only because they were not in the

01:12:37

Torah. They come later. They're very important festivals as well. Purim celebrates the theme of surviving persecution.

01:12:45

The Book of Esther is all about the first Purim. And then Hanukkah is the last one that's added to the list, but it occurs before Purim in the calendar.

01:12:56

It is a celebration of rededicating the temple after somebody desecrated it and brought the unholy thing in.

01:13:03

Like in Exodus? In, um... In Numbers? 164 BCE.

01:13:09

A Greek general killed all the priests of the temple and brought in a statue of Zeus and said, you're going to worship this instead of God.

01:13:17

And that's what Hanukkah is about? Hanukkah is about the fasting and praying for the oil to come from Egypt so that they could light all the candles and rededicate the temple back to God.

01:13:28

They had to clean everything. They had to go through all the ritual purifications of the temple before they could open the temple back up for atonement.

01:13:36

But Egypt and a Roman god, there's quite a timeline between that, no? Yeah, there's nine days. That's why there's nine candles on the

01:13:43

Hanukkah candlestick. This was the same time, the Egyptian desecration and the Roman god bringing in the statue of Zeus.

01:13:51

These are happening. It was a Greek desecration. The Egyptians didn't desecrate, but they provided the oil to repair, to restock the oil of the temple so it could be rededicated.

01:14:03

Oh my gosh. Yeah, and so that's Hanukkah, and it's called sometimes the

01:14:09

Festival of Lights simply because of the lighting of the candles. It's not a

01:14:15

Christmas tree that's getting lit. It's the candles that are getting lit in the temple. So it's called

01:14:20

Festival of Lights, and in John's Gospel, Jesus went to the Festival of Lights. He went to the Hanukkah that was being celebrated in his day 200 years or almost 200 years after.

01:14:33

Wow. Oh my gosh. What would we do without you? I mean, truly, for the people that don't hear this podcast or the people that hear this podcast and they want to share it with their loved ones, do you have a practical step for people to better navigate the

01:14:51

Bible? Because obviously, the Bible's not going to be simple. It's never going to be a simple world navigation, but how do we fix the problem of people going down the route of misinterpretation here?

01:15:03

First practical thing, if you're not reading the Old Testament, read it. That's the first step. If you get stuck at parts of it, okay, move on to the next part.

01:15:11

There's a lot to be gleaned just by reading through it in English. If you want to focus just on Torah and then eventually some of the other things, fine, but at least become familiar with what's in the books before Matthew in your

01:15:25

Bible. The second thing is don't automatically rule out Torah following.

01:15:32

It's not something that has been properly understood. At least the debates around whether Gentile Christians should follow the

01:15:39

Torah or not have often been based on assumptions about what Paul and Jesus were dealing with rather than clear understanding.

01:15:47

So another thing on the practical level is this is just a practical thing in learning.

01:15:53

Don't get so concretely set that the one answer that you processed is the right answer and it's 100 % right.

01:16:02

It may be right 60 % of the time when looked at sideways. You have to realize that other factors are in the picture and these things are integrated.

01:16:15

I'm speaking mainly to American Christians when I say that because a lot of our upbringing has been this is what we believe in our organization.

01:16:26

You believe that you're our member. What is it? I agreed that I believed it, but what is it?

01:16:32

Nobody can explain it to you. It's a list of statements is what it becomes and it's like, okay, where's the meat?

01:16:39

Where's the stuff? And so we have become used to this idea that if it's scientific,

01:16:48

I get to use my mind, and if it's religious, I don't. That's the first. I don't approach anything in the

01:16:54

Bible without thinking through it critically and analyzing it using reason, the use of languages, and all of this.

01:17:03

I can't say that it's 100 % scientific what I do. There are some connections that I see that I can't always explain why they're connected, but I don't approach it irrationally, as if I read this word and I processed these words in my mind, and now

01:17:19

I got this idea of what it means. It must be that 100 % true, and I need to exercise a faith muscle and say, okay,

01:17:27

I believe that. That is a real belief anyway. Yeah, I think if I were to defend what

01:17:33

I think is the common reason people do that, it's because they're erring on the side of not being blasphemous.

01:17:40

They're erring on the side of, well, I don't want to step foot into my Jewish religion if that's going to dishonor my

01:17:45

Christian religion, so I'm just going to keep two feet out, versus like, well, it's okay if I'm inquiring, because I think it's like, well, it's my faith.

01:17:54

I don't want to dishonor my God, so I'd rather just stay out and stay in the New Testament. The other thing I would suggest is don't be afraid to do something

01:18:01

Jesus did. Oh, that's good. That's real good.

01:18:07

I would say that. The other thing I would say is whether you participate in the

01:18:12

Jewish festivals and feasts or not, become familiar with all of them and their cycle, because that will help you understand why

01:18:21

Jesus is doing which miracle he's doing and where he's at when he's done it, and it also helps us understand the moves of the early churches.

01:18:30

Paul and the other apostles are developing things in the early church, and it will help us see things in Revelation that don't make sense unless we understand this.

01:18:39

Do we need to have another Revelation conversation, yes or no? Maybe. We left some things on the paper we didn't talk about, but that's what

01:18:48

I would just say. I encourage you to explore the connections between the Torah and the

01:18:54

New Testament beyond even just talking about the festivals and the feasts, but as far as moral things go, it's mentioned in both as things that Christians shouldn't do in the

01:19:04

New Testament, Jews shouldn't do in the Old Testament, Noah shouldn't do before there was a such thing as Jews.

01:19:11

My hunch is that's when it's for all humanity. Thank you. This is amazing. I think

01:19:16

I entered into this conversation with anxiety, this sanctification gap, but this was more than I could ask for.

01:19:23

As it always is with you, Dr. James Stenlisek, thank you so much for coming on this show. I'm so excited for our future conversations.

01:19:30

I know we discussed a couple before the call, and then we have so many exciting things. This episode is going to air after our live

01:19:37

Q &A, which I'm just going to speak retroactively, went amazing, but I'm excited for more conversations on this, and I hope that anybody listening got as much clarity on this topic as I have, but do you have any announcements in the new year, because this is, it'll air in January, that you want people to know about, that they can attend, learn more, get in contact with?

01:19:57

Now we talked about earlier setting up a date in January for a Q &A. Now that was related to the last podcast, not this one.

01:20:06

Yes, correct. Do you want to set one up for this one, or would that be the same day? No, no, let's keep it separate, because one, the one that will be, will be

01:20:15

Revelation, this will be Torah, but I'll coordinate with that, coordinate that with you offline, but any other, like, like,

01:20:22

I want to plug your work. I want to, you know, platform what you're doing if people want to connect, not just through biblically speaking.

01:20:28

Sure. So I have a website that people can check out, but it's, it's just my first and last name.

01:20:35

I can add it to the show notes. Is it just jameshedlisek .com? I think that is what it is.

01:20:40

I'm just double checking. There, I do lots of different things. One of the things that I, I posted there is, like, some things

01:20:48

I'm doing in academics. Yeah, it is jameshedlisek .com. And I critically evaluate tools for people that are studying

01:20:56

New Testament, Greek language especially, and I'm thinking of expanding it, actually, to include some of the things related to the

01:21:05

Torah and some of the topics that we talked about tonight. But within, within there,

01:21:11

I think the way I have it set up is a little bit on the clunky side where it bounces you out to a

01:21:16

WordPress site. Once you click the link, it takes you out to a WordPress site. But I, I've written excerpts of some of the critical evaluations.

01:21:25

Like, I'm, I'm constantly evaluating about four books a year and publishing those critiques.

01:21:31

So I try to get a synopsis of those and put them on my website. So it's under one of the tabs.

01:21:38

I think it's under, it's under one of the blogs, actually. I think you have to click on blog to get to it.

01:21:45

Yeah, my, my research blog is just me general as a scholar. Anything and everything goes there.

01:21:51

And there's Greek resources and New Testament resources that I really value. Amazing. I'll link your website in the show notes so anybody can check that out and see the critiques if they want to go a level deeper with you.

01:22:02

But James, thank you so much for giving me so much of your time and so much of your knowledge on this topic. This is so clarifying for me and you're always welcome back and I definitely will see you soon.

01:22:12

I'll, I'll book you for a couple more just, and I appreciate your, your wisdom in the new year. So thank you so much.

01:22:18

Thank you too, Cassian. It's a pleasure being on this podcast and, and it's a pleasure conversing with you.