God’s Pattern
As this is being written, a significant increase in natural disasters is causing families to suffer the loss of their loved ones, homes, businesses, jobs, dreams and hopes. At the same time, a lethal fire of revolutionary fury is raging across much of the Islamic Middle East, destabilizing that region more and more. Economic insecurity, political jostling and outrage generated by gross corruption and rampant immorality in leadership keep corroding all parts of the world and weakening the foundations of entire societies.
If you have been called to be one of the Lord’s disciples, you have another sobering fact to face – a noticeable spike in virulent hatred and murderous violence against Jews and Christians around the world. It is happening in many places, while the rest of the world looks the other way and says nothing. In short, our daily news reports are beginning to resemble the chaotic scenario described in Psalm 91!
Yet in the midst of this, God gives us some seemingly impossible commands. In Phil. 4:4-9, He commands us to rejoice always and be anxious for nothing! But how can we do that? That would take enormous supernatural ability! Only the perfect presence and power of Almighty God Himself could transform our viewpoint and cause us to feel elation and total joy and peace and rest, even as our world is enshrouded in Darkness and bombarded with overwhelming disasters and filled with fear and pain! How can we obey our Father’s orders and do the job He has commissioned us to do under such seemingly impossible circumstances?
Doesn’t this make it clear that we need a much more authentic and serious approach to our training as disciples? How can we ever overcome amid such difficulties and give a testimony to our Lord that will make a supernatural difference in such a world…unless we can actually draw from and fully partake in the eternal Authority and Triumph contained within the perfect presence of the risen Lord Himself?
Scripture claims that our Messiah has already done everything necessary to save and restore the created universe. And we say we believe that after He willingly laid down His life for our sake, His Father raised Him from the dead! His contemporary Jewish apostles claimed to be eye witnesses to this fact and willingly died rather than deny it. And chapters 2-5 of the Book of Acts relate that after His disciples received the New Covenant baptism into the indwelling presence of God’s Holy Spirit, the risen Lord continually manifested His presence within them and released the benefits of His finished work through them, amid the dark, brutal Roman world in which they had to live. He lived and worked from within them. He was like their Head and they were like living members of His Body. Together, they PROVED to the world that Yeshua (Jesus) is the Messiah of Israel and that He is alive, present and active on Earth and that all the claims and promises He made are absolutely true!
And our Master promised to be with us…just like that…even until the end of this age! (Mt. 28:18-20) He promised that the same miraculous signs that accompanied Him would also accompany those that would believe in and embody His Resurrection Presence (Mk. 16:9-20)! So…now that so many of the modern world’s foundations, pillars and essential fixtures are shaking and crumbling, isn’t it time for us to experience and manifest His presence as He lives and works within us? Will His disciples be ‘on duty’ to make sure that the new realities that emerge from the ashes of what is being destroyed reveal the Glory of God’s beloved risen Son? Nothing short of Him will see us through the tsunami of destruction that has already begun to move across the world! If He really does live in and among us at all times, and if we’re clinging to Him like glue and identifying with Him as much as He has already identified with us, then nothing should be able to separate us from God’s love, provision and protection, should it? (Cf. Rom. 8:26-39)
But if our faith is weak and dim, if we fail to maintain a living, interactive faith-connection with His Resurrection Presence, we are naked before our enemies because we have no living Master to follow or embody. And He has no true Body through which to do what His Father sends Him to do. The separation of the Head from His Body is precisely what the powers of Darkness strive desperately to accomplish. If they succeed in ‘decapitating’ us…by keeping us mentally and emotionally separated from Him so that He can’t operate in and through us, we lose. We remain weak, passive, silent, irrelevant, powerless, ineffective and fruitless.
Connected or Disconnected…Which Is Best?
With that in mind, I ask you to consider two patterns. One pattern is God-given. The other is an alternate substitute that rebellious, unbelieving people settled for, centuries ago. The man-made pattern, which we’ll consider further in Part 2, is very much in vogue today. But in His mercy, God works around it. It’s not what He wanted Israel to demonstrate and share with the rest of the world, but nevertheless, He reaches out to us as much as we will allow. But as we compare the two patterns, ask yourself this question:
Which of these patterns will benefit us most, as we face and strive to overcome these ever-worsening world situations and conditions?
Let’s begin with God’s pattern. This is how God introduced it in the beginning:
Genesis 1:26a
“Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness…”
This is God’s changeless ‘humanity pattern’. He has always intended to restore, develop and maintain it between us and His living Word. It is the ‘Follow Me’ pattern that the living Word taught to Adam and Eve. It is the ‘Follow Me’ pattern He came to re-establish with them after they had fallen into Sin and Death. It was the pattern He taught Abel and tried to teach to Cain. It was the pattern He came to re-establish through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses. And after the living Word became flesh and appeared as Israel’s Messiah, it was the pattern He began to re-establish with His first century Jewish apostles and disciples! It is the New Covenant…which was given to restore mankind to the perfection of God’s original image and likeness Creation!
So…image and likeness disciple training isn’t anything new; it’s just rarely seen. Nevertheless, that is what God’s living Word was sent to re-introduce to Abram, the Chaledan moon-worshipper and his family and unborn descendants with these words:
Genesis 17:1b-4
“I am God Almighty; walk before Me, and be blameless. I will establish My covenant between Me and you, and I will multiply you exceedingly.”
“Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him, saying, ‘As for Me, behold, My covenant is with you, and you will be the father of a multitude of nations.'” (Emphasis added.)
This living, interactive, Blood Covenant relationship with His personal Word is what God always wants His image and likeness human friends to share with Him. It is the relationship God inspired Moses to describe in his writings (E.g. Deut. 6:4-9). The written Word that God commissioned Moses and the prophets to provide for us is meant to serve as the ‘menu’ that directs men to partake of the real, living Feast God is always making available to us. But our living and working relationship is not to be just with the ‘menu’. It is to be with the living Word of God that the menu reveals and explains and to whom it tries to direct us! Life and strength do not come from menus. They come from feeding on the ‘Living Bread’, the Person that has come down from Heaven to be in us and work through us, Himself!
So when God led that company of Israelites, composed of Jewish and non-Jewish people, out of Egyptian slavery, He set them apart for His own personal service. Theirs was to be a very intimate, interactive, priestly ministry of obedience to His living Word. They were to be disciples of His Word. And He promised that if they followed this pattern, He would bless them to an astounding degree. But, because the world’s salvation depended on whether or not they fulfilled their commission, He also warned that their disobedience would usher in some dire consequences (See Deut. 28 & 29). The consequence would be: Israel herself would remain decapitated and cursed, and so would the rest of the world that she was chosen and commissioned to teach, guide and bless!
Yeshua said in Jn. 4:21-24, that ‘salvation comes from the Jews’. In other words, Israel is the chosen instrument God uses as He works to save the entire world from Sin and its lethal effects. So obviously the ‘image and likeness’ pattern God commissioned Israel (through Moses) to demonstrate and teach to the rest of the world, has extremely high stakes and enormous consequences! That’s why Israel serves as a model and example, in God’s plan, for the rest of humanity. By watching what God does with Israel, for better or for worse, the world can know Him and His ways and know what to expect for itself. An Israeli rabbi recently wrote that Israel is like a ‘canary’ that miners take with them down into a mine shaft. What happens to the canary (in terms of noxious, lethal gases and fumes) lets the miners know what lies in store for them. If the canary thrives, the miners are safe; but if the canary dies, the miners are next. So the canary plays a very important cautionary role for all that must share the same environment with that canary.
Israel does play such a role in God’s plans. What God intends to do with the human race happens with and to Israel first. Then, by observing what happens to Israel, the rest of the world knows what to expect from God as well. But to be more precise, I believe it must be said that ‘the canary effect’ is essentially dependent on the one that is the most famous, world-impacting Jewish Man of all time. I’m speaking of the living personal Word of God who became flesh and dwelt among us in the person of Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth. He is the Messiah of Israel. Israel is the ‘matrix’ or ‘womb’ into which God chose to place His living Word. So, the living Word of God is ‘The Son of God’. And He also appeared among His fellow Israelites as, ‘The Son of Man’.
He and His true apostolic, New covenant disciples must be at the center of our understanding of, ‘The Canary’. I say that because the risen Messiah is the living Word of God, and the Word of God is the Salvation of the whole world. In that sense, everything revolves around Him and those that serve Him in Spirit and in Truth. The fate of the rest of Israel, as well as that of the rest of the world, will depend on the way they respond and relate to Israel’s Messiah…and His true emissary disciples. In that sense, what happens to Israel in this regard, as she embraces or rejects Him, will happen also to the Gentile world as it follows suit, one way or the other. Pay close attention to what Messiah Yeshua, God’s living Word made flesh, is forcing the whole world to consider:
Matthew 10:32-33; 40
“Therefore everyone who confesses Me before men, I will also confess him before My Father who is in Heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, I will also deny him before My Father who is in Heaven…He who receives you (My New Covenant disciples) receives Me, and he who receives Me receives Him who sent Me.” (Amplification and emphasis added.)
The spirit of Anti-Christ and the powers of Darkness have tried desperately throughout the ages, to ‘decapitate’ Israel from God’s living Word in order to destroy her. They tried to prevent her from fulfilling her commission of bearing the Ultimate Seed of Abraham – Messiah Yeshua, God’s living Word made flesh. If the Serpent had succeeded in wiping out God’s chosen Covenant people, He would have prevented the Messiah’s coming. But now that the Lamb of God has come and done His work, if the Serpent can succeed in making Him somehow disappear from their minds, hearts and lives, many in Israel will never know their Messiah and the Serpent will claim that God was not able to honor and fulfill His Blood Covenants with her. He will also claim that since God broke His promises to Israel, and she has no grounds upon which to trust Him, neither does the Gentile World have grounds for trusting Him! In that case, none of the families of the world will have the slightest chance of ever being rescued from the Serpent’s coils.
Thus we see the strategy of the Serpent (the spirit of Anti-Messiah) – If God’s ‘Warning Canary’ perishes…if God allows the true Remnant of Israel to be destroyed, Israel will have been betrayed by the one she proclaims to be the one true God. And if Israel can’t trust her God, the Gentile world has no grounds to trust Him either. They would have no real or authentic Covenant and spiritual Commonwealth into which they could be grafted and would have no hope of receiving the Salvation promised to all men by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Word and credibility of this God would be proven to be non-existent. And if that should prove to be true…the God of Israel isn’t what He claimed to be and the Serpent is proven to have been right all along! That is the Serpent’s agenda in this world that teems with so many spiritually naive, clueless humans.
So the stakes in all of this are enormous. And it’s easy to see why this would be so important to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. If He is the one true and only God, regardless of what the Powers of Darkness and the humans that serve them try to do, He will see to it that Israel survives, regardless of all her sins and misdeeds. He will do it for His Name’s sake! And, just as He did with her Messiah, His living Word, He will also bring Israel back from the dead and reestablish her and she will thrive and fulfill her God-given commission and receive the realities He promised her…so that all the other children of Adam may see it and believe, and be saved as well (See Ezekiel 34 & 37).
This is why it is so vitally important for Israel, and the rest of the world, to embrace God’s living Word made flesh and the disciples through whom He intends to reveal Himself to each generation. If they embrace Him, He will save them. And then the Serpent will be proven to be a liar and a fraud and bound for eternal devastation.
Obviously, the Prince of Darkness cannot afford to allow any of us, Jew or Gentile, to unite and interact with God’s Word, and become part of His Body on Earth if he can help it. God’s Word is The Tree of Life and The Light of the World. As long as humans remain connected to God’s Word as His fruit-bearing disciples, God’s Holy Spirit will continue to have a point of entry through which to rush into the world…like ‘rivers of Living Water’ (See Ezekiel 47:1-12; Matthew 7:37-39). In this way, God will continue to invade the realms of satanic Darkness and obliterate the effects of Satan’s lies in human hearts and lives. And the demonic spirits that infest the earth will be exposed and disarmed and they will be the ones that end up being decapitated!
So the Serpent Is Always After the ‘Canary’
Unfortunately, the powers of Darkness often succeed in severing people from God’s living and written Word. That of course continues to impede God’s Word from reconnecting with and restoring His image and likeness on Earth to its God-intended perfection. And so God’s living Word is largely forgotten or disfigured or completely ignored and replaced with alien man-made things, religious and otherwise. And that’s why Darkness and Sin continue to devastate and destroy most of the human race.
Matthew 7:13-14
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.”
Even many contemporary Jewish and Christian people are deceived into endorsing the naïve and deady assumption that God has changed His mind about what He first revealed to Israel as revealed in the writings of Moses. They assume God ‘outgrew’ and ‘moved beyond’ the original primitive, ‘intolerant’ attitudes and requirements He put into the first five books of the Bible. They claim that God has ‘matured’ and ‘gotten in step’ with the practical realities, standards and demands of the sophisticated, educated, technological, polytheistic modern world. They assume God no longer holds us advanced, ultra-modern, self-actualizing people accountable for the quaint, woefully outdated Biblical standards of righteousness and commands He entrusted to ancient Israel. And so…since they assume these outdated ancient ‘Jewish Traditions’ no longer matter or have any authority over us modern people, they further assume that ‘the mine’ is actually very safe, and therefore, we have never had any real need for ‘The Canary’.
This attitude leads many modern Jewish people to assume that they can now afford to ignore the Word of God, both living and written, and engross themselves in worldly pursuits and achievements. Many believe they can manufacture and achieve their own version of righteousness and salvation. They consider their own opinions to be valid and sufficient; so they ignore the Blood Atonement of the Lamb of God and deny their sin and desperate need for God’s living Word to redeem them. Instead, they try to be ‘nice people’ and give money to good causes and do nice things for society’s less fortunate people. But that is a ‘home made’, self-devised substitute ‘salvation’ that is based on fallen humanity’s ‘good intentions’ that lead to ‘good works’. But how will they know for sure that what they’ve done is good enough in God’s sight… when they continue to insist on contradicting what He clearly warned us about, concerning His living Word, in so many portions of His written Word?
Many modern non-Jewish people that happen to be ‘Christian’ assume all they have to do is, ‘ask Jesus into their lives’ so they can ride into Heaven on the coat tails of His Righteousness instead of having to bother to allow His Righteousness to actually begin to be seen operating from within their transformed lifestyles! But both attitudes come from alien fabrications, a false ‘Judaism’ and a false ‘Jesus’, that are products of human denial, imaginative contrivances, and wishful thinking.
They are a far cry from the authentic living Word that God has revealed throughout the Scriptures and who was commissioned by God, to serve as humanity’s Messiah. The man-made versions of ‘Jesus’ merely require people to repeat a short prayer for salvation and join a ‘good church’. They assume that by doing that, everything is assured for eternity and permanently resolved, fixed and carved in granite. And with such convenient contrived devices, men exempt themselves from having to know God’s written Word, much less embrace wholeheartedly and realign their entire existences to serve His living Word that the Scriptures reveal and announce. They assume they need not concern themselves with the revealed standards of righteousness and holiness, nor do they need to obey His commandments, as contained in all of those so-called ‘nullified’ and ‘outdated’ portions of His written Word. But the living Word Himself actually and very clearly warned us, that every ‘jot and tittle’ of God’s written Word would be required of us and will be in force until heaven and earth have passed away and everything has been fulfilled! (See Mt. 5:17-20)
So, obviously, such careless cavalier attitudes are deadly. If God were to allow them to prevail, they will certainly kill The Canary…and the rest of the world. But thankfully, He has sworn by Blood Oath, that He will not allow Darkness to prevail. Nevertheless, the demonically deceptive paradigms and attitudes the Serpent has spawned, keep prompting the decapitated world to ‘ease up’ and to regard God’s expressed will and changeless perfect standards and commandments as no longer binding and irrelevant. They make us assume that God is here to do our will and that we are at liberty to ‘cut, paste and rearrange’ significant portions of His Word and change their original meanings and even to completely ignore entire sections of it that do not suit our fancies and imperatives and sectarian traditions and personal passions, urges and addictions. Thus, instead of being restored back into God’s image and likeness, many of us are trying to ‘morph’ God into our non-Biblical, worldly ‘Gentile’ images and likenesses! But as long as we do that, we will be like disconnected lamps. We will try to live in God’s Light and share it…but Darkness will prevail because we will be following a ‘gospel of salvation’ that has no power to produce personal righteousness and will not withstand and pass the Judgment scrutiny of Almighty God (See 2 Tim. 3).
Our Millions of Dust-Covered Bibles
When it comes to knowing what God’s written Word says and means, much of today’s modern, technologically advanced, multi-tasking world is profoundly illiterate and clueless. The vast void, left by such gross uncaring neglect, has been filled by an enormously vast religious ‘buffet’ that offers myriads of man-made substitutes, ‘God as you like Him’, entrees. Now people amble through the buffet, shopping and picking and choosing whatever version of ‘god’ or ‘jesus’ best suits their desires, comfort zones and personal urges. Naturally, they follow the path of least resistance and thus reject and bypass what seems to be overly demanding, or too ancient, irrelevant and alien. They assume that because God’s Biblical requirements are so out of step with our modern pop cultures, they must be nothing more than outdated ‘Jewish traditions’. And, therefore, they are unnecessary and incompatible with the personal tastes and requirements and the, ‘walk with God’ that ‘modern world’ people assume to be ‘better’ and more ‘relevant’.
As a result, most modern people have lost any sense of the utter importance and necessity of The Exodus. Instead of leaving their places in this fallen world to follow His Word and Holy Spirit to a Land He will show them, most modern people demand that God accommodate Himself to their comfort zones and priorities and aspirations. So, the modern, evolved, hyper-educated world that God entrusted to their care, is more engulfed than ever in demonic wickedness, darkness and human agony. Billions are staggering under the weight of the buffetings and tremendous damage caused by Law-less selfish, short-sighted people that do not tremble at God’s Word, or fear His Majesty and righteous judgement and justice. And so the righteous and unrighteous, man and beast alike, are suffering from the lethal effects of human short-sightedness, greed, truth-twisting, tolerance of evil, injustice and barbaric cruelty.
In light of this ever-quickening vicious cycle of self-destruction, can anyone that claims to be a believer in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, afford to be careless and cling to wrong assumptions about God and His living and written Word? Will cheap counterfeit maps of Reality whose coordinates do not conform to the spiritual terrain through which we must actually navigate really get us safely through the demonic mine fields that are all around us? If our maps of Reality are fraudulent and do not really come from God, can we assume that He will ‘wink at our disobedience’ and lead us safely through the demonic ‘mine fields’, anyway?
Leviticus 22:21
“When a man offers a sacrifice of peace offerings to the LORD to fulfill a special vow or for a freewill offering, of the herd or of the flock, it must be perfect to be accepted; there shall be no defect in it.”
Matthew 5:47-48
“If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is Perfect.”
No beloved, God will always honor and validate and fulfill His Word. The written Word reveals His eternally changeless living Word. And His living Word is here to fulfill every jot and tittle of what was written about Him. And demons and humans that do not honor God’s changeless Word with Him, will suffer the tragic consequences. We must return to what God said and develop a much more Biblically authentic understanding of what it means to have His incarnate Word summon us to ‘Follow’ Him. It’s time to give serious consideration to the Follow Me pattern that God’s living Word restored to the world through Israel and the writings of Moses. Here is Moses’ verbalization of God’s ‘image and likeness’, disciple-training pattern:
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
“Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (NASB)
There is a military-level attitude and intensely personal interactive obedient lifestyle embedded within these words. And it wasn’t only intended for ancient Jewish people! It is God’s blueprint for every human being He has or will ever create! God’s Word is intensely actively creative and intensely personal and unchanging. Whenever God speaks… His Word proceeds from Him to create something! Things are supposed to happen; change is meant to take place…and the universe is supposed to transform in one way or another, whenever God sends forth His Word!
So if you receive God’s Word and submit to His absolute authority, He will pierce, penetrate and impregnate your innermost being with His world-changing Life and its Authority. Because you were created to be His image and likeness, the Life that is in God’s Word will take hold in you and begin to grow, develop and take over…COMPLETELY! The total obedience the Word always renders to His Father will begin to glimmer and work and manifest itself increasingly, within you! This is what Paul was referring to when he wrote:
Philippians 2:12-13
“So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure!”
God sends His Word, to be our Shepherd. He says that point blank in Ezek. 34 and Jn. 10. It is the same living creative Word God spoke forth to create and sustain the universe in Gen. 1…the same Word through which God revealed Himself to Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and to Joseph, through dreams, to prepare him for what he would have to face in Egypt. It’s the same Word that appeared to Moses from within the burning bush and that led Israel out of their Egyptian bondage and through the parted waters of the sea. It’s the same Word that awed them all from atop Mt. Sinai and sustained them in the wilderness for forty years. It’s the same Word that appeared to Joshua as the sword-wielding ‘Captain of the Lord’s Host’. It’s the same Word that, in the first century, became flesh and died on the cross as the Son of Man, to make full atonement for the Sin of the world. It is the Word that rose from the dead…and who is here with us now…through the Holy Spirit…to connect us to the living God and make us one with Him! (Jn. 14:5-6)
So as you ponder the words of Moses’, realize that he was talking about how God’s chosen people and the rest of the world are to receive and obey God’s living Word, who is Yeshua (Jesus) the Messiah! God expects Israel and the rest of the world to embrace and obey His living Word. In every instance in which the Word appears in Scripture, it is – Yeshua that is being revealed. He is the living Word, the Son of God…the ‘Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53…the Lamb of God…the Son of David…the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all Creation. Regardless of the era, or the form in which God sends Him, the living Word is the one being sent to deal with human beings and the one to whom we are all responding…in one way or another!
So the ‘Follow Me’ pattern in Deut. 6: 4-9 is to be followed by true Jews as well as by true New Covenant disciples. It is the only pattern that enables God’s Word to abide, work and interact deeply enough with each person. When He is free to penetrate us at that level, He can also freely circulate in our midst and blend us into His one Body and through that Body, He can obey His Father amid our earthly circumstances…before the eyes of the unbelieving world. Jesus Himself emphasized this pattern in Mt. 22:35-40, when a Jewish Torah lawyer asked Him which of God’s commandments was the greatest and most important. In reply, the Lord quoted the very words of Moses you just read; and He linked them to another one of God’s commands…the one where we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. This too was revealed through the Torah of Moses, in Lev. 19:18.
But most of Israel failed to learn this because the majority did not listen to Yeshua any more than they had listened to Moses. Like us, they too were afraid of what would happen in their hearts if they allowed the Word of their Creator to get too close. They didn’t trust God; so they remained fearful and controlling…refusing to allow His Word to test them at such close quarters and to such depths. Despite Moses’ repeated pleas and urging to embrace God’s Word, they refused to revere God and become the priestly nation He required. Instead of having God’s living Word serve as Mediator between their hearts and the Father that spoke Him to them, they put Moses and his human successors and the traditions they devised before the people…in the place of God’s living Word! They continued to appoint men, to serve as ‘go-betweens’, permanent separating ‘buffers’ between them and the living God, so there would always be something standing between them and their Creator.
Exodus 20:18-20
“All the people perceived the thunder and the lightning flashes and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it, they trembled and stood at a distance. Then they said to Moses, ‘Speak to us yourself and we will listen; but let not God speak to us, or we will die.’
“Moses said to the people, ‘Do not be afraid; for God has come in order to test you, and in order that the fear of Him may remain with you, so that you may not sin.’”
When you get as close to God as He desires, it’s not you that will die…your sinful, radically independent existence apart from God’s Word is what will die! True disciples of God’s living Word, like Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Israel and Joseph believed and obeyed God’s living Word properly, even before the written Scriptures existed. They allowed God’s Word to get very close to them, and He transformed them. And after Moses wrote down the revelation of the Torah, people like Daniel and the other prophets, continued to obey God’s living and written Word. But most of God’s people that lived after Moses continued to follow that post-Sinai substitute pattern of creating and maintaining distance from God.
Judges 21:25
“In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”
And in Samuel’s day, the Israelites refused to have God for their King. Instead, they clamored for a human king because they wanted to be just like all the pagan Gentile nations around them!
1 Samuel 8:4-7
“Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah; and they said to him, ‘Behold, you have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations (Gentiles).’
“But the thing was displeasing in the sight of Samuel when they said, ‘Give us a king to judge us.’ And Samuel prayed to the LORD. The LORD said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being King over them.’”
Fallen flesh, regardless of which ethnic group it springs from or what age it lives in, craves the same radical independence and control that Satan reserves for himself. Flesh drives us to try to be as self-determining as God Himself is (Cf. Gen. 3:4-5). Flesh has no interest in serving as God’s image and likeness and personal priesthood. It craves dominance and preeminence in the fallen world’s self-adoring, Sin-full system. It won’t abide God’s nearness or submit to the Headship of His living Word. It prefers to be self-governing, self-directing and ever-increasing in personal glory and influence. That’s why fallen humans create as much distance as possible from God. We don’t want Him to increase as we decrease, we try instead to establish religious diplomatic relations with Him, through created go-betweens ‘middle-men’. We will only allow God to come so close to us…and then no further…so we can remain in charge of our own affairs.
But in the New Covenant era, God sent His Son to renew, restore, fulfill and complete the original image and likeness human essence and nature. Never is there to be any distance between God and His people. Could our utterly perfect, holy God, have an image and likeness that ‘does its own thing’ and makes peace with the Serpent’s Sin? No of course not. We are made to be as one with God’s living Word, who is the perfect image and likeness of the Father that sent Him (Jn. 17). Only God’s Word is to serve as Mediator and High Priest between us and Him. God must be free to speak to and govern us…HIMSELF!
So obviously, the living Word of God will never endorse the current attitude of many ‘ultra-modern’ Jewish and non-Jewish people that assume that God’s Word, as revealed through Moses, is now outdated, irrelevant and not to be taken seriously by ‘modern’, ‘liberated’ people. He would never say that. If He did, God’s living Word would negate and deny Himself! God and His Word are one! So God never contradicts or reverses His own Word, and the Word never contradicts or reverses what His Father sent Him to reveal and command. As God is perfect and eternally changeless, so too is His living Word, whose image and likeness we were created to be. He is the same…yesterday, today…and forever! (Cf. Heb. 13:8).
The revelation given through Moses (first five books of Scripture) is the absolute foundation of our Faith! Nothing that God has revealed about His nature and standards of righteousness in that foundation can ever be, nor should it be, changed, edited, morphed, ignored or replaced! God’s Perfection never changes; we imperfect ones are the ones that have to change! Yeshua didn’t come to change or replace what Moses wrote about Him; He came to validate, embody, fulfill and make sure it would be interpreted and obeyed properly! (Cf. Mt. 5:17-20)
Deuteronomy 4:2-9
“You shall not add to the Word which I am commanding you, nor take away from it, that you may keep the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you. Your eyes have seen what the LORD has done in the case of Baal-peor, for all the men who followed Baal-peor, the LORD your God has destroyed them from among you. But you who held fast to the LORD your God are alive today, every one of you.
“See, I have taught you statutes and judgments just as the LORD my God commanded me, that you should do thus in the land where you are entering to possess it. So keep and do them, for that is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples (Gentiles) who will hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as is the LORD our God whenever we call on Him? Or what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments as righteous as this whole law which I am setting before you today? Only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons.”
Consider the following indictment the Messiah pronounced against His contemporary Jewish opponents. Like Yeshua and His disciples, these opponents were religious Jews that frequented their synagogues regularly. But this is where they went wrong: like many of their ancestors, they studied God’s written Word (the ‘menu’). But the written Word was always pointing to ‘the real Food…the personal, interactive Presence of the Living Word! Like their fathers did at Mt. Sinai, they too backed away and remained aloof from Him. Instead, they prided themselves on being part of God’s unique, chosen people simply because of their natural birth and ethnic traditions. They assumed self-righteous airs because of the created things they had inherited. Many became ‘menu experts’, but they did not remain true to the standards of true Jewishness that Moses had put forth in Deuteronomy. They would not allow God’s living Word to pierce their hearts and take them over. So Yeshua, the living Word of God made flesh, said to them:
John 5:39-40; 45-47
“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have Life…”
“…Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me! But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” (Emphases added.)
Yes, Moses wrote about Yeshua (Jesus) – God’s living Word, who eventually became flesh and appeared in our midst in the person of the Messiah of Israel and King of the Jews. He came to actually BE and teach and explain, all that Moses was inspired to write down! And Moses prophesied that God would one day send His Word in human form – as a prophet with a stature that would exceed even that of Moses:
Deuteronomy 18:15-19
“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your countrymen, you shall listen to Him. This is according to all that you asked of the LORD your God in Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God, let me not see this great fire any more, or I will die.’
“The LORD said to me (Moses), ‘They have spoken well. I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in His mouth, and He shall speak to them all that I command Him. It shall come about that whoever will not listen to My words which He shall speak in My name, I Myself will require it of him.’” (Emphasis added.)
So the one Moses had foretold, actually came. And He is still here with us, through the Holy Spirit. He’s here to live in you and in me…to reveal Himself to the rest of the world…through us! Now we can apply Moses’ words to the way we live with our risen Lord. In a very real sense, Moses showed us how we could relate to and follow our Messiah in our day. He is the very same Word that appeared to the whole nation of Israel, atop Mt. Sinai in Moses’ day! So in this sense, true Jews will always be true disciples of God’s living Word; and true New Covenant disciples will always interact with God’s living Word just as the words of Moses required Israel, and the Gentiles in their midst, to do!
Ponder the following paraphrase and see how intensely personal God says He wants us to be with His beloved Son, the Master that has summoned us to follow Him:
‘Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one (with His Word and His Spirit)! You shall love THE LIVING WORD through whom the LORD reveals Himself to you, and interact with HIM with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your might. This SON, YOUR MESSIAH, AND LORD, which I send to you each moment, shall always be the very LIFE of your heart. You shall embody, demonstrate, proclaim and teach HIM diligently to your sons and shall embody and talk everything over with HIM when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. By your obedience to HIS VOICE, you shall bind HIS INDWELLING PRESENCE as a sign on your hand and HIS LIVING PRESENCE shall be like frontals on your forehead. Your obedience to and dependence upon HIM shall saturate the doorposts of your house and your gates with HIS LIVING PRESENCE as He reveals Himself to you FROM DEEP WITHIN YOUR HEART and to the world THROUGH YOUR CRUCIFIED, OBEDIENT FLESH!’
We are to allow Him to rule over us from within our innermost being, just like our ‘Marching Orders’ describe. He is to be Lord over our hearts, thoughts, imaginations, and choices. So obviously we New Covenant disciples must not allow anything or anyone, to come between us, and our Master. We must be as one with Him at all times, directly… person to person… face to face… Spirit to spirit… and heart to heart! He must be free to test and work in our hearts directly at all times:
Hebrews 4:11-13
“Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.”
No Go-betweens Allowed in the New Covenant
In the New Covenant, things will be done as God has always intended them to be done from the beginning… Person to person! So He will have no created mediators standing between Him and His people. Only God’s living Word will be our Shepherd and Mediator. (Cf. Ezek. 34; 1 Jn. 2:26-27) God commands us to embrace His Son and feast on the Perfection of His indwelling Presence and to love, absorb and become one with all that He is sent to be and to do, in our personal hearts, minds, bodies, homes, families, and relationships! Even spiritual leaders among us will have to learn to interact personally and directly with our risen Messiah… and of course, they will be required to teach all the others to do it as well.
The New Covenant equips and commissions each regenerated child of God to be part of the priesthood that abides in God’s Presence with their Messiah to minister to Him personally and directly. That’s why Father imparts the same Life and Spirit that is in His Son, the Son of Man, into each one of us. He wants to reveal His risen Son through us 24/7! Now we can minister to God as His image and likeness, by allowing Him to reveal His Son to us, in us and through us. That is why our original ‘self-life’ must be forsaken and plunged into His Son’s death. After that, our risen Messiah can, and must, become our new Life. Our personal union with Him must be continuous. It can’t just be a matter of a weekly two-hour visit, in a synagogue or church building that is then lost and forgotten in the rush of our worldly activities and affairs. Pagans are the ones that have temples, but God’s New Covenant Jewish and non-Jewish people ARE temples…His perpetual, ever-faithful temples from within which His Living Presence can always be encountered on Earth!
Our Messiah’s indwelling creative Presence must occupy our full, wholehearted attention, affection and focus! He is not a part-time religious hobby; He is our new and eternal Life! This goes much deeper than dropping in for occasional casual visits that take place in a public building. It goes beyond the mere pursuit and accumulation of soulish intellectualism and abstract, theoretical head knowledge. It is an ongoing personal interaction, like a blood transfusion that never ends…receiving everything from God’s living creative Word as our spiritual ‘oxygen’. This is to take place in our most intimate, innermost parts throughout every private and public moment of our entire existence.
If we receive, embrace and obey God’s Word in our hearts like this, His electrifying Presence, the perfect Humanity and Activity of the Son of Man, will take over and change us radically from within. The character, disposition, and obedience of the Son of Man will appear in our actions, reactions, and interactions. His love, faithfulness, and forbearance will be seen and felt in our marriages and family relationships. He will permeate our home life and every relationship in which we engage. And this is how God will get the attention of the jaded, unbelieving, self-adoring world around us. The perfection of His Presence in us will make an enormous difference. And unbelievers around us will see and feel that difference…and when they do, they will also begin to see ‘the handwriting on the wall’ and more and more of them will sense that The Judgment is looming over the world, getting closer and closer and they will see and feel the urgent need to repent.
The Spirit of God makes the reality, activity, and fruitfulness of God’s Word shine forth from within us. Then the Word becomes like a fruit-producing Vine, transmitting His Resurrection Life and Activity into and through His fruit-bearing disciple ‘branches’. But that can’t happen if we keep allowing created things to come between us and our Master. Such blockage severs the personal, living connection we must have with our Lord. It creates a gap between us and ‘pulls our plug’ out and away from the one who is Our Life and our personal connection with God and His Almighty Power!
The True Jew and the True Disciple
Look at Moses’ words once more with this ‘Vine and branches’ reality in mind:
Deuteronomy 6:4
“HEAR, O Israel! The LORD is OUR God, the LORD is one! YOU shall love the LORD YOUR God with all YOUR heart and with all YOUR soul and with all YOUR might. These words, which I am commanding YOU today, shall be on YOUR heart.” YOU shall teach them diligently to YOUR sons and shall talk of them when YOU sit in YOUR house and when YOU walk by the way and when YOU lie down and when YOU rise up. YOU shall bind them as a sign on YOUR hand and they shall be as frontals on YOUR forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of YOUR house and on YOUR gates.” (Emphasis added)
Can you see how penetratingly invasive and intensely personal and lovingly interactive this relationship with the living Word has to be before we can truly become His image and likeness? The Messiah and His disciple must think and act as one working unit! Only this kind of personal abiding closeness can enable us to carry out the Marching Orders listed in this website. This is what God had in mind when He began to teach and train Abraham, His beloved Covenant friend.
Genesis 17:1
“Now when Abram was ninety-nine years old, the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, ‘I am God Almighty; WALK BEFORE ME, and be blameless!’”
God revealed this to Abraham long before there were written Scriptures or synagogues or church buildings and denominations. He ‘connected’ this man to Himself through the living Presence of His living Word and showed him what a true Jew and true disciple were to be! “Walk before Me”. If Abraham and the rest of us do that, we will be “blameless.” But since we can’t see Almighty God face to face, or touch Him, we can only know that we’re ‘walking before Him’ and being blameless, when we truly embrace, ‘follow’, obey and interact with His living Word according to what is revealed and prophesied concerning Him in the written Word. That’s what Deuteronomy reveals, as do all other books of the Bible (E.g. Psalms 1; 119; Mt. 5:17-20; Rom. 2; 1 Jn. 2: 22-24). God is one; so God’s living Word and His Word’s disciples must also be one (Cf. Jn. 17).
But that’s not the way it is in the world today, is it? Many Christians do not identify with the Torah or the foundational revelation and instruction it gives. They do not identify or relate to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Moses. They do not identify with God’s chosen Israelite people, nor does it occur to them that the one they call ‘Jesus Christ’ is the most famous, world-impacting Jew in all of human history by far. They do not see Him as ‘Yeshua ha Mashiach, Ben David’, the Ultimate Israelite, the Seed of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and David. They do not relate to Him as Yeshua the Messiah King of the Jews. They do not recognize Him to be the epitome of what it is to be an Israelite. A great, negative, antipathy and emotional distance have developed between many people and the Biblical Israelite roots of their faith. And because of that distance, there are also great distances among people. There’s distance between Jews and Christians, and distance between the multiple thousands of Christian groups that all call themselves, ‘Christian’, but have virtually nothing to do with each other! There’s distance in marriages and families, and many of us are even disconnected from our true selves! Disconnection and habitual separation has become utterly normal to us, haven’t they? Great division exists between the various ‘rootless’ members of the Body. And rootlessness makes us resemble ‘tumbleweeds’ blown randomly by the Serpent-generated winds that continually blow, this way and that, all across the earth.
That is because of the great distances we allow to remain between ourselves and our Head…God’s beloved Son. If we think it’s okay to maintain separation from Him, then we are, tragically, decapitated! And if we’re decapitated, the Serpent can easily go about ‘dismembering’ and slicing and dicing what’s left of us as well.
The requirements of the Old and New Covenants are identical – wholehearted oneness with God’s Word and obedience to Him. Only direct, personal union with our Head, can transform the rabble of radically independent agents, that Sin has made of us, into one living, integrated, synchronized Body. Only such union can reveal and embody God’s true supernatural salvation to the rest of the human race!
So being part of God’s true Israel has to be more than just an accident of birth and the observance of man-made sectarian religious traditions. It must go deeper than ethnicity, or the observance of religious rituals, formulas, and rites. And divisive theologies and pronouncements that men create do not make us one with God either. Those are all temporary matters of soul and body. God requires something to happen to us that is Heavenly. And that takes place at a much deeper eternal and spiritual level. The union God requires can only be created by His living Word when we all submit and allow Him to pierce, penetrate and impregnate our innermost being…our spirits…with His perfect Eternal Life And when the spiritual reality of the Life of God’s Word enters at that level, His living Reality begins to ‘bleed through’ into our minds, wills, affections and bodily actions, reactions and interactions, as well.
True Hebrews and True Disciples Are Identical
Arthur Katz was a Jew who believed in and served Yeshua (Jesus) as His Messiah. He passed away recently, after decades of fruitful prophetic ministry. In an audio teaching, he once said that true Jewishness and true discipleship are identical. Most modern Jews and Christians would be outraged by that statement. But if you ponder it honestly in light of what Scripture requires, you’ll see that true Jewishness as required by the Hebrew Scriptures and true discipleship as required by the New Covenant apostolic writings, are in fact synonymous! A true Jew is a true disciple of God’s Living and written Word; and a true New Covenant disciple, even a Gentile, will interact with the indwelling Lord just the way God required Adam, Eve and Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses to do with the living Word of God! (Cf. Mt. 10; Mk. 16:9-20; Jn. 15; Rom. 2 & Eph. 2) The living Word of God, after appearing as the Son of Man, said to His Jewish brothers:
John 8:56
“Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.”
The original Jewish apostles and disciples of our Master did a beautiful job of bridging the four-hundred-year-old gap between the time and writings of the Hebrew prophet Malachi and the appearance of the Hebrew prophet John the Immerser as recorded in the writings of the Jewish apostle Matthew. The disciples of the Messiah were – true Jews AND ALSO – true disciples of the living Word of God. They didn’t bridge the gap because they happened to be Jewish…but because not only did they wholeheartedly embrace and obey God’s written Word, but they also knew, embraced and became one with – GOD’S LIVING WORD! (Read 1 Jn. 2:20-24 once more.) Like all Jews of their day, Yeshua and His disciples had studied and memorized the Hebrew Scriptures. And just like their other Jewish brothers, they respected and observed man-made Israelite traditions and went to synagogues or to the temple, every Sabbath day and worshipped God with their Israelite brothers and sisters, observing every Biblical feast and commandment that was required by God’s written Word. But that was not their primary link with God! It was secondary and supplemental. What made their observance real was that they were true Hebrews, just like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and Moses had been before them. They lived, interacted with and obeyed the Living Word. And centuries after they died, the living Word they knew was also revealed by the Holy Spirit in the written Word. And that’s what Yeshua’s disciples had done. They had allowed the Holy Spirit to energize their hearts, minds, bodies, and relationships with the living Word, just like the true Israelites before them that had known Him long before anything was ever written about Him!
This living heart interaction with the Living God is what made the disciples to be true Biblically authentic Jews. Knowledge of the living Word enabled them to recognize Yeshua (Jesus) when He appeared among them. They knew, by the Holy Spirit, that He was the same Word that had appeared to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and Moses and to their other descendants at Mt. Sinai!
John 1:45
“Philip *found Nathanael and *said to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”
Matthew 16:15-17
“He said to them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ (Messiah), the Son (Word) of the living God.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Barjona, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but My Father who is in heaven.'”
When Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth, appeared to the disciples, the Holy Spirit had already previously equipped and predisposed them to recognize and acknowledge the living Word they already knew, when He appeared before them in the flesh. They knew in their spirits that this was the one Moses had written about. So, despite all their human faults and failings, they embraced and submitted to Him while many of their contemporary Jewish brethren continued to follow the lead of their disobedient ancestors who had backed away from Him…at Mt. Sinai. Like their ancestors, they decided to keep their distance when the living Word of God appeared to them.
Acts 7:51-53
“You men who are stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears are always resisting the Holy Spirit; you are doing just as your fathers did. Which one of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? They killed those who had previously announced the coming of the Righteous One, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become; you who received the Law (Torah) as ordained by angels, and yet did not keep it!“ (Emphasis added.)
Yeshua’s Jewish disciples recognized and embraced and submitted to the living Torah Moses had described in the written Torah. Thus He was able to transform them into paragons of what Spirit-filled New Covenant Israelites and disciples were, and always will be, required to become…His image and likeness!
So the New Covenant union that all men can now have with Israel’s Messiah, enables all Jews and Gentiles to ‘cross over’ and be grafted into the Root of God’s True Israel by that same spiritual connection with God’s living Word made flesh! (Cf. Gen. 12:1-3; Mt. 10:24-25; Eph. 2: Rom. 2:9-11) The relationship God requires all men to have with Him is universal. It’s not limited to one ethnic group or world religion or historical era or dispensation. It’s not about any man-devised set of sectarian traditions, customs, religious organizations, theologies or ethnocultural, historical outcroppings that divide all the peoples of the world today. Because so many people value, and even idolize these things, they give much higher priority to them than they do to the explicit commands of God Himself!
Galatians 3:26-29
“For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ (Messiah) Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.” (Emphasis added.)
The fact is that most of the mindsets, perspectives and religious practices of the Jewish and non-Jewish World as they are today, actually emerged centuries after the time of Moses and centuries after the time of Yeshua. And in a variety of ways, they all deviate from what God taught through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, the prophets and – Yeshua, the Messiah. God’s living Word died to destroy the wall of partition that once separated His Chosen People from the rest of the world. And tragically, many of His Chosen People and many from the rest of the world have disobediently cooperated with each other in rebuilding that wall and maintain it to this day! And that is a far cry from all of them together being, the image and likeness of God’s living Word, isn’t it?
When God’s living Word is truly our Head, then His true ‘Biblical Jewishness and Righteousness’ are imparted to us by God’s Holy Spirit. God transmits the living presence and heart-changing activity of His living Word…The Messiah…into us. It is that wholehearted devotion and obedience to God’s Son, the living Word, that is the hallmark of a true, living, relationship between God and any human being. In this respect, the Old Covenant and the New Covenant are identical in their intent and requirements. The only real difference is that the Covenant of Moses serves to expose all rebellious, disobedient human hearts. It shows whether they are still married to their original state and lifestyle of Sin, or, whether they are dead to that…and are now married to (or the Bride of) God’s living Word (Jer. 33:11; Mt. 25:1-10; Rev. 19:6-7).
So as God renews His eternal Covenant and writes it on human hearts, He changes and empowers those hearts. He doesn’t empower them to be Jewish or non-Jewish. He empowers them to be restored to the original image and likeness of His living Word, just as it was in the very beginning. In that case, they transform into ‘The Bride of the Lamb’. That’s why, in Jn. 4:19-24, we see Jesus saying the following to a Samaritan woman:
John 4:19-24
“The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.’
“Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in this mountain (Mt. Gerizim) nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’” (Emphasis added.)
As we’ve already observed, the status quo that people are so accustomed to and conditioned by today…is temporary. A new day is approaching. God will have His way. So it is incumbent on all of us to prepare our souls for the massive changes that will surely overtake us in the days to come. Yeshua…The KING of the Kingdom of Heaven and the entire universe is at hand. Repent! Fall at His feet and wait for His good pleasure! Make sure you do not appear before God…Head-less!