The Shema

 This week we read chapters from the book of Deuteronomy as part of Come Follow Me.  When I was in college I used to think of the Book of Deuteronomy as "ether in print."  There were  actually a few times when I was having trouble falling to sleep because of stress or anxiety, so I started reading Deuteronomy and then was able to nod off.  I don't hold that opinion any more, and have found much of interest in the book.

Tradition holds that Deuteronomy was written by Moses, but most scholars believe that it was probably passed down orally until much later.  Some scholars associate it with the text found my Josiah when he was restoring temple worship in Israel (2 Kings 22:8).  When Josiah read it he recognized that it foretold that Israel would be destroyed because they did not keep their covenants with the Lord and followed after idols.  Josiah was so upset his tore his clothes (a sign of deep despair).  A few years after Josiah's reign, Israel was taken into captivity. 

One of the main jewels of the Book of Deuteronomy is the Shema. It is the text of a covenant or commandment given from the Lord to the people of Israel right before entering the "promised land." The Shema is found in Deuteronomy 6: 4-9 and is called the Shema because the first word of 6:4 is "shema", which means "hear" or "attend".  It contains a passage that Jesus later quoted when a lawyer asked him what was the greatest commandment: 

"And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all they soul and with all they might." (v. 5) (see also Matt 22:37)

This is a notoriously difficult passage to translate. The word לבב, means heart, but in the Hebrew language the heart isn’t the center for emotion like it is in English, (that’s the abdomen). The heart is the center of true understanding and devotion.  

The word soul, נפש, comes for the word for your neck.  When the Lord creates Adam, he breaths into him the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). The neck it where that breath, symbolizing your spirit, goes in and out of your body. When breath stops, life stops. Even though this word means neck, it is used as an idiom for your essential self in the Bible more than it is used to represent your physical neck.

The last word, מאדך (me'odecha) comes from an adverb meaning "very" or "a lot." When God finished creating the world and he said it was “very good” the term for very is מאד, me'od (Genesis 1:31). But here it isn’t used as an adverb, but as a noun. That last letter "ך" is a suffix that means "your". The the word means something like "your very-ness" or "your much-ness". It isn’t used in this form anywhere else in the whole Old Testament, only this passage. I think the writer couldn’t come up with a word strong enough to express how much of yourself you should use to worship God, so he made up one. 

The author here is using amazingly strong words to try to communicate how much we should love the Lord and how faithfully we should serve him. I think it is why this prayer has endured a central tenet of Jewish worship and is so powerful and meaningful for Jewish people today.

Of course, because Jesus repeats it in the New Testament, it is also a powerful part of Christian worship. Every Christian must ask themselves if we worship God with all our heart (devotion), soul (essential being) and me'odecha.

Shema Israel

Jesus is the GOAT: a look at the Day of Atonement

This week in Come Follow Me we read about a couple of the sacrifices regularly conducted in the Tabernacle. This year I have been able to see more than ever before how all of these ancient practices, although they seem a bit barbaric to us, were actually pointing to the atonement of Jesus Christ. It is as if God was sitting up in heaven with Mother God, and trying to come up with as many ways as possible to foreshadow the life and mission of Jesus. They tried using every sense--taste, smell, touch, sound, sight. They used a variety of ceremonies and places--the altar of sacrifice, the altar of incense, the laver, the show bread, the menorah, the curtains... everything foreshadowing some aspect of Jesus' life and mission as our Savior. 

I can't go into all of them in one post, so I wanted to talk about the Day of Atonement. It is one of the high holy days in Judaism, and the only time that anyone was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies. It is explained in Leviticus 16:2-22.  The high priest first made a sin offering for himself, washed himself, and changed into specific clothing to represent his ritualistic purity. Then he took two goats and presented them at the door of the Tabernacle. There they cast lots to establish which goat will be sacrificed and which will be set free as the scapegoat. The first goat was offered up as a sin offering for all the people. The high priest brought the blood of the offering into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled it on the Mercy Seat (the cover of the Ark of the Covenant). Finally, he went out of the Holy Place, confessed over the live goat all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and then sent him off into the wilderness. 

Some of the symbolism here is really clear.  The first goat represents Jesus whose blood atones for the sins of the people.  Just as Jesus will advocate before the throne of God for us, the blood of the first goat is placed on the Mercy Seat, which represents the throne of God. This symbolic act says, "Look father, I have given my blood for these people, therefore have mercy on them."

But what of the other goat? The sins of the House of Israel are ritualistically placed on the second goat and that goat is taken out of the camp.  One obvious symbolism is that the second goat also represents Christ.  He takes upon him our sins and then removes them from the community. By his departure (i.e. his death) the community is cleansed of sin. 

But why does one goat die and one goat live?  Jesus died for our sins (first goat) and thus reconciles us to God.  He also takes away our sins, like the second goat, but where does he go with them?  Does he pass them off to another community?  Is it understood that he would die in the wilderness?  One Jewish commentary, Mishna Yoma 6:6, suggests that the scapegoat was pushed off a cliff.  This symbolized that those sins were permanently removed out of the community in a way that they wouldn't come back. 

What if,  however,  there is another foreshadowing here.  Maybe the scapegoat represents what Jesus did after his death.  The casting out of the scapegoat does happen after the sacrifice of the first goat. We know from the scriptures that after he was killed, Jesus went and ministered to the spirits in spirit prison (1 Peter 3: 19-20). Couldn't that be like a wilderness of type? We also understand that Jesus visited his other "sheep" (John 10:16). From a Biblical point of view, that could represent the Gospel going to the Gentiles. From a Book of Mormon point of view, it could represent Jesus visiting the saints in the Americas. Both of these groups could be metaphorically on the other side of a barren wilderness because they were separate and different from the community where Jesus taught during his ministry.

This is all a bit of a stretch. None of the podcasters I listened to this week brought up this idea as a possible symbolism of the scapegoat.  Still, who knows? There has to be some reason why there are two goats and one is left alive. In all the other sacrifices, the animals are killed. 

It is easy to see symbolism if you are looking for it, and it is easy to take it too far.  One might even suggest that a "goat" is used in this sacrifice instead of a sheep or bull because God knew that 3000 years later in English the term "G.O.A.T" would be an acronym for Greatest of All Time, and Jesus was certainly the greatest man of all time. That's silliness, of course, but it could make a good t-shirt, especially for those who know their Old Testament.  In a way it explains the symbolism of all the sacrifices of the Levitical worship: "Jesus is the GOAT". 

A Kingdom of Priests

When the children of Israel arrive at Mount Sinai, the Lord tells them "You have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagle's wings, and brought you unto myself.  Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: and ye shall be unto me a kingdom priests, and an holy nation" (Exodus 19:4-6)

Did this happen to the House of Israel in the Old Testament?  In a way it did, but in a limited scale.  In Exodus 19 the Lord told Moses to bring the people to the bottom of the mountain so they could hear his voice. The people came, and they saw the lightning and thunder on the mountain, and heard the voice of the Lord but it sounded to them like a trumpet. (v 18-19)  Then in Exodus 24, Moses, Aaron, and 72 others were admitted onto the mountain where "They saw the God of Israel...And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand; also they saw God and did eat and drink." (v 9-11) These experiences distinguished these people as witnesses of God. They were singled out as a special group of people, or "treasure" because they had this experience and entered into a covenant with God.

Most of the House of Israel, however, refused to receive the full blessing the God wanted to give them. When Moses came down from the mountain with the Law, "All the people saw the thunderings and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, and when the people saw it, they removed and stood afar off. And they said to Moses, Speak thou with us and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die.  And Moses said unto the people, Fear not; for God is come to prove you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not. And the people stood afar off." (Exodus 20: 18-21)  The people were too afraid to listen to the Lord directly and enter his presence. Then, soon after they feared because Moses had been the in Mountain talking to the Lord for a long time.  They made a golden calf and worshiped it when God had expressly commanded them not to make any images. (Exodus 32) They are not ready to become a "nation of priests", so the Lord creates a subset of priests to serve them. 

The Lord commands the people to build the tabernacle, and then consecrates Aaron and his sons to be priests to serve in the Tabernacle (Exodus 28).  The Levites and descendants of Aaron continued to server in the Tabernacle, and then in the Temple, for hundreds of years until Herod's Temple was destroyed in 70 AD.  In that way, the House of Israel partially fulfills the command to be "kingdom of priests, and a holy nation," but the priesthood was limited to a select few who officiated in the temple. The other tribes of Israel depended on the temple workers to help them perform ordinances and make covenants.

So what about today?  Is there a "kingdom of priests" today?  I only know of one church that invites all members to become priests and priestesses. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints invites all worthy young men to be ordained as priests beginning at age 16. All worthy adults are washed and anointed to become priests and priestesses in holy temples.  In the ancient temple, only the high priest may enter the Holy of Holies once a year. In modern temples all worthy adults are invited to symbolically pass through the temple veil and enter the Lord's presence when they receive their temple endowment. In a very real way the members of the LDS church fulfill the Lord's request to be a "kingdom of priests".

So if members are part of this "kingdom of priests" what are our responsibilities? In ancient days the priests made it so that all the house of Israel could perform the ordinances required by the Judaic Law. That is what the modern LDS church is offering to the whole world today. They recognize that all peoples and cultures have truth and their own kinds of relationships with God, but only in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can people recieve and perform the ordinances, and make the ritualistic covenants they need to fulfill God's plan for them.  That is why we build so many temples.  That is why we send our young people and older people to serve as missionaries.  We are the kingdom of priests that the Lord is sending out serve the entire world.   

A Closer Look at Manna

 For my Sunday School lesson today I decided to focus on the parting of the Red Sea and the bestowal of Manna in the wilderness. It made me look closer at Manna, how it was described, and the rules about how it was to be gathered and eaten.  

First of all, what was Manna.  There are a few different words and phrases that described it.  In Exodus 16:31 we read that "it was like coriander seed, white; and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey." in Exodus 16:14 we learn that it was "a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground." We also learn in 16:21 "and when the sun waxed hot, it melted."  I have to admit that the first thing that came to my mind with this description was Dipp'n Dots.  We learn elsewhere, however, that they would "bake" it and "seeth" or boil it. So it wasn't Dipp'n Dots. For my class, I made a honey graham cracker recipe, crumbled the dough, and cooked it. It wasn't white like real manna, but the students enjoyed gathering it up from the butcher paper I had spread on the floor.

My attempt to make Manna taught me something about the message of the Manna.  I think the reference to Coriander in Exodus 16:31 refers to the size of the bits of Manna because it is followed by the phrase, "and the taste...". Here is a picture of Coriander seed.

As you can see, it is pretty small.  I think a modern American would say it is about the size of pepper corns. The Lord tells them that they are to gather one omer every morning per person(16:15) , and the chapter says that it was found on the ground (v. 14).  An omer is believed to be about two quarts. 

So think about what it would take to gather two quarts of something the size and shape of a peppercorn.  They couldn't just scoop it up, or they would get a handful of dirt mixed in with their Manna.  They would have to bend down, pick up each piece, one at a time, and put it into their container.  After that they would then have to either grind and cook it as bread or boil and eat it.

In John 6: 25-40 Jesus compares himself to Manna, the bread of life.  Several of my podcasters, and materials in the Come Follow Me manual talked about how just as the children of Israel had to gather Manna each day for physical sustenance, we have to give ourselves spiritual Manna each day to stay spiritually strong. If gathering Manna is a symbol of diligently seeking God's spirit, what do the details of Chapter 16 teach us?

First of all, we need to feed our spirits every day. We can't gather enough spiritual food on Sunday to last us through the week.  If we try to rest on yesterday's spiritual laurels, it could go rotten in our souls.  

Second, the daily spiritual experiences we seek are not necessarily large.  Spiritual health is based on many small acts of devotion, like picking up the many pieces of Manna in an omer.  These could include saying prayers, daily scripture reading,and small acts of service. Each is another seed of the bread of life. 

Third, to collect spiritual sustenance, we have to humble ourselves.  The people gathering manna had to bend over, probably to their knees, just to see the Manna in order to pick it up. It took physical effort and focus. If we don't bend over, examine closely, and focus, we are likely to end up with a metaphorical handful of dirt instead of the bread of life. 

Finally, if we do humble ourselves, gather spiritual experiences daily, and focus our lives on Christ, the Lord does send us, each day, what we need to get through the day. In the Lord's Prayer Jesus taught his disciples, "Give us this day our daily bread." He will sustain us.  Maybe we aren't eating Thanksgiving dinner every day, but we aren't starving to death either.  He is faithful and will provide. 

We get the impression from the scriptures that Manna was not only nutritious, but also delicious.  The scripture describes it like "cakes of honey" and "bread made with oil", (think doughnuts). Likewise our daily communion with God can also be a delicious part of our lives. It will sustain us and help us get through whatever wilderness we might encounter. 

Passover

The symbolism of the passover is so deep that I am sure 1000's of books and articles have been written about it. I wrote a good blog post about Genesis 7-13 in 2022. One thing I mentioned then was how the different plagues were created to show that Jehova was more powerful than the Egyptian gods, with each plague referring to a different god. One insite I got from the podcasts I listened to this week was a different way of seeing the plagues. This week Dave Hadlock on Follow Him talked about how the plagues were a dismantling of creation.  

I have talked about before how the flood at the time of Noah was an undoing of creation. It was a chance for God to reset the world with a new founder and a new covenant. That is basically what is happening in the story of the Exodus. God, through the plagues, ritualistically reverses creation so the pharaoh will free Israel and then God can re-establishes a new creation and a new covenant with the house of Israel.  Here are the parallels.

During the Creation, God orders and separates light from darkness and water from land.  He sets lights in the heavens and creates plants and animals. His final creation is man. The plagues reverse all that.  The Lord starts by cursing the Nile, the main water source.  He later causes darkness where there can be no light. He destroys crops and sends the locusts who destroy all the plants.  He also destroys the cattle. He causes hail and fire to fall from heaven (reversing the placement of lights in heaven). His final curse is the death of the firstborn. When the house of Israel is finally allowed to leave Egypt, the world the Hebrews have known has been completely destroyed, or un-created. 

As Israel leaves the ruined world behind, the Lord starts to re-create their world again. First, he separates the land from the water when he divides the Red Sea. He separates light from darkness when he establishes the Pillar of Fire to lead them by night. Later we will learn that he creates food (like the plants created in Eden) in the form of Manna, and gives them animals to eat, in the form of quail (Ex 16). He leads the people to Mount Sinai where Moses talks with the Lord. When the people are ready to meet the Lord on the Mountain, the mountain is filled with lighting and thunder (Ex 19:16-19).  The Lord is restoring the lights that had fallen from heaven. The creation has been re-established.  All that was destroyed by the plagues are back in place. This done, they are ready for a new covenant, with a new priesthood leadership, lead by Moses and Miriam, instead of Adam and Eve. We will talk in later weeks about how Israel refused the full covenant that the Lord wanted to make with them, and were given a lesser covenant.

If you look, you can see this pattern of uncreation and recreation repeated in the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon and even in Church history. A few examples are the Babylonian Captivity, the events of 3rd Nephi, the coming of Christ in the meridian of time, and the restoration of the Gospel through Joseph Smith.  In each case people have strayed so far from God's path they need a really dramatic reset in order for them to get back on track. In each of these cases, look for the elements of water, light, plants, animals, and signs in the heavens. In each case there is a catastrophic failure, but then the Lord starts over with a new covenant. 

This pattern can bring us hope in our own lives.  Sometimes it seems like our own lives experience a catastrophic failure. This can be due to our own sin, or through exterior forces that make our life unravel. The scriptures show us that God is faithful.  When "un-creation" happens, if we turn to Him he can recreate our lives in ways we could not have anticipated. 

Jesus' Anointing

This week we take a break from our study of Exodus and turn to the celebration of Holy Week.  I posted about my family's traditions surrounding Holy Week a few years ago.  Today I want to focus on an occurrence that is often overlooked in the recounting of the last week of Jesus' life. To start out, I have to ask the question: what does it mean when we say Jesus the Christ?  

Both of the terms "Christ" and "Messiah" mean the same thing, "Anointed One." (Christ is Greek, and Messiah is Hebrew).  What role does anointing play in the Old Testament?  There are two kinds of people who are anointed, priests, and kings. Since Jesus qualifies as both a priest and a king then it makes sense that he would be anointed. Yet, there is no account of Jesus being formally anointed by either of religious or political leaders of the day.  There isn't even an account of Jesus being anointed by God.  

There are only two accounts of Jesus receiving an anointing, and both were performed by women.  In John 12:1-8 Mary the sister of Martha, anoints Jesus' feet shortly before Holy Week.  In Mark 14:3-9 an unnamed woman anoints Jesus' head with spikenard. Some people think of these as two separate events, and some people see them as two recountings of the same event. For this discussion I will consider them the same event.  Mary, the sister of Martha, pours a very expensive and aromatic oil on Jesus right before his crucifixion.

Why, if one of Jesus' main titles is "Anointed One," is Jesus anointed only by women?  And what is spikenard and why would a women own a very expensive alabaster container of it?  

Spikenard is a essential oil perfume made from a plant that grows in the Himalayas. It would have been expensive because it was imported from a far-away country. Why might a woman own some?  We must remember that ancient Israel, especially the cities, would have been very stinky places. There was the smell of sweaty bodies, sweaty animals, and animal dung. Jews performed a lot of ritual washings, but in the desert running water was scarce and baths were few. It would have been normal, therefore, for a woman to have purchased, or have been gifted perfume as part of her dowry to sweeten the experience of marital intimacy. 

I purchased some spikenard last time we studied the New Testament.  It has a nice smell, but quite strong.  A few drops of it would have gone a long way. The story specifically says that pouring the whole container on Jesus' head was considered a waste and the smell filled the house. 

One way to look at the scene is that Mary, by sacrificing the large container of oil was showing her great love, perhaps even romantic love, for Jesus.  She was, in essence, saying, "because of my great love for you I will never marry or love another man. I know you are going to die, so I will use all my spikenard on you at once, while I have the chance." 

If this is the case, it is a very touching and romantic scene. It makes it even more beautiful that Jesus appears first to Mary when he is resurrected.

There is, however, an even more impactful symbolic meaning to this scene. If you read through my blog titles from the last time we studied the Old Testament, you know that the idea of God as the Bridegroom, and the church as his bride permeates the whole Old Testament, and then recurs in force in the book of Revelation. I think the reason that the woman in Mark who anoints Jesus is unnamed, is because Mark (and the other gospel writers) was aware of this symbolism.  He knows that spikenard is associated with the bridal chamber.  He knows that the bride represents the church.  He is showing two important principles. 

First, that it is Jesus' death that makes him the Bridegroom. When Judas asks why Jesus allowed the waist of the expensive oil, Jesus says that she has done it in preparation for his burial (Mark 14:8). He is combining images of marriage and death on purpose. He is showing that Jesus' suffering and death is the marriage that joins us to him in an everlasting covenantal embrace. 

Second, Jesus is not established (i.e. anointed) as priest and king by worldly religious or political leaders, but by the church itself (symbolized by the woman).  In order for him to be our priest, we must be his disciples.  In order for him to be our king, we must be his subjects. It is our love and respect for him that enthrones him and makes him Lord in our lives and in our hearts. 

Joseph in Egypt Revisited

 I wrote a lot about Joseph in 2022, so much so that it took two posts that you can find here and here. This year as I was reading the story again, I was thinking about how I would present it to 15-year-olds.  A lot of what I wrote about four years ago is interesting to a scriptorian but might not be very interesting to a teenager. In reality, what I ended up writing four years ago doesn't actually give anyone practical advice on how to live your life. I didn't end up teaching the lesson this week, but my co-teacher gave a beautiful lesson that has real application in a modern teen's life.  She first talked about Joseph fleeing Potiphar's wife and how we might apply the lessons from that story in our lives to avoid temptation and sin. Then she talked about all that Joseph went through and how, though it seemed terribly unjust at the time, it brought Joseph to the place he needed to be right when he needed to be there to save his family. 

As someone who is on the other side of 60, it is this message that resonated the most with me this year. The question I ask myself is, did Joseph's brothers have to sell him into slavery for him to end up in Egypt in time to save his family?  Did Potiphar's wife have to proposition him and did he have to languish four years in jail in order to catch Pharaoh's attention? 

I think the answer is no. I think that the Lord doesn't depend on other's bad decisions to accomplish his works. It is possible that if Joseph's brothers had been kinder to him, something else, perhaps less hurtful, might have happened to him to bring him into Egypt.  If Potiphar's wife hadn't propositioned him, maybe Pharoah would have met him anyway, since he was working for the Pharoah's captain of the guard. 

The encouraging thing about this story is that even when someone uses their free agency to hurt us or misuse us, God is great enough to figure out a way to help us accomplish our mission on earth anyway. If our brothers throw us into the pit, He can send Ishmaelites (I think it is significant that is was a branch of the covenant family) to save us.  If we are wrongly accused, He will give our cellmates prophetic dreams that will eventually lead to us being brought before Pharoah. If we are patient and faithful, the Lord will help us overcome any roadblock put in our way by the sins of others. 

And what if I am the betraying brother?  What if I am Potiphar's wife?  What if my actions cause someone else to be thrown into some kind of proverbial pit?  In my mind, the greatest blessing of the atonement is not that my sins can be washed away, it is that God's grace can somehow heal the negative consequences of my sins on others. My faults won't keep someone else from completing their mission. If I was at times a bad wife, a bad mother, or a bad friend, the atonement can heal my family, my spouse, or my friend. It is what I pray and hope for the most. It is what I hope and pray for every day.