WRITINGS
The year was 2002, and our family was living in Merrimack, New Hampshire. We began attending a conservative Baptist Church just down the street, a traditional New England church building with a white steeple and bell tower.
I was a new believer in Jesus, but I was confused about Christianity. Did my Jewish heritage mean anything? After all, I knew that Jesus was a Jewish man. And wasn’t His actual name Joshua, pronounced Yehoshua in Hebrew?
We read, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
The first word in Hebrew is Be-reisheet. This word signifies the very act of creation—God brought “being” into existence from “non-being,” something from nothing. In the beginning (Be’reisheet), the Lord God-YHVH made everything perfect. Each living organism on earth is divinely planned and woven into the most remarkable fabric of creation, a living tapestry of God’s artwork. Every detail is carefully and methodically executed by the wisdom of God, for creation without wisdom would be chaos. But the universe is far from that. It is intelligently designed by God’s hand. Each star and speck of dust moved into place, every planet in our solar system carefully aligned, and the earth itself delicately cloaked in a firmament of water and oxygen, a biosphere capable of sustaining all life.
The story of David, an ordinary boy raised to extraordinary heights by an extraordinary God. The Son of Jesse, a simple shepherd boy chosen by God to be the King of Israel. And the only figure in the bible to be called: “A man after God’s own Heart.” In so many ways David is given to us as a type of Yeshua, a preeminence of Him to come.
In God’s infinite wisdom He has woven into the fabric of humanity a plan for the redemption of fallen man. We can see that by His divine election that He has preserved a seed that extends from Adam through Noah, Abraham and King David, ultimately bringing forth the Messiah Yeshua, the stem and the root of Jesse, and the branch and arm of God. But with Abraham, God made a covenant to create a nation that would literally become ‘one’ with Him. To understand His purpose for humanity we must look to Israel, for she is the only nation on earth to receive direct revelation of God, and the only nation to be born of His Covenant.
“Then Moses said to God, Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they say to me, ‘What is His name?’ what shall I say to them?” (Exodus 3:13, NKJV).
“Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt…” (Exodus 12:1, NKJV).
This chapter details the exodus from Egypt, the laws of the Passover, and the plague of the first-born. But it opens with an intriguing phrase, “in the land of Egypt.” Since we know the story is unfolding in Egypt, why is it necessary for God to reiterate an obvious fact?
“Now it came to pass after these things that God tested Abraham…” (Genesis 22:1, NKJV).
This verse provides a rather puzzling question. If God is omniscience, meaning that He is all-knowing, why does He need to test Abraham? And, if He already knows the outcome of the test with Abraham then why is the test even necessary? To discover an answer we will turn to Midrashic commentary; Genesis Rabba 55:2.
“Now the Lord had said to Abram: Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1, NKJV).
In this opening chapter in Genesis we see that God has chosen Avram (Abram), yet it gives us no indication for what motivation? Noah’s election in previous chapters is obvious for the Lord said that Noah was a righteous man, perfect in his generations. He had found favor in God’s eyes and was chosen to save a remnant of humanity.
God's name is the most frequently used noun in the Hebrew Bible, occurring over 6,800 times. It is spelled with only four consonants: Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey (יְהוָה), and is called the “Four-Letter” name of God, or the “Tetragrammaton” in Greek. This is God’s written name because He is the Word of God, and we know that Yeshua is the word of God who came in human form. In other words, God’s written word came to life. Hence, the “word became flesh.”
The story of Chanukah takes place about two-hundred years before the birth of Christ during the time of the second temple in Jerusalem. A small group of Israelites led by a family of Aaronic priests, called the Maccabees (Hebrew meaning hammer), had risen up against their Greek-Syrian oppressors in what is called the Maccabean Revolt. This was not just a fight against a foreign occupying presence, but a spiritual battle against the Hellenization and assimilation of the Jewish people into Greek culture and idolatry.
There is a growing hunger within the church to understand its Hebraic foundation, often call the Hebraic roots of the church. This does not imply in any way that gentile believers suddenly become Jewish, or that Jewish believers loose their ethnic and cultural identity in following Christ.
“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.’ But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare, and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord” (Jonah 1:1-3, NKJV).
