36 B'HA'ALOTKHA (when you set up); Num 8-12, John 5&6

[Bruce Bertram]

Numbers 8 starts out with a note that the light of the lamp stand in the Tabernacle was supposed to fall in front. Then there is a description of the setting apart of the Levites for the work of helping the priests and taking care of the Tabernacle. We are told that all the first born of Israel are God’s, but that the Levites were set apart for service instead. The ceremony for setting apart includes shaving the body hair, cleansing from sin (sprinkling with purifying water), and washing their clothes. They are set apart as a wave offering, they enter service at 25 years old and retire and 50 years.

Chapter 9 gives an account of the second Passover, the first while on the road. Just before the celebration, some people tell Moses they can’t celebrate because they are unclean from contact with a dead person, and ask if there’s a way they can. Moses inquires of God, and God sets aside a second time a month after the first for people who are unclean or are on a long journey.

10“Speak to the sons of Israel, saying, ‘If any one of you or of your generations becomes unclean because of a dead person, or is on a distant journey, he may, however, observe the Passover to the LORD. 11‘In the second month on the fourteenth day at twilight, they shall observe it; they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. 12‘They shall leave none of it until morning, nor break a bone of it; according to all the statute of the Passover they shall observe it. 13‘But the man who is clean and is not on a journey, and yet neglects to observe the Passover, that person shall then be cut off from his people, for he did not present the offering of the LORD at its appointed time. That man will bear his sin. 14‘If an alien sojourns among you and observes the Passover to the LORD, according to the statute of the Passover and according to its ordinance, so he shall do; you shall have one statute, both for the alien and for the native of the land.’ ” (Numbers 9:10-14 NASB95)

These are important verses for determining the validity of celebrating the Passover by non-native Israelites, for being able to celebrate it even out of the Land or apart from the Temple, and for the designation of the lamb as the ‘offering of the Lord’ (verse 13).

A cloud would cover the Tabernacle by day, which looked like fire at night. The movement of the cloud would cue Israel when it was time to march and when it was time to stay put. This cloud was also referred to as the ‘commandment of the Lord.’ Sometimes it would stay for days in one place, sometimes it was only a day. To help with ordering and moving Israel, God commanded that two trumpets of silver be made and blown as signals. One signal was for summoning the congregation (both trumpets blown), one was for summoning just the leaders to a meeting (one trumpet blown) and one was for moving out (both in an alarm). These trumpets were also to be blown when going to war or battle, and ‘in the day of your gladness’ (verse 10:10) in the appointed feasts, on the first day of the month, and over burnt offerings and peace offerings. In the second year, in the second month, Israel started moving and went to Paran. Moses wanted his father-in-law to stay with them to act as a guide and it appears he stays with them.

However, it wasn’t long until Israel started grumbling and complaining about their hardships. In Chapter 11 we read of an instance where the grumbling was met with ‘fire from the Lord’ on the outskirts of the camp. The people cried out to stop it, and God is merciful and stops. This place is called Taberah or ‘burning.’ Next, the grumbling is about food, because they are eating only manna and want meat also. Israel longs for the fish and other foods of Egypt, and start talking about going back. The manna comes with the morning dew and is like coriander seed, and the cakes baked with it tasted like cakes baked with oil. Moses complains about leading the people and trying to provide meat for all of them, and tells God he can’t do the leading alone and to kill him if he has to keep doing it by himself. So God tells Moses to bring 70 elders to Him and He will take some of the Spirit on Moses and put it on the 70. When God does this the 70 elders prophesy, including two in the camp who didn’t make it to the meeting. When Joshua wants to stop the two, Moses says that he wishes all people would have the Spirit and be prophets. God answers the desire for meat by bringing in a lot of quail. He says Israel will eat meat for a month until it comes out their noses, but while the meat is still in their mouths He strikes them with a plague and many die. They call that camp site Kibroth-hattaavah meaning ‘graves of lust.’

In Numbers 12 Aaron and Miriam complain about the Cushite wife of Moses. In the process they also question the credentials of Moses for speaking the Words of God and say that they can do it too. God, in the form of the cloud, calls the three of them for a meeting at the Tabernacle, and tells Aaron and Miriam that He speaks to Moses face to face but with others He speaks in dreams or visions. He also says that they should’ve been afraid to grumble against Moses because he sees the ‘form of the Lord.’ When the cloud withdraws from the meeting, Miriam is completely white with leprosy. First Aaron cries out to Moses for healing for her, then Moses cries out to the Lord. God says that at least she should stay outside of the camp for seven days, then she can come back.

Jesus, in John 5, goes up to Jerusalem for a feast, and there heals a man who is too crippled to get himself into the healing pool at Bethesda. The problem is it was on a Sabbath day, and Jesus tells the man it’s okay to carry his mat and walk. The religious leaders are angry at this and want to know who told the man it was okay to carry the mat. The man doesn’t remember, but later in the day Jesus finds him again and tells him not to sin so more doesn’t happen to him. The man tells the leaders it was Jesus who healed him, and when the leaders question Jesus He claims to be equal with the Father, so the leaders start plotting to kill Him. Jesus tells them that He does nothing apart from the Father, that He only does what He sees the Father doing, and whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father. He also begins to speak of resurrection, and that He has the power given to Him by the Father to raise the dead. Jesus goes on to speak of the testimony of John the Baptist, the testimony of His works, and the testimony of the Father as to who He is and where He is from.

39“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that testify about Me; 40and you are unwilling to come to Me so that you may have life. 41“I do not receive glory from men; 42but I know you, that you do not have the love of God in yourselves. 43“I have come in My Father’s name, and you do not receive Me; if another comes in his own name, you will receive him. 44“How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God? 45“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. 46“For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. 47“But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?” (John 5:39-47 NASB95)

Moving on, Jesus goes to one side of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) called Tiberias, and has a picnic with 5,000 men using only five loaves and two fishes. Twelve baskets of leftovers are taken up on top of that. When the people get excited and Jesus perceives that they want to set Him up as King right away, He goes off by Himself to the mountain, and the disciples set off in a boat for the other side of the sea. When they get part way across, Jesus sees they are in trouble with the weather, and goes out to them walking on the water. The disciples are frightened, but take Him in the boat and continue to the other side. Meanwhile, the people back at the picnic site are looking for Jesus and can’t figure how He left when there wasn’t a boat there, so they get in boats to go looking for Him. They catch up to Him at Capernaum and ask Him when He got there.

Instead of answering the question, Jesus speaks of the reason they were looking for Him, and that they should look for Him not because of miracles like the food at the picnic but because He is life. The people respond by asking for a sign from Him like manna from heaven, and Jesus replies that Moses didn’t give the manna but God did, and that God has also provided Himself as the bread. They grumble that Jesus is saying He is ‘from heaven,’ and Jesus repeats His assertion that He is the bread of Life, and that He will raise up all people that God gives Him at the resurrection. He also says some things that are even more difficult to understand.

53So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. 54“He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55“For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. 56“He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. 57“As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me. 58“This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.” (John 6:53-58 NASB95)

The people He is speaking with grumble at this, and some of His disciples quit following Him. But Jesus clarifies what He means in the following key verse.

63“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. (John 6:63 NASB95)

So to ‘eat His flesh’ and ‘drink His blood’ means to eat and drink His Words. He asks if the other disciples will leave Him also, and Peter says, “Where would we go? Your words are eternal life. You are the Holy One of God.”

Shalom

[Bruce Bertram]

B’ha’alotkha Numbers 8:1-12:16; Zechariah 2:14-4:7; John 5 & 6

Numbers 11 tells us about the incident with the quail while Israel was starting to move away from Mt. Sinai. They get no more than a few days on the road when some rebellious people (the NASB translates the word as ‘rabble’ 11:4) made up of both Israelis and the ‘mixed multitude’ that came out of Egypt with them start whining about their diet. They wanted meat because they were tired of the manna, and they began longing to go back to Egypt where they could get better things to eat. This was right on the heels of the incident at Taberah (11:1) where there was grumbling and people dying because of it, yet it doesn’t affect the rabble very much, apparently. Moses entreats the Lord, who provides quail in abundance. So much is the abundance that the Lord says it will “come out their nose” (11:20), probably a euphemism for vomiting. The bread of God just isn’t enough for the rabble, though delicious and sustaining (11:7-9).

John is one of my favorite books of the Bible (although they all are right up there at the top) and chapter 6 is one of my favorite chapters. There is so much wisdom and meaning packed into these few verses that I use them on many occasions for all sorts of debates and discussions. John focuses on the words of Jesus relating to eternal life and resurrection in both chapters (as well as many other places) in such a way that chapter six builds on the statements in chapter five relating to those subjects and crescendos up to Jesus’ concept of ‘eat me.’

That’s right; Jesus is the first person to say ‘eat me.’ Not as an insult, nor a tongue-in-cheek whim, but as a challenge, one that anyone can accept and benefit thereby. He is the bread which comes down from heaven (6:35), filling those who hunger and thirst so that they will never need sustenance again. Few, however, will take the challenge, and few gain the eternal life offered for the victors who accept Jesus’ challenge. The consumption of the body and blood of Jesus is opposed by some of His hearers (6:52) and followers (6:66) because it looks as if they are limiting His meaning to His actual body. But it could also be that they understood perfectly, and just didn't want to obey. In reality, Jesus is saying that His body and blood, His life, is the will of the Father.

38“For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. 39“This is the will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day. 40“For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:38-40 NASB95)

This will is expressed in the Word of the Father, meaning both the personification of God in Jesus as well as what we think of as spoken words. Jesus lived to do the Father’s will, and equated this with the words He was speaking.

63“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. (John 6:63 NASB95)

So to take in the words of Jesus and the Father, and follow through by doing them, is the same as eating the body and blood of Jesus, and is the path to eternal life.

28Therefore they said to Him, “What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?” 29Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” (John 6:28-29 NASB95)

Believing, in this case, is much more, Jesus is saying, than simply hearing. True believers must take in God’s word like it was food and drink, and show the effects of belief by the outworking of that Word in everything he or she does. Just like food nourishes our physical body (which also feeds our spiritual selves) the Word of God nourishes us as well. The Words go in and actions come out. James says a little more on this sometime later.

22But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. 23For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; 24for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. 25But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but an effectual doer, this man will be blessed in what he does. (James 1:22-25 NASB95)

Israel in the desert spurns the bread of God which is an analogy for disobedience or refusing to do the words of God. During the incarnate ministry of Jesus there were still a lot of people who refused to accept the bread. They wanted a sign (6:30 & 31 – they probably wanted to see actual manna) that Jesus was The Prophet spoken of by Moses, when signs were all around them such as the picnic where Jesus fed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes (6:1-14). Even now people the world over refuse the bread that gives eternal life. Only by accepting God’s Bread, hearing and doing, can a person live.

32Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. 33“For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world.” (John 6:32-33 NASB95)

Shalom

[Bruce Bertram]

Numbers 8:1 - 12:16; Zechariah 2:14 (10) - 4:7; John 5 and 6; John 19:31-37; Hebrews 3:1-6

Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. Now that day was the Sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.” (John 5:8–10, ESV)

The first section of John 5 relates the story of a 38-year invalid, too crippled to move by himself into the healing waters of a pool (and unhelped by others), healed by Jesus. Obviously the big event here is the healing. But the rocket scientists among the Jewish leaders apparently were unmoved. What gets them really wound up is not the miracle, or sign, of the guy walking. It is the fact that he is carrying his bed. They claim that “it is not lawful” for him to carry something on the Sabbath. But the law they are referring to is not God’s Law. I can find nothing in the Bible anywhere about carrying a mat on a Sabbath. This was just labeled ‘work’ by the religious. ‘Not lawful’ in this case has nothing to do with the Bible, but with interpretations and tradition added on like barnacles to a boat bottom.

This is critical to understand. Every one of the clashes between Jesus and religious leaders, or later clashes between people like Paul and the religious leaders, has nothing to do with the Bible, and everything to do with power (see Matthew 12:2; Mark 2:24, 3:4; Luke 6:1-5, 13:14-17; John 9). The self-appointed and anointed religious leaders had the power to say what was lawful and what was unlawful. They used and abused this power unmercifully, blocking the way into the kingdom but refusing to enter themselves.

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. (Matthew 23:13–15, ESV)

Jesus did not do anything unlawful, according to God’s Law, nor did He instruct the man to do anything that would be unlawful in the same way. We just learned in the previous chapter that His food and drink was to do God’s will in everything, and teach others to eat and drink it the same.

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. (John 4:31–34, ESV)

The religious leaders, on the other hand, had no intention of following the Law. They received the Law as given by angels, but did not do it.

“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.” (Acts 7:51–53, ESV)

The stiff-necked religious leaders, circumcised in one body part but uncircumcised in ear and heart, majored in the minors. They got upset about a formerly crippled guy carrying a mat, yet betrayed and crucified the Righteous One who made carrying the mat possible. The leaders never did anything to help the man into the waters of the healing pool, and got mad when he violated their self-made rules. They did not ask about the miracle of the healing, but persecuted the poor man and Jesus for challenging their authority. It’s not for nothing they are called hypocrites and white-washed tombs.

You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. I do not receive glory from people. But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:39–47, ESV)

And before we get to thinking, “That was then, this is now,” I’m sorry to say we still have these leaders around today. Every time you hear someone getting on someone else’s case over a rule that is not in the Word, it is an echo from ancient times. People who sit in judgment on the Word, refuse to obey it, and persecute those who want to obey are sons of the hypocrites. Those of us who joyfully pick up our mats and walk after God’s living oracles heal us and free us are condemned by those who call His Word ‘old’ or ‘for Jews only’ or ‘spiritual’ or ‘just a bunch of rules and regulations.’ The power-hungry now are still the religious leaders, fashioning their own kingdoms out of sycophant followers, claiming to teach ‘Jesus’ ‘grace’ and the Word when in reality they block access to God’s kingdom and refuse to enter themselves.

Jesus didn’t hide the fact that he healed the man. He even went back to him, knowing the guy had not positively identified Jesus to the authorities, to, in effect, give him a business card so the former cripple could glorify Jesus and rub the noses of the leaders in it. Maybe it wasn’t that deliberate, but I think it was. Jesus made sure the leaders knew who it was that was stirring the waters.

“I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me. (John 5:30, ESV)

His followers also refuse to hide, bearing witness to the truth of Jesus and the Scriptures, living the testimony of the writings of Moses wholly and completely, and rejecting the contrary laws of men. The love of God is within us, accepting and loving Him who comes in the name of the Father, rejecting him who comes in his own name and seeks his own glory. We major in the majors, eating and drinking the body and blood of Jesus in the whole of the Word, living out His commands in love, Spirit, and truth.

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal.” Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (John 6:26–29, ESV)

Shalom
Bruce