This week’s Torah portion is called Yitro which means “Jethro”. It comes from Exodus 18:1 through 20:23.
This Torah portion
begins with the re-introduction of Jethro who is Moses’ father-in-law. He has come with Moses’ wife and two sons to
meet them after hearing “all that the Lord had done for Moses and the people of
Israel.”
Moses shares the details of the Exodus with Jethro and they rejoiced over all the goodness of the Lord. Jethro offers a burnt offering to the lord, he, Aaron, and all the elders share in the meal, they all get a good night’s sleep, and the next day Jethro observes Moses sitting before the people as judge from morning until evening.
In that Jethro suggests to Moses that he was incapable of performing this duty, that this will wear him out, and that he needs to appoint others to assist him. He suggests that Mosses set up men to judge over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens.
In this way a judicial system would be established where only those matters that could not be settled at the lower levels would move up to the higher levels. Ultimately if the matter could not be settled by the rulings of the “thousands” it would be brough to Moses.
Moses agrees and follows
the suggestions of Jethro. Jethro leaves
and heads back to his own land leaving behind Moses’ wife and children.
Chapter 19 opens with
the sons of Israel reaching the wilderness of Sinai in the third month after
leaving Egypt. They set up camp at the
base of Mount Sinai. Moses goes up the
mountain and God speaks to him.
In this, God reveals to
Moses His plan to make the people of Israel into a kingdom of Priests. The Lord tells Moses that He wants to enter
into a covenant with the people and that if they agree to His covenant, He will
make them his own possession.
Moses calls the elders
of the people together and shares what the Lord had told him. The people all proclaim together “All that
the Lord has spoken we will do!” And Moses returns to God and shares that the
people have agreed to the covenant.
God shares that He will
come to the people and speak to them and that Moses should prepare the people
for His visitation.
Moses prepares the
people according to God’s command and on the third day God appears in a thick
cloud with thunder, flashes of lightning, and a loud trumpet call.
This made the people in
the camp tremble. But, Moses brought
them out and had them stand at the foot of the mountain where God had told
Moses to bring them.
Ultimately God began to
share His statutes, Laws, and ordinances.
After He shared only the first ten, the people interrupted Him by
speaking to Moses.
They told Moses that they
had become scared that if they heard any more they would die, they asked for
Moses to go to speak to God directly about all that He had to share and for
Moses to bring back to them what God spoke.
Moses gets alone with
God, and God enters into the balance of what He had started to share with the
people. This ends the reading for this
week.
The first would be that
there is a tendency within people to do the same thing with God’s ways that the
sons of Israel did so many years ago; to stop God at the end of the first ten
commandments and not want to hear anything else.
The second thing is that
we tend to want to have God speak directly to someone else and then allow that
person to share what God showed them to us.
I think this is more than just laziness.
I think there is a
tendency to believe that thinking if we are taught by someone else it somehow
makes us less responsible than if we would have heard God direct.
This false sense of
security allows us to avoid the very death that the sons of Israel were so
fearful of encountering.
The third thing I want
to consider is what this “fear of death” really is, and why we should not fear
it but instead embrace it.
I am going take a moment
and read from Romans Chapter 8:9-8:15:
However, you are not in
the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if
anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. If Christ is in you, though the body is dead
because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus
from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also
give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you. So then, brethren, we are under obligation,
not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh for if you are living
according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to
death the deeds of the body, you will live.
For all who are being led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of
God. For you have not received a spirit
of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as
sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!"
Did you catch the
connection to this week’s Torah portion?
Here is the connection
and why this is so important. The
connection is “For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again”
…..
Fear of what? Fear of death… this is not a physical
death. This is a deep fear of change.
This is what the sons of
Israel did. They were slaves, that
slavery led them into fear, and the fear stopped them from hearing God.
Why is it
important? Because fear of death
silences God’s voice.
Paul is telling us that
we don’t need to follow in their footsteps.
This entire chapter is
Paul encouraging the readers to open up their hearts to trusting that they can,
through the Holy Spirit, have a one-on-one personal relationship with God.
At the same time, he is
pointing out that this relationship will lead to a death. But, the truth of this death is that we
should not fear it. In reality, what we
should fear is the fate of those that do not experience this death.
What Paul is getting at
is that we are born into sin. Sin is
death so, in all truth, we are dead men walking. The only solution to this death is to die to
it. When we die to a life of sin and
pride, Yeshua raises us from the dead and delivers us into life.
The point is, WE CAN NOT
EXPERIENCE THE FULLNESS OF LIFE WITHOUT BEING LED BY THE SPIRIT INTO DEATH. Yeshua said that one must be “born of the
water AND born of the Spirit”.
I would argue that being
born of the water references adoption into the family of Messiah in a physical
way. In other words, through baptism we
commit to a way of life put forth in the Torah.
But this is not enough unto itself.
Yeshua wants more of us. He wants more for us. He wants us to live and life comes through
death.
Ultimate death does not
come through simply being taught the Word and obeying it. Ultimate death comes when we allow our souls
to be stricken by the Torah, to let Torah reveal our pride, and to lead us into
a place of dying to our sin nature and our pride.
Sadly, most of us
continue to lean on our religious teachers instead of truly seeking dialogue
with Him. I believe at the bottom of this is the same fear that the
children of Israel suffered and that same spirit that Paul speaks
of.
Ultimately, God will
give us new hearts and make us into the bride that He chose us to be, we will
join Him when He sets up His kingdom, and we will rule with Him from
Israel. At the same time, we have a choice to become those kinds of priests
today.
I pray that as we allow
these concepts to work their way deep into our souls, that we allow the Holy
Spirit to reveal to us where we too are walking in the fear of death, still
being held hostage to the desires of the flesh, and pulled away from a deeper relationship
with God through the sin natures we were born into. I pray that as
He reveals these things to us that we step up in courage, become expectant of
what is possible, and chase after the life that is available on the other side
of death. In and through this, I pray that we become a testimony and
a blessing to the world as we demonstrate the freedom of embracing Torah, dying
to the flesh, and being His bride NOW. Amen Amen
