Maintaining Balance

The scroll has been rewound and it is time to begin.  Time to begin a new year’s journey through Torah.  Time to start a new year’s spiritual journey with God.  Time to start anticipating what this year might bring.  For me, the past several weeks were all about looking back.  Looking back over my previous year.  Thinking about what God showed me.  Remembering my growth, the relationships, the blessings, and even my failures.  Remembering those moments when I wish I could have taken back my words, reactions, or even the things that I had done.  The last few weeks were about closing out last year’s spiritual season right and thanking God for the love and grace He extends to us each and every day.

With the Torah rewound and the festivals behind us, it is time to start back at the beginning.  With that said, I find no better place to begin our journey for this year than with John 1:1-5 NASB “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.  In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men.  The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.” 

I firmly believe that understanding the concept of Spiritual Yeshua changes everything about how we view each of the covenants, God’s interaction with the world, and ultimately God’s plan of salvation. 

When we read scripture, like Romans 9, that talk about the Jewish people stumbling over the stumbling stone, it should lead us into a place of contemplation.  In this place of contemplation, we might ask ourselves:

• What was the character of Spiritual Yeshua before He was physical Jesus,
• What was the role of Spiritual Yeshua before He was physical Jesus,
• Is Spiritual Yeshua the same today as He was before He was physical Jesus, and
• Can we stumble over physical Jesus just like the ancient Israelites stumbled over Spiritual Yeshua?

In all reality, the vast majority of the letters written by Paul to the early churches are all addressing this exact problem.  Church after church was stumbling over Christ.  One group was connecting salvation to particular festivals, another to not drinking alcohol, another to circumcision, others to food sacrificed to idols, and the list goes on and on.  In Galatians 5:4 NASB, Paul goes as far as to say that “You have been severed from Christ, you who are seeking to be justified by law; you have fallen from grace”.  In this example, the stumbling comes from a spirit of religion that simply can’t accept the concept of Grace.  In Romans 9:32 Paul explains that this was the issue that caused the stumbling for the Jewish people.  He says that “Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as though it were by works” they stumbled over Christ.  This would be the most common way of stumbling over Him.  However, I believe there are a few more that are not quite so obvious.

In John 3:14 Jesus tells Nicodemus that He must be lifted up just like the serpent that Moses lifted up in the desert.  This scripture comes right before the famous John 3:16 and sets the stage for what Jesus is attempting to communicate.  In what Jesus is saying, He is referring to an event that happened when the Israelites were traveling through the desert.  The story is told in Numbers 21.  In the story, the people were grumbling and wanting to return to Egypt.  In short, they had come to the place where they had lost belief that the difficulties of the desert experience and all that they were learning and growing into were less desirable, less profitable, and less promising than what life in Egypt promised.  They had lost faith that the promised land would be worth the difficulties of the desert and they were willing to let go of what they had not experienced to return to what they had always known.  In this, God sent serpents to bite the people, Moses sought God’s favor, God told Moses to make a bronze statue of a serpent, and when the people gazed upon the serpent after being bit, they lived.  This is the example Jesus uses for how He would be lifted up and how people who “looked” upon Him would live.

What I find interesting about this is that God had Moses make an image of the very thing that was biting them and causing them to die.  It was this bronze statute of the serpent that they had to look upon to live.  Scripture doesn’t really tell us too much about this but I believe there is something really important for us to understand.  Knowing that Jesus used this very scene to express how people would need to look upon Him puts it into an even more important context.

There are a few things that are important to look at:

• The people wanted to give up on the promise and return to the bondage they had known,
• God sent the serpents,
• The serpents were bringing death to the people, 
• When the people were dying they knew that they had to listen to God to live, and
• When the people who had been bit looked upon the bronze statue they lived. 

If Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, is it possible for us to see Spiritual Yeshua not only as the one being lifted up, but also in each of the other aspects of the story?  In essence, I believe that all of these things are Yeshua working for us because He is more than a man.  He is the Word made flesh, He is the way, He is the truth, and He is the life.  He was with God in creation and He is with God now.

As I end this a bit shorter tonight, I simply want us to ponder a few questions.  If Christ is in and through each of these things, where might we be stumbling over Him?

• Do God's Laws, statutes, and ordinances trip us up?  How about His appointed times?  Has a theology of minimums for salvation led us to stumbling over the gifts of wisdom and the very things that will help give us what we truly seek?
• Do we let God use the struggles of life to grow us or do we miss the opportunity for growth by complaining and simply praying for the challenges to be removed so that we can go back to our old patterns and the life we are most comfortable in?
• Do we trust God's sovereignty to the point that we can thank Him by "holding up and gazing upon" those very things that He used to kill something that was dead within us so that we may experience new life apart from that which needed to die?

I pray that each of us have come to see some areas where we too are tripping over Christ.  I pray that as we become more aware of these areas, we find a new strength, a refreshed mind, and a new way of thinking.  I pray that we let Him help us regain our balance, and that we let Him take us by the hand and lead us into a new freedom that can only be found in Him.  Amen Amen