Thanking God With No Leftovers

We are approaching the celebration of Passover and with that there may be some thought to the offering of the Passover lamb. Thinking of that offering I was drawn to take a look at the number of offerings that are prescribed in God's Word. There were peace offerings, and offerings associated with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and monthly offerings at the New Moon Celebration. We also have sin offerings and offering that come with the Feast of Trumpets at harvest time. Lots of opportunities to bring the Lord an offering. We could also throw in those offerings of praise and that of ourselves as "living offerings" found in Romans 12:1. I am always impressed that when I begin a bit of a study God brings related studies to my attention, whether I am looking for them or not. The thoughts of this blog are spawned by a post that came to me from First Fruits of Zion. It is a Messianic website with interesting things to read and some thought provoking ideas as well. I highly recommend it if you are interested in the connection between Israel and the followers of Messiah or the Church, as we commonly refer to it. I do not intend to plagiarize for these thoughts are a compilation of stuff that has lodged in my brain over the years. However, I do want to give credit where credit is due. The offering we will look at today is the Thank Offering. This offering has some unique qualities that could easily apply to us. If put into practice it would bring a pretty radical change to the believing community. A very positive change we would all be blessed by.

Leviticus holds many of the regulations concerning the offerings. We will just touch on a few.
Leviticus 7:2 & 7, "The guilt offering is to be slaughtered in the place where the burnt offering is slaughtered, and its blood is to be splashed against the sides of the altar. The same law applies to both the sin offering and the guilt offering: They belong to the priest who makes atonement with them." Should an Israelite, a child of God, bring a guilt or a sin offering they had no right to the meat of the offering or to the bread or grain offered. It belonged to the priests. However, the priests could eat it that day and the day to follow, but only at the tabernacle or temple. On the third day any left over had to be disposed of. The pattern was consistent with all the offerings brought to the Lord, all except the thanksgiving offering.

Leviticus 22:29-30, “When you sacrifice a thank offering to the LORD, sacrifice it in such a way that it will be accepted on your behalf. It must be eaten that same day; leave none of it till morning. I am the LORD." Here we read that the offering was to be eaten on the same day. No leftovers. Be it a sheep, goat, calf or bull it had to be eaten on the day it was offered. It was not reserved for the priests. There were particular parts that were to be offered by the priest but the remaining meat was to go to the one making the thanksgiving offering. The only exception was in Leviticus 7:16, "If, however, their offering is the result of a vow or is a freewill offering, the sacrifice shall be eaten on the day they offer it, but anything left over may be eaten on the next day." If the Thanksgiving offering was tied to a vow or an offering previously promised to the Lord than there was an extra day to eat it. Same was true of peace offerings. The meat was good to eat until the third day. Why the restriction for just the Thanksgiving offering? Why must it be eaten on the same day it is offered?

Thanksgiving offerings were unique in that they were not regularly scheduled or there out of compulsion. The offerings tied to specific feasts and festivals were to be given at that prescribed time. Sin and guilt offerings were required to care for those particular situations. Thanksgiving offerings were given when one wanted to express thanksgiving to the Lord in a special way. Perhaps due to a special healing, answer to prayer, provision or some deliverance that highlighted God's goodness to the one coming to express their gratitude. The child of God, who simply wanted to express thanksgiving, could do so at any time. Now comes the question, "Why must it all be eaten on the day it was offered? Why the shortened time frame? To me, that just seemed sort of random and a bit of a challenge to consume that much meat in one day. A question I asked myself with no satisfying answer and my commentaries gave little help. Enter a thought from First Fruits of Zion. The thought there was that this compelled the one making the offering to gather friends and family for a feast in order to share the meat. This way the Lord's goodness could be shared with all who came. What a cool thought! My mind took off running with lots of tangent thoughts and ideas.

I have asked for prayer from time to time. Even now I am going through the annoying process of waiting for my insurance to approve a needed hernia surgery. In the mean time I cannot pick up anything much heavier than a pair of socks. As one who thrives on going to the gym, cutting wood, working in the yard, and doing renovations on a home that needs new floors and walls, I am pretty much beyond frustrated. Either the projects have to wait or I need to find sheets of plywood that weigh less than ten pounds. However, in time, this will be resolved. The surgery will happen and I will recover. God will answer in His time. When He does I will be thankful. Maybe this is not enough. Maybe I should have a party and have a bunch of friend and family over for dinner and a time to share and proclaim God's goodness to me.

What would happen to the relationships we have in the assemblies we fellowship in if we did this on a sort of random basis? You asked for prayer because of a battle with cancer and your spouse is healed. Why not have a few friends over for dinner and celebrate God's answer? Maybe you have been praying for a job situation and that has been resolved, so you have three or four families over for cake and coffee, just to let them know how grateful you are to the Lord and for their prayers. Imagine, scattered through out our church families random times of fellowship being enjoyed just to bring and to share a thanksgiving offering to the God who heals and provides. It may well be time to follow Nehemiah's direction to "Eat the fat and drink the sweet" every now and then and share in some praise and thanksgiving to our God and Savior. Nehemiah 8:10, "Then he said to them, “Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet, and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy to our Lord. Do not sorrow, for the joy of the LORD is your strength." Maybe the body of believers you belong to would be strengthened as you share in the joy of the Lord and celebrate some times of a Thanksgiving dinner in April or July or any time. If you are an American, why wait until November for a thanksgiving celebration? Isn't any time God reveals His grace, mercy, compassion, and lovingkindness worth a little thanksgiving celebration?

Maybe as we call upon friends and prayer partners to bring our concerns and burdens to God's throne of grace we should give a little thought to a thanksgiving gathering when the answer comes. What would it do for all of us to come together in random, rather intimate, gatherings in our homes or backyards for a time to honor God. It would not be a bad thing to lift up praise to His holy name for the good things He has done. Perhaps our attitudes would change and we would be a more grateful and joyful people, Maybe we would be strengthened and encouraged to pray for one another. Perhaps our focus would rest more on praise and the wonder of the God who so desperately cares for us instead of what we perceive to be our problems. It could be that our lives become more of a sacrifice of praise than we have ever known.

Do not be surprised when my invitation comes for you to join me after the Lord brings the needed surgery and healing to pass in my life. Maybe you too will have a reason for a thanksgiving gathering as God pours out His lovingkindness upon your life as well. Just remember, invite enough folks so there are no leftovers.

The Biblical Numbers of Inspiration

Have you noticed that God seems to have some favorite numbers? He seems big on seven, and twelve; forty is pretty popular as well. Perhaps one is the loneliest number that you ever knew. Sorry, couldn't resist a little Three Dog Night reference. Numbers are pretty helpful when trying to understand how long kings reign and how long things like the tribulation will last. But numbers are also a problem. The record of the Kings seems to be at odds with those of the writers of the Chronicles.Simply put, there are a number of times that the numbers simply do not add up. From simple things like the number of supervisors Solomon had working on the temple, 3,300 in 1 Kings 5 compared to 3,600 in 2 Chronicles 2:18, to the difference of 10,000 vs 2,000 footmen in 2 Kings 13. Many evangelicals, and those deeply committed to a ridged inerrancy, struggle with these apparent contradictions. Some spend significant amounts of time carefully backtracking the number of years kings reigned and major events that happened to discover things like the age of the earth or the date of creation. They often fail to take into account the possible overlap of kings and their sons and the reality that the scriptures are not written from a western or American cultural point of view. Eastern, Hebraic culture is far less concerned with dates and time lines than they are with relationships and the record of the experience of people. We misunderstand the point as we allow ourselves to be trapped in our western culture.

The culture of the Scriptures, in particular the Old Testament, allows, even expects, exaggeration to make a point. 1 Samuel 18:7 proclaims, "And the women answered one another as they played, and said, Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands." Is it really reasonable to think David, as a very young general and fairly resent soldier, had honestly slain tens of thousands of enemy soldiers? Or is exaggeration used to make a point?  2 Chronicles 1:15 is another example, "Also the king made silver and gold as common in Jerusalem as stones, and he made cedars as abundant as the sycamores which are in the lowland." Really? Gold and silver as common as stones in Jerusalem? Jerusalem is nothing but stones! Oh, the author is using exaggeration to make a point. As we read through the Scriptures it is well to remember that eastern records make ready use of hyperbole and exaggeration as they record events. This is true of Babylon, Egypt, and the nations that surrounded Israel. It is also true of the writers of the Biblical text. If you are too ridged in your view of the inerrant Scriptures you will find yourself exercising textual gymnastics to try to get things to fit. Even Matthew conveniently leaves out a few kings to get his genealogical  formula to work. The point is not the accuracy of the list but the reality that Yeshua is clearly in the line of David and thus qualified to be Messiah.

If we are honest we do similar things as well. We see a friend and say. "It has been a life time since I last saw you." Probably not a life time. Maybe we are disappointed with a corrupt political leader and say, "They broke every law on the books." Every law? How about a little history lesson as we reflect that General Custer was over run by a million Sioux warriors. Well, maybe not quite a million. We understand that all of these statements use exaggeration to make a point. We need to realize that the Scriptures do the same, from time to time. There are indeed more precise numbers that hold true. There were twelve sons of Israel, and David did reign for forty years. It seems clear that there will be a thousand year reign of Messiah, and the earth was created in six literal twenty-four hours days. Umm, wait a minute, even that is up for debate. My point is that we do not need to feel threatened when we find some apparent discrepancy in the differing records of historic events in the Bible. The authors had a point to make that was focused upon relationships between God and people. Or perhaps the relationship between groups or even individuals. The writers' intent, as directed by God's Spirit, was to help us experience the moment or the event. To learn of God more than the precise number or location that is recorded. Differing writers write from different points of view.

This is why we have four Gospel accounts. Fuor differing views and four ways to present Messiah and His relationship to His people. We can hunt for discrepancies in the various accounts or realize that presenting an accurate chronological history is not the point. The point is to present Messiah in real life with real interaction with real people. The text is an Hebraic experiential record not a western history book. I am not suggesting that we toss inerrancy out, God has given us an accurate account of what He desires us to know and to live out. However, perhaps we need a little more cultural flexibility as we approach God's Word. Perhaps we get so tied up in trying to get the numbers to match that we miss the point God wants us to grasp. Maybe two different authors recorded the same event from their own point of view with the information they had at hand.  Maybe that is why we have a few differences. Maybe God wants us to simply know that there are consequences for our behavior instead of how many Amalekites attacked an idolatrous Israel. 

Understanding the Real Word of God

How would you describe the Bible to someone who had never seen it before? A number of possibilities might come to mind. It is the Word of God. Which may not be all that helpful to the inquisitive yet ignorant mind of the seeker. It is a Theology book, or maybe something about ethics or an ideology. That may be true, but it would be unhelpful to the uninformed. You could go with history, however, the history that is there is rather spotty. It also contains some pretty unsettling stories of immoral behavior, murder and a touch of the supernatural. There are times when this history isn't even chronological and bounces from one genre to another. Stories, poetry, letters, some rather apocalyptic stuff, with both gaps and redundancy. It doesn't even seem to hold a very consistent order of things. Moving from expression of literature to another. And what of some of those strange literary images of beasts and wheel inside wheels. None of the Christmas tree topper angels looked like these descriptions. As believers, we can take for granted that all this makes some sort of sense.

Yet, even for us, we tend to gravitate from one Biblical category to another. There is a bit of truth in all of our labels, however, none are really all that satisfying. We struggle, in part, because we are bound to our culture. If you come from a western mindset, Europe or America for example, you view things from a certain perspective. Even those at a greater arms distance have been affected by the influence that western, American, culture wields. With the internet, music and the American film culture few have escaped the western influence. For whatever reason God has determined to reveal Himself through a record of encounters with humanity. For the most part, through His relationship with Israel. The events recorded are relational and experiential, giving information as to who God is, what He has done and what He requires of His creation. We learn of Him through the recorded accounts of His people over an extended time. The accounts are not sanitized or edited to make them more palatable. They carry the wonder of grace and kindness and the horror of depravity and unspeakable cruelty. They do so because that is the reality of humanity either in concert with God's instructions and directions for life or the abject rejection of His authority. These are placed on display in various degrees of agreement or rebellion for us to review, consider and apply.

Western culture prefers order, neat timelines and crisp structure to our stories. We want logic and the right answers. While at the same time we are sold out to situation ethics and flexible morality that changes with the times. The good guys should win, in the end. Directions should be evident and relatively easy to follow. How you feel is important and as long as nobody gets hurt, your actions should not be judged. As the revelation God has chosen to share does not follow those guidelines we pursue ways to make God's accounts more acceptable. Thus, theologians may spend a lifetime writing a systematic theology to gather all the fragments of delineated concepts into one discernible package. We spend vast amounts of time categorizing and cataloguing our findings. We tag them with impressive titles like, pneumatology, hamartiology, Christology and eschatology. We endeavor to create timelines and chronologies so the stories of the Bible can be followed easily and grouped together in handy flow charts. We also spend generations debating topics like "free will vs predestination" "faith and works" and whether you are pre-, post, or a-millennial, struggling to convince the rest of Christendom that we have the right answer.

None of these are particularly wrong. However, I fear we miss much of the real revelation of God in our vain attempt to organize and codify what has been graciously given to us. God integrates everything He chooses to reveal to us. What we desire to divide, the Lord reveals as an integrated whole. As we strive to know the right answer, God desires a right relationship. He gives us a book of examples as to how to achieve that and how to see relationships fall apart. We argue over the future while God reveals how we should live now. We develop charts and timelines while God reveals that He works in cycles. He lets us know if we fail this time there will be another opportunity to get it right. Our timelines tend to imprison us in failure while God reveals that He gives second chances.

Perhaps we need to step back and let the Word of God just be what it is. A remarkable gathering of profoundly messy relationships and experiences with the God of Israel and among the humans that have inhabited this planet. That is where we learn what we need to know. We learn of compassion from the story of Ruth. How to deal with unjust accusations as we follow David while he flees from Saul. Justice and mercy in the account of Sodom and Gomorrah. God's sovereign control in the story of Esther. A bit about the consequences of deceit and the God of second chances from the life of Jacob. How God redeems a murderer in the life of the Apostle Paul. The hope of the resurrection from the women at the tomb. Real people, real relationships, real life experiences with the God of creation. Has our effort to "rightly divide the Word of truth" left us with a cold academics that denies the real Word of God? A message from a God who loved us so much He recorded a book filled with experiences we can relate to just to show us who He is and how we can best live life in the here and now. Maybe this is the real revelation God has given us after all.       

           

Are You God's Leaky Vessel?

God uses some interesting things to help us understand who we are in Him. We are sheep, a body, and living stones making up a temple. We are His friends, co-heirs, and God's sons. He also calls us His "earthen vessels". 2 Corinthians 4:7, "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us." Even though we came from the soil, check Genesis 2:7, the Lord has determined to use us to carry the glory of His message concerning His Son. The Spirit of God dwells in us and empowers us to live lives that have purpose and value. However, there seems to be an issue with God's plan. Even though all these things are true, God directs the Apostle Paul to warn the believers in Ephesus that their vessels may well leak.

Ephesians 5:18, "And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit." Writing to a city that had pagan festivals which involved the consuming of wine to the point of intoxication, Paul warns the believers to avoid such conduct. Drunkenness removes self-control and leads to all sorts of actions that are wounding, foolish and sinful. In opposition to this the Spirit brings forth fruit, including , self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). To be consistent in our Spiritual fruit bearing we are told to be "filled with the Spirit". Individuals have had some interesting interpretations concerning this verse. Sometimes forgetting that "self-control" is an evidence of the Spirit's filling not lack of control. We, who are filled, should be bringing forth that Spiritual Fruit. You remember, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. These aspects of the Spirit's fruit integrated together reveal that "excellence of the power of God" we read of in 2 Corinthians 4:7. So we have the message and the power, however, we do not seem to always be effective at putting all that on display.

The problem seems to be that our earthen vessels leak. In Ephesians 5:18 the word "filled" is actually a present passive imperative verb. Meaning we need to constantly keep on being filled with the Spirit. The passive part indicates we cannot do this ourselves. It is something the Spirit does, we just need to be willing receptacles. In reality, it is less that we need more of God's Spirit and more like God's Spirit needs more of us. We crowd our lives with an enormous amount of stuff and push the Spirit into the corners of our existence. We replace the Spirit with things like anxiety, bitterness, complacency and insensitivity. It is never our objective to do so. We my never get drunk with wine but we may well replace being self-controlled by the Spirit. It may be that we acquiesce to the cry of the urgent and the tentacles of our illusion that we can handle things on our own. We often are unaware of how easily we can be drawn away from the Spirit and fail to receive His desired filling of our lives. It seems, in my own life, that my Earthen vessel leaks more often than I would want to believe. Paul shares some very good advice. We do indeed need to keep on being filled with the Spirit so we can produce the fruit of the Spirit so the excellence of the power may be of God, rather than having our own weakness on display. I do want to be more than a leaky vessel. How about you?