This week's lesson is from Genesis 23:1 - 25:18. It begins with the death of Abraham's wife, Sarah. An entire lesson could be spent on the way the scripture gives her age, but I am not being led to give that at this time. God is leading me to teach a different lesson for now. I know that one particular person will swear I am leaning in this direction due to a life situation for them, but God spoke to me about this matter two days before the phone call I received from them. In fact, God has placed this matter on my heart for some time now and this parashat has opened the door for such a great starting point.
We go on to read in chapter 24 that Abraham was old and well on in years. The sages tell us that Isaac was 37 at the time of Sarah's death and he had no wife, so Abraham set about to take care of that matter. Abraham knew the importance of having a Godly wife for his son. He, himself had been priviledged to have the most Godly wife for over 100 years. Sarah had stood beside him through the good and bad. She exemplified the Proverbs 31 woman, although Proverbs had yet to be written. Kind of makes me wonder if Solomon had Sarah in mind when he wrote that chapter. Hmmmm, guess I'll have to check further into that one. Anyway, back to our parashat, Abraham knew that the women living around them did not adhere to the Godly ways of he and Sarah so a wife for Isaac would have to come from a different location.
Our story picks up with Abraham calling his servant, Eliezer into his presence and swearing him to an oath. Eliezer is charged with the task of traveling back to Abraham's kindred and finding a wife from among them for Isaac. Out of his devotion for his master he willing takes on the task and with camels and gifts in hand sets out for the city of Nahor. While on his way, Eliezer comes up with a way to figure out which young woman is the right one for his master's son. I guess you could say he strikes up a deal with the Lord God. He stops at a spring just outside the city shortly before the time when the women would come to get water. He asks God, "Let it be that the maiden to whom I shall say, 'Please tip over your jug so I may drink,' and who replies, 'Drink, and I will even water your camels,' her will You have designated for Your servant, for Isaac; and may I know through her that You have done kindness with my master." Genesis 24:14 And God graciously answered his prayer, actually before he even finished praying. Rebecca makes her way to the spring and follows through exactly the way Eliezer had hoped. She was everything he could have hoped for in a wife for his master's son and met the qualifications to be the next matriarch of the Jewish nation.
Rebecca's own words and actions praise her worthiness in her new role. Her family is not willing to let her go so easily. They want to wait a year or so before letting her leave, but Eliezer is insistent that she leave now. Rebecca's family decide to call her in and ask her what she wishes to do and she replies, "I will go." So they pack up her things, send her nurse with her and tell her goodbye and bless her by saying, "Our sister, may you come to be thousands of myriads, and may your offspring inherit the gate of its foes."
As Eliezer and Rebecca, along with their enterouge, are approaching the land of Abraham, Rebecca sees Isaac and inquires as to who he is. When Eliezer tells her it is his master, she takes her veil and covers her face. Eliezer then recounts the events of the last few days to his master Isaac and the Word of God tells us that, "And Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother, he married Rebecca, she became his wife, and he loved her; and thus was Isaac consoled after his mother." Genesis 24:67
I have so much I WANT to teach from this lesson, but time just will not allow at this moment. There is a much needed lesson here on tents, but I will save that for a Hebrew lesson at some point. There is, however, one thing I must introduce to you at this point and that is the concept of a fractal. A fractal is an image that when you look at a smaller section, that section contains the whole image. Are you confused yet? Let me give you an example:
Broccoli. Guess you never thought of broccoli as a fractal, did you? I could have zoomed in on one little branch of this stalk of broccoli and shown it to you and said, "I grew this in my garden and if there were nothing around it to give you depth, it would have looked like a full sized head, because each little branch contains a picture of the whole. If you want to research this concept further, I have found a terrific website that explains the concept of fractals in layman's terms https://www.fractalus.com/info/layman.htm
Now, back to Isaac and Rebecca and I will show you how the fractal fits in. There are only a few men in the line of Yeshua (Jesus) who only have one wife and Isaac is one of those men. Marriage was instituted by the Lord God, himself, at creation, because it is a fractal of something much greater. Take a look with me at Revelation 19:7“Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready.” & 9:Then he said to me, “Write, ‘Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’”
Can you see the picture? The Lamb is the Messiah, Yeshua and the marriage set forth at creation was a fractal of that marriage to come. There is an even greater picture of this marriage, but I will get to that in a later parashat.
Now to another point I really want to make in this weeks lesson. I will do a lot of confession time here. I have been married for a little over 35 years to the same man. It is the first marriage for each of us, but it has been a very rocky 35 years. I was 17 and still in high school when we married. He was 20. We came from very different backgrounds. I had been brought up in a home where we went to church at least three times a week, studied our Bibles daily and made sure to tell each other "I love you" before going to bed each night. My Daddy always gave my Mother a kiss before leaving for work each morning, again when he left for work at lunch and when coming home from work in the evening and at bedtime. He continually would wink at her and tell her he loved her. He would do loving things for her and she for him. I never heard raised voices in anger and there was always a sense of peace in our home. Tithing was a given and we were never in need. We had no real excess, but were never in want either. At Christmas time our family would gather for a large meal and gift exchange and I would always receive many gifts.
For my husband, it was a different kind of story. He did not come from an abusive situation, just different. Rather than three times a week in church, he can only remember three times ever going to church and that was with an aunt and uncle. He told me he could never remember ever hearing the words I love you being spoken in their home. His family was very poor, food was whatever they could raise on their farm and Christmas time meant the same thing every year - socks and underwear from their parents and a bucket of plastic cowboys and indians from an aunt. The toys they played with were whatever could be found in the ditches in the surrounding hills, discarded by others. Very cold winters with little heat in their home and hot summers with no air-conditioning. Working in the fields after school and in the summer.
You can see that we had a lot of differences to work through, which unfortunately we seemed not to. It's not that we didn't love each other, we just saw things through different lenses and the truth is our past greatly shapes the lense through which we see the future. I see things with love and compassion and he sees things through frugality and self-centeredness. The problem is it has taken 35 years for us to realize that we needed a good blend of the two. You see, I would give everything we have away if I believed there were a need and probably have us in a tremendous debt at that. He would pinch every penney till it screamed and proclaim, "they can get a job and help themselves." We have to balance each other out, but a third person is needed to do this.
Let me give you a visual image to help. Have you ever played on a see-saw when you were a child? If the two people are equally weighted, no problem, right? What happens if one is heavier than the other? When we get married, a third person is in the picture, the Spirit comes along side us to give us the help we need. He stands in the middle of the see-saw and if one of us gets a little heavy-ended (so to speak) he goes along the other side to help that person out to bring the board into balance. Get the picture?
The problem in so many marriages is what almost happened in my own. We feel like we are the one up in the air so much of the time that the "game" isn't fun anymore. Did you ever play on a see-saw with someone who was a bully and they got on and held you up in the air and wouldn't let you down? Then you know where I'm going with this. Your emotions are always up in the air, you walk on eggshells all the time around them, it is always their way or the highway, etc. You get to a point where you begin to put up walls between you and them. And then what do you do? You find a chance, jump off and run away. Nevermind that the Spirit may get thrown off the board in the process and all the people that have been watching are standing watching him be thrown into the playground dirt, because remember He has been trying to balance out the board all along. Not such a pretty sight, is it?
I am saddened to admit that at one point in my marriage I threw him onto the playground dirt. It is a decision I so deeply regret with everything in me, yet I can not undo that action. I can say that I picked up the pieces and re-built my marriage with His help and although the emotions did not immediately return they did return eventually and today I can say that I love my husband. I can not imagine life without him. I do not want to mislead anyone. We do not have one of those ooey-gooey cuddly lovey-dovey relationships. It is a long-term committed marriage. We each have our role and we love each other. We know each other's space and respect it and have come to understand each other in a way that is known only to us. We finish each other's sentences (after 35 years I guess that is expected, ha!). I have learned to stand up for myself, which only took 33 years and he has learned to respect me for it. Most of all we have learned that love is a choice, not an emotion.
Marriage and the picture of it is so important to God. It was never God's intention that marriage end in divorce, nor do I believe it was God's intention that man have more than one wife. God created one man and one woman and gave them to each other. There is no indication that Adam had any other wife. God certainly never told Adam to take another and in Revelation we do not read the Brides and the Lamb. It is Bride, singular. When you begin to look throughout the geneology of Yeshua you can see that God had a definite plan and each time a man chose more than one wife, a problem arose that created a thorn in their flesh for centuries.
Now my question for you, has the thing we have made of marriage caused our own demise, even within the church? We take marriage so lightly and divorce so easily and we say we have Biblical grounds, but do we really? Are we in today's time facing the grave consequences of these choices? We hear almost no sermons on this topic from pulpits today. Are pastors afraid of losing most of their congregations if they preach on the subject of divorce? I know this is a touchy subject and probably many of you have been through a divorce. I am not throwing stones and I am not judging. Many of you were not the one who made that choice. Three of my best friends are divorced and re-married. All of us live in glass houses and believe me, I have plenty of other skeletons in my closet beside what I have already confessed. I may go there at a later date, but God is not asking me to go to that closet yet! Hallelujah!!!
At this point I will have to delve into the commandments or as I have already taught on this segment, better known as the connections. Look at Deuteronomy 27 and 28 with me. The nation of Israel is about to go into the promised land at the helm of Joshua. God, through the voice of Moses, is giving them instructions for their new life. Moses has gone over the Torah with the people and he re-iterates the connections with them. He sets before them the blessings and cursings connected with the Torah. Blessed are those who observe, to perform all of His commandments and the blessings are spelled out in chapter 28 verses 3-13. If they do not hearken to the voice of the Lord their God, to observe, to perform all His commandments and all His decrees then He names all the curses which will come upon them and overtake them. Those curses are listed in chapter 28:16-68! A much longer list.
If you read back through the Torah you find that in Chapter 24 there is a passage referring to divorce and an allowance for it, but with great restrictions. There are many interpretations by the great sages as to what these verses actually mean, but to qualify them completely we must look at the One who knows, the One who wrote the Torah, Yeshua. He, alone was the Torah made flesh. Read with me Mark 10:4-12 The Pharisees have approached Yeshua (Jesus) to test him and ask:
"They said, 'Moses made it permitted to write a certificate of divorce and to send her away.' Yeshua answered and said to them,
On account of the hardness of your heart, he wrote this commandment for you. But from the beginning of creation,, 'God created them male and female. Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' If so, they are not two any longer but one flesh. Thus, what god has joined, a person shall not divide.'
In the house, his disciples came back to ask him about this. He said to them, 'One who sends away his wife and takes another is an adulterer against her. A woman who leaves her husband and goes to another man is an adulterer."
God did NOT desire or even condone divorce. His will was for marriage to last a lifetime, because it was His picture of the future marriage of His Son. What have we done to give the world a skewed vision of the marriage of Christ? Are we constantly throwing the Spirit into the dirt for all the world to see? Could we, the Church be living in the curses because we have been so disobedient to the connections (commandments)? Now, you just wait a minute, you say. We don't live under those laws any more. We are New Testament. We live under grace! Yes we do! We live under grace and the Children of Israel did as well. Really? Yes, but haven't we, as Gentiles, also been grafted in to the vine? Then we are not exempt from the connections. But we are no longer under the Law! We are no longer under the Law (Torah)? When did this take place? At the crucifixion? At the resurrection? So, since we are under grace we are free to commit adultery? And to take God's name in vain? We are free to dishonor our parents also? And to lie and steal and covet? Well, that's news to me! Is that really what Paul is talking about? I believe we have misunderstood Paul's teaching on this matter, don't you? Especially when you understand that each of the 10 Connections (commandments) are simply a heading for a section dealing with the 613 other connections.
I am willing to bet you have never thought of it in that way before, have you? Now go back to Deuteronomy 28 with me. I am going to leave you with it. My purpose, after all, is to make you think for yourself and to read deeper into the scripture than you have ever read before. Go to that chapter and read it entirely. The best reading for your understanding is to read it from the Torah getting the correct interpretation.
For those of you who do not have a Hebrew Torah or Tanach, you can read it online at the following:
http://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/9992/showrashi/true
I have linked it to show Rashi's commentaries underneath the verses. If you do not wish to see these, you may uncheck the box at the top of the reading and it will take them away. This website is a wonderful Orthodox Jewish website with a treasure trove of information for you on every subject imaginable. The verses I want you to really look at is 20 and 21. Marriage is not the only thing we have taken lightly, but this parashat has given us a good place to start. Perhaps this will cause us all to take a good long look at all the connections and to rid ourselves of the sin that we have allowed to creep into the Church and our own lives. Perhaps we, like the children of Israel have decided we can pick and choose which connections to obey and discard. Hashem (Lord God) says, "to perform all" not some or any, but all!
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