By Joseph Shulam.
Torah Portion Devarim – Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22.
Haftarah (reading from the prophets) Isaiah 1:1-27.
From the New Testament, Matthew 24:1-22.
Starting the reading of the book of Deuteronomy is a sign that we are getting close to the end of the Hebrew year, and the high holiday season is around the corner. On the other hand, the book of Deuteronomy is one of those mega texts that not only summarizes the end of the period of the birth of the nation of Israel, but also projects prophetically to the New Testament. The apostle Paul’s theology is 90% based on the book of Deuteronomy, particularly the last chapters. Paul’s theology on Israel is spelled out clearly in the letter to the Romans, chapters 9-11. To help you, our readers, from jumping out of this prayer list, look at the text of Deuteronomy 32:15-22. Here is the text:
“But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked; You grew fat, you grew thick, You are obese! Then he forsook God who made him And scornfully esteemed the Rock of his salvation. They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods; With abominations they provoked Him to anger. They sacrificed to demons, not to God, To gods they did not know, To new gods, new arrivals That your fathers did not fear. Of the Rock who begot you, you are unmindful And have forgotten the God who fathered you. “And when the LORD saw it, He spurned them, Because of the provocation of His sons and His daughters. And He said: “I will hide My face from them, I will see what their end will be, For they are a perverse generation, Children in whom is no faith. They have provoked Me to jealousy by what is not God; They have moved Me to anger by their foolish idols. But I will provoke them to jealousy by those who are not a nation; I will move them to anger by a foolish nation. For a fire is kindled in My anger And shall burn to the lowest hell; It shall consume the earth with her increase And set on fire the foundations of the mountains.” (Deuteronomy 32:15-22 NKJV)
Now you can go to Romans 11:15–28.
“For if their being cast away is the reconciling of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? For if the first fruits is holy, the lump is also holy; and if the root is holy, so are the branches. And if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive tree, were grafted in among them, and with them became a partaker of the root and fatness of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches. But if you do boast, remember that you do not support the root, but the root supports you. You will say then, “Branches were broken off that I might be grafted in.” Well said. Because of unbelief, they were broken off, and you stand by faith. Do not be haughty, but fear. For if God did not spare the natural branches, He may not spare you either. Therefore, consider the goodness and severity of God: on those who fell, severity; but toward you, goodness, if you continue in His goodness. Otherwise, you also will be cut off. And they also, if they do not continue in unbelief, will be grafted in, for God can graft them in again. For if you were cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a cultivated olive tree, how much more will these, who are natural branches, be grafted into their own olive tree? For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: “The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; For this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins.” Concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sake but concerning the election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers.” (Romans 11:15-28 NKJV)
Clearly, the motives that Paul is using here are all taken from Deuteronomy 32:15-22. Without connecting these two texts from the Torah and Paul’s text in Romans 11, it would be so easy to misunderstand Paul and come to totally wrong conclusions about the relationship of God the Father with His children, Israel. The very nature of God would be in question if this text from Deuteronomy 32 is not seen as the source and ground for Paul’s theology of Israel’s relationship with God, which is based on the Torah.
In our Torah reading on this Shabbat, there are other essential things that we need to notice and remember both privately and collectively as disciples of Yeshua, our Messiah and Savior.
One of the most significant and vital teachings throughout the whole Bible, which is 90% ignored by the majority of both Christians and Jews, is the first verses of our reading on this Shabbat: Here are the verses that I want to re-introduce to you, dear brothers and sisters around the world.
Deuteronomy 32:1:
“Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; And hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. 2 Let my teaching drop as the rain, My speech distill as the dew, As raindrops on the tender herb, And as showers on the grass. 3 For I proclaim the name of the LORD: Ascribe greatness to our God 4 He is the Rock, His work is perfect; For all His ways are justice, A God of truth and without injustice; Righteous and upright is He. “They have corrupted themselves; They are not His children, Because of their blemish: A perverse and crooked generation. Do you thus deal with the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, who bought you? Has He not made you and established you?” (Deuteronomy 32:5-6 NKJV)
What can we learn from the texts of Deuteronomy 32?
1) God speaks clearly like the rain and the dew. There is no way to mistake God’s speaking. The example of rain and dew as the paradigm of God’s revelation to us human beings is always clear if we want to hear HIM. My mother’s mother, my grandmother, when she was in her 90s and even earlier, acted like she didn’t hear my father. She didn’t like my father, who, although he knew that she didn’t like him, took good care of her to her last days. But when my father would talk to her, she had selective hearing and acted like she didn’t hear anything. But, if you were in the other room and just mentioned her name, she would shout, “You are talking about me! What are you saying?”
Israel might have been doing the same thing. Selective hearing is something that many of us have when we don’t want to hear, we don’t hear. But our text in Deuteronomy 32 tells us that even though we might think that God doesn’t know us and doesn’t answer us, He always knows us because we are all His children: all the races and the colors and the heights and the narrow and the thick.
2) God is a bookkeeper, and he has books in which all our deeds and words are recorded. You might say, “How could that be?” Well, I know Dr. Masanori Abe from Japan, who miniaturized the memory chips that we have in our smartphones and computers to a one-centimeter square chip with 40,000 megabytes. Later, he miniaturized 40 gigabytes on a one-inch square.
We have nothing to worry about. God’s storage space, the whole universe, is His playground. You can imagine how great an inventor and technical genius our dear Brother Masanori Abe was, and multiply it by infinity many times over. Yes, God keeps records and knows not only what we say, but what we think and say it only in our hearts.
3) God is always true, and truth is the only measuring rod that God uses to measure our deeds and the meditations of our hearts. God doesn’t need a polygraph machine like the police and the FBI use, and all around the world, today, the courts use it to determine what is true or false. Expert criminals have also learned how to circumvent, but God doesn’t look at your lips only; He sees your heart and your soul. He also remembers all, just like in the history of Israel – the prophets that lived hundreds of years after the events had revelation of what happened even a thousand years earlier. This is also true in the text that I brought before you above. You can lie and deceive and pull the wool over your friend’s eyes, but not over God’s eyes. It is important to confess and repent when we sin, and to beg and cry before both man and God for forgiveness.
(The next thing that we learn from our Torah portion is of great importance because our Gentile Brothers have ignored the Torah and ignore Israel and God’s promises to Israel and have become antisemitic, i.e., those who hate Jews and Israel but carry a gold cross on their neck. This cross that they worship is now made from Gold or Silver, but long before the judgment day that is described in the book of Revelation, this small gold cross will become like an iron anchor of a major ocean liner of 40,000 tons.)
4) God is speaking here of the nation of Israel. He is speaking of the seed of Abraham in the flesh. He is speaking of those who have been chosen and blessed and brought out of Egyptian slavery and given the land of Israel that He promised to Abraham and the seed of Abraham as an everlasting inheritance.
“They have corrupted themselves; They are not His children, Because of their blemish: A perverse and crooked generation. Do you thus deal with the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, who bought you? Has He not made you and established you?”
I learn from this text, dear brothers and sisters, that God doesn’t have favoritism between His children, and all humans are his children in some sense. Still, Israel is more special because God has chosen Abraham and His physical seed to be the carriers of the seed of salvation.
Israel, the Jewish nation, was selected by God as the seed of Abraham to be the light to the nations and the wife of God, the Messiah, and the savior of the world.
This truth is central to the whole Bible
from Genesis 1 to Revelation 21.
If your church ignores this central truth, it means that they are ignoring God’s plan for the salvation of the whole world. The creator of the world has not chosen any other nation to bring to the world salvation and redemption, just read again Romans 9-11. But don’t only read. Pray and ask God to enlighten you and wake you up to see that, as the Apostle Paul said in Ephesians 2:10-14. You were Gentiles before you knew Yeshua; you didn’t have the covenants of God, because all the covenants of God were made with the seed of Abraham, i.e., the nation of Israel. You were not a part of his community of Israel. You had no hope of eternity. But, now through Yeshua our Messiah, all these things that you didn’t have, you have. You are no longer strangers; you are fellow citizens of the same Jerusalem that we see in the last chapters of the book of Relations.
All that I can say and hope you say the same “Halleluiah” = Praise the Lord!