The question comes up often as to how involved we should be in society as Messianic believers. This message shows that we should indeed be involved and the decision to overturn Roe v Wade proves it!
The Torah is a history of the beginning of time through to the edge of entering the promised land and the death of Moses. The ending purpose is to tell Israel how to live once they enter the land. What is often called “the law”, the Torah is actually a lifestyle document. It commands the people how to run their society once they enter the promised land. These instructions include blessings and cursings. Deut 32 tells what will happen when they fail to follow the instructions. Not if but when. The instructions for living outside the land are pretty scarce and quite bad. It’s meant to teach them a lesson, that abandoning Yah’s ways will result in a bad lifestyle and they will year to get it back.
Slide 2 ‘They have made Me jealous with what is not God; They have provoked Me to anger with their idols. So I will make them jealous with those who are not a people; I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation, For a fire is kindled in My anger, And burns to the lowest part of Sheol, And consumes the earth with its yield, And sets on fire the foundations of the mountains. ‘I will heap misfortunes on them; I will use My arrows on them. (Deu 32:21-23)
We are part of Deut 32. We’re “that foolish nation”. These days, I feel God has taken that line to the extreme. Our literal nation has been its most foolish in memory in the last year to 18 months. Paul explains in Romans how this passage pertains to those of the nations, gentiles, who join Israel through the shed blood of Messiah and thus make Israel jealous. So we look to the Torah for our lifestyle, but there’s a problem. We’ve never experienced that lifestyle in full and it hasn’t even been possible since the close of scripture. So how do we live our lives in a Godly manner while coming to the truth in Babylon?
Slide 3 Now these are the words of the letter which Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the rest of the elders of the exile, the priests, the prophets and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. (This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the court officials, the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, the craftsmen and the smiths had departed from Jerusalem.) The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, saying, “Thus says YHVH of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, ‘Build houses and live in them; and plant gardens and eat their produce. ‘Take wives and become the fathers of sons and daughters, and take wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands, that they may bear sons and daughters; and multiply there and do not decrease. ‘Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to YHVH on its behalf; for in its welfare you will have welfare.’ (Jer 29:1-7)
The instructions for life in exile come through Jeremiah. What’s unspoken here is, effectively, don’t be revolutionaries. Don’t try to start uprisings and free yourselves. Don’t forgo having children. Live life and have kids. Not only do not be revolutionaries but seek the welfare of the places they were sent. They were sent into exile for lack of belief and they needed to trust that Yahweh would restore them, which had already been prophesied through Isaiah. In fact, Babylon not only remained a power, Yahweh used that power to restore Judea through Nehemiah and Ezra. So Yahweh’s plan, which we can see in arrears, was to use Babylon to restore Judea and to use educated and useful Jews who knew when it was time to return. There was a plan and Jeremiah’s message was part of that plan.
These instructions were for the first exile. Our present circumstances are a little different.
Slide 4 “So you are to know and discern that from the issuing of a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until Messiah the Prince there will be seven weeks and sixty-two weeks; it will be built again, with plaza and moat, even in times of distress. Then after the sixty-two weeks the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing, and the people of the prince who is to come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. And its end will come with a flood; even to the end there will be war; desolations are determined.” (Dan 9:25-26)
The return, or end, of this exile is not prophesied in the Tanakh, what we call the Old Testament. The end of this one is prophesied in the New Testament. And this one ends with global destruction, then the return of the risen Messiah and the first resurrection. It’s a much different thing. Which is why the term coined by some “Second Exodus” doesn’t make sense. While there are parallels with the Exodus (which isn’t even called that in the Tanakh), what’s to come is a totally different thing. One could say the return from the Babylonian exile was kind of a second Exodus because they had to make a trek and relearn Torah. But in our present paradigm, people are coming to the knowledge of the truth without respect to ethnicity and wherever we are in the world, which is the purpose of today’s message. We don’t live in the first Babylon, we live in the greater Babylon for lack of a better word. 😊 We are not 70 people living in the USA that will turn into millions and march across the Atlantic ocean and on to the Jerusalem. We are not going to be taught the ten commandments standing at the base of a mountain. Those things were very special and very holy and very much singular events. We are also not Jews who were carried off into a specific country who are waiting to be called to march back to Judea and rebuild. We are not looking for a temple made with hands, brother and sisters. While those events prophecy and inform the future they are not going to be repeated. The Lamb of God has been sacrificed, that’s not going to happen again, and the temple we look for will be the original in shamayim, heaven, the one not built with hands.
What happened before informs our present. While what will happen in the future is a bit different from the past restoration, we need to look at the instructions given through Jeremiah for how we should live in spiritual Babylon. Yahweh knows how each of us grew up. He knows when He called each of us to The Way. He knows our circumstances so we can trust that He doesn’t want us to isolate ourselves from society and we should participate in the betterment of society and the betterment of ourselves. The Jews in Babylon had a purpose: to exist and wait faithfully for the restoration. Our mission has that component, but also more. We are to prepare ourselves spiritually and preach the gospel, aiding in Yahweh’s calling of people and growing the flock while living in Babylon.
Slide 5 “I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; Your word is truth. As You sent Me into the world, I also have sent them into the world.” (Joh 17:14-18)
Brothers and sisters, we aren’t sent into the world. We are born in it and come to the truth in it. We have a stake in it. We have to be salt and light. We have to work to better ourselves and our world. The desire to not be in the world is strong in us because we see right and wrong clearly. We don’t belong here. And ultimately we won’t be here. We have confidence in the resurrection of the dead and in the world to come. But we have to live here and we have a big stake in here being the best it can be.
Today is a day of celebration for our nation. 50 years of abortion legalized improperly has come to an end. My lifetime. Half a century. They made it as difficult as possible, including a recent assassination attempt on a judge. 49 years of abortion and then a Jubilee!
And this happened because all who fear God came together on this crucial point. We’ve had countless volunteers, hundreds of millions of dollars, and countless geniuses dedicate themselves to ridding our land of the abominable Roe v. Wade. The best we can hope for on that front is to be able to decide for ourselves through our country’s political systems. There can be no larger example of why we need to be involved in the welfare of Babylon. Yahweh hates sin. Jonah’s example preaching to Nineveh shows this before the New Covenant. Yahweh wants all to repent and come to the knowledge of the truth. The truth that our government never established a right for a baby to be killed in the womb is now established and enshrined by the blessed Clarence Thomas and his God-fearing peers. And guess what? None of those justices keep Shabbat or eat clean. They are opposed personally to Yahweh’s Torah. But they also are installed by Him to protect our rights.
Slide 6 “If, then, I am a wrongdoer and have committed anything worthy of death, I do not refuse to die; but if none of those things is true of which these men accuse me, no one can hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar.” Then when Festus had conferred with his council, he answered, “You have appealed to Caesar, to Caesar you shall go.” (Act 25:11-12)
The most extreme case of using one’s citizenship to further the kingdom of God is here on the board. Paul was such a unique individual. He was educated in everything and a citizen of both Judea and Rome. And he was called to spread the gospel to the nations, which he does here by forcing to be brought to Rome in chains. He had the ability to get an audience with the most powerful person on earth and he did so, risking his own life.
We are blessed to live somewhere we can influence the government. This also causes us conflict because we are educated in Torah and know that this land will not be proper until the return of Yeshua. Today, though, let’s celebrate that for 50 years there have been enough God-fearing people in this land to rid the land of the atrocity of Roe v. Wade. Praise Yahweh!