Remember that the number three is a Messianic reference. This third-year tithe is a reference to the Messiah: His sacrifice, God’s acceptance of the Messiah’s sacrifice and, from that point, God will make those who accept the Messiah’s sacrifice into His people.
The Feast of Weeks, called Shavu’ot in Hebrew and Pentecost in Greek, commemorates the harvest of the second crop of the year, wheat. It’s connected to the Firstfruits of the harvest at Passover time. Yeshua is called the firstfruit of the resurrection of the dead.
God loves the world but He shows His love in a different way than we might think. We must not hoard the mysteries of the kingdom of God all to ourselves.
Solomon’s assent to kingship mimics the triumphant entry of Yeshua haMashiakh (Jesus the Christ) into Yerushalayim (Jerusalem).
These two chapters are very heavy and they record far more curses than blessings. The previous chapters we covered tell us how God expects to treat one another and today’s chapters show us how God will either reward or punish the people depending on how well they put His words into practice.
The trustworthiness of the Bible has been under attack in earnest by skeptical scholars for more than 200 years. In recent times, there have been popularist attacks that use morality arguments to argue against the morality of the Bible.
Dan Savage, homosexual rights activist, columnist and founder of the It Gets Better antibullying campaign, spoke to a large national conference for high school journalists hosted by the National Scholastic Press Association and the Journalism Education Association in April 2012. In a profanity-laden address, he attacked those who quote the Bible as a reason for opposing acceptance of homosexuality.
Given incomplete knowledge of the Torah time period, we can either trust God’s prescription for the situation or feign complete knowledge that the remedy was worse than the condition. Compared with the secular view of existence, God’s view of existence presented in the Bible is a better representation of reality.
This passage covers sometimes strange instructions for divorce, kidnapping, charity, limits to punishment and marriage to bear an heir.
The imagery of the book of Revelation can seem bizarre and unfathomable, until we realize that the book is a compilation of Day of the LORD prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures. In this case, we’re examining the strange imagery of “scorpions” and “locusts” related to the fifth and sixth trumpets in Revelation 9–10.