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Death is not a barrier for the Kingdom of Heaven, as it is for us. Death is strange, abnormal, out of place in the Creator’s design, but Heaven can provide protection against threats to our reaching the goal Heaven has for us.
A key lesson from Leviticus/Vayiqra is corruption and especially contact with death cannot approach the Presence of God. That is taught via the Torah instructions to keep leavening — things that ferment or are fermented — out of the Tabernacle and away from those who serve there. The stench of death is a very unpleasant smell, yet the Torah tells us that burned sacrifices are a “pleasing aroma” to God. This seems like a paradox.
God protected Israel from the poisonous animals in the wilderness until their grumbling became so loud that God temporarily took His hedge of protection away from them and the snakes came into the camp (Numbers 21).
This protection is also recalled with the Apostle Paul, who was bitten by a poisonous snake, and rather than succumbing to the poison, the snake bite had no effect on him because Yeshua haMashiakh (Jesus the Christ) promised Paul that he would arrive in Rome to testify of Him there.
The mysterious ritual of the red heifer sacrifice detailed in the Torah reading חֻקַּת Chukat (Numbers 19-21) is a pattern of what Heaven had planned for the healing mission of Yeshua. This is the strangest sacrifice of all the sacrifices described in Torah. It’s the only one that is treated like toxic waste, yet the ashes of this “toxic waste” were the most important part of the Temple. Without those ashes, worship in the Temple would eventually grind to a halt.
Heaven plans to reverse the reign of death, making life reign eternally.
Torah = Principle > Law > Application
Everything in Torah starts with a commandment (mitzvah), which then is applied to one’s daily life in an ordinance/statute (khuqqah/chukah) and then is applied to a particular situation through a judgment (mishpat). The relationships between the three can be illustrated this way:
When you go off the path and you come to yourself and realize this, you repent, make teshuvah (“turn-around,” i.e., repentance) and return to the right path. The key to repentance is to return back to a point that you knew for sure where you were going. This is a good principle for other parts of our life too.
You know that the mishpat is correct if it’s easy to connect it back to the mitzvah.
Numbers 19: Paradoxical mystery of the red heifer
The Temple institute has been preparing for the rebuilding of the Temple for many years. They have been designing the garments, the furniture and implements. They have gone as far as they can go in their preparations, but they can’t complete the process because of a profound quandary.
You can’t inaugurate the red heifer sacrifice without a priest but you can’t inaugurate a priest without the cleansing of the red heifer ashes. The truth is that you can’t have the temple or tabernacle without the Messiah! Moses said that there would be a time when the prophet like himself would come to Israel and He would lead them. Moses implored the Israelites to look forward to the Messiah and listen to Him.
The Priesthood in heaven has always been in operation and they are in service to this day. What we had on earth was not a “mere copy” but a true copy of what is in Heaven. The temple services were a metaphor to show mankind what Heaven is doing on our behalf, how Heaven longs to connect to us.
In the Second Temple period, many people, particularly those of the sect of the Essenes were pulling away from the Jerusalem Temple as a focus of their religious identity and devotion because of the political corruption of the High Priestly elites.
The Jews of Egypt also had set up a temple for themselves, rather than going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
We also see in this time period that the Pharisees took many of the rituals from the Tabernacle and brought them into their own daily practices, for different reasons. They are the ones who set up the synagogue system so that Jews all over the world could still study Torah and maintain their Jewish identity many miles away from the Temple.
Many Christian churches today, particularly denominations that are also highly liturgical, patterned the architecture of churches on the Temple.
Some of these practices that the Pharisees adopted and encouraged, such as washing of hands, can help us focus on God and bring small but profound reminders of Him into our daily life, but if you elevate these from the level of a judgement to a mitzvah, one can go too far into legalism.
What’s young and bovine and red all over?
The sacrifice of the red heifer is full of symbols of redness: a red heifer, a red thread and cedar wood, which is red. The Hebrew words for mankind (אָדָם ʾāḏom, H120, H121), ground (אֲדָמָה ʾᵃḏāmâ, H127, H128) and blood (דָּם dom, H1818) share the same letters דם. It’s symbolic of something that is full of life but is killed so that others can draw near to life. That’s a key of the Tabernacle/Temple services.
“For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the blood by reason of the life that makes atonement.’” (Leviticus 17:11 NASB)
“Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins are as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool.” (Isaiah 1:18 NASB)
These remind us that our efforts to clean ourselves up can only go so far. There are three levels of wrongdoing:
- Sins: Missing the mark like shooting an arrow and not hitting the bullseye.
- Transgressions: The good that I was supposed to do and didn’t do it.
- Iniquity: Rebellion against Heaven. This is a level of wrongdoing that can only be atoned (covered and removed) on Yom Kippur (Day of Covering, aka Day of Atonement) by the sacrificial work of the high priest.
Hebrews 9: Mystery of the red heifer revealed
This is part of a long discussion (Hebrews 1–10) of Yeshua as the ultimate Cohen (priest) of Israel, drawing on the patterns of Yom Kippur and the red heifer. We must tread carefully when dropping into the middle of this discourse.
But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkling those who have been defiled sanctify for the cleansing of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without blemish to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?
For this reason He is the mediator of a new covenant, so that, since a death has taken place for the redemption of the transgressions that were committed under the first covenant, those who have been called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.”
Hebrews 9:11–15 NASB
If you can accept this covering, you should be even more willing to accept the covering of the Messiah, the true High Priest of Heaven and His covering of our sins, transgression and iniquities. He removes them from us so we can present ourselves before God with a clean conscience. God knows about all the skeletons in our closets and the Messiah willingly cleans them out and doesn’t throw them in our face once we have repented and put our trust in His work.
Phillip asked Yeshua “Show us the Father” and Yeshua responded and said, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father.” This was Messiah’s mission on earth, to show mankind who the Father is. The Book of Hebrews is the Messiah’s resume.
Messiah’s sacrifice doesn’t just cover our sins, but cleanses our conscience. It’s not just closing a cluttered closet door, hiding what we don’t want seen. It’s about cleaning and removing the clutter. We have to trust God and let that go.
Just like HaSatan lied to Eve, he lies to all of us, too. This is why He is called the “accuser of the brethren.” We do well to ignore his lies.
This passage has one of many kal v’khomer (“light and heavy”) arguments in Hebrews: Yom haKippurim brings cleansing of sins, transgressions and iniquities for all the people, but the high priest, a descendant of Aaron, has to call upon a greater cleansing to prepare him to serve.
The sage Maimonides suggested that the high priest was cleansed by the red heifer also leading up to Yom haKippurim. That tradition may be preserved in this argument in Hebrews, says commentator David Stern. If you ask a devout Jew why he or she attends Yom Kippur services, it’s likely because of faith that sincere prayers of repentance are heard and honored by God — even in the absence of the Temple or Tabernacle.
Unlike the high priests who descend from Aaron, Yeshua didn’t need an outside cleansing from the stain of death. Heaven anointed Yeshua to take on the death penalty required by the Torah, and He died. Heaven raised Him up, and He offers cleansing from the wages of sin by our trust that Yeshua is the ultimate high priest Who offers us cleansed before the Father.
Hypocrisy = Contact with death
In Jewish tradition, since there was such a strong culture of avoiding any contamination by death, they would make sure that graveyards were very clearly marked. They would usually whitewash their graves to make them obvious and easy for those who needed to maintain ritual purity to avoid them.
Yeshua used this tradition to make a point about hypocrisy:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside they are full of robbery and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee, first clean the inside of the cup and of the dish, so that the outside of it may become clean also.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. So you, too, outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
Matthew 23:25–28 NASB
Unfortunately, there are people who will not walk the road that leads to life and will insist on walking on the road that leads to death, but God has told us that the road to death will be destroyed one day.
God is not tricking us to choosing death. He only wants us to choose life.
Humanity’s deal with death since Eden can only be broken by the death and resurrection of the Messiah. Yeshua conquered death. When we “take up [our] cross daily,” we are acknowledging that the old life has to die. Not many of us understand how important that is and that all of us must die to our old life, not just people we consider seriously sinful, such as drug addicts or alcoholics.
All of us must take an inventory of our lives and rearrange our lives. We have to actively decide not to continue walking on the road that leads to death, we stay away from those things that lead us towards death. We need to learn the same sort of lessons that those in the 12 step programs learn, and this is something we need to do daily. Choosing life and trusting God is a regular cycle that mature believers practice.
We also need to be reminded that we can never save ourselves. That’s not something that we can deal with ourselves. We have to call in the expert, and the expert is the Messiah, who is able to take away our sin, accept our repentance and help us walk the right path.
Summary: Tammy