Tim Hegg has written an excellent exposition on the applicability of Torah to gentile converts to belief in the Jewish Messiah: One Law Movements.
Archive for the ‘Parsha 15 - Bo’ Category
One King, One Nation, One Law
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010Bo 5769 – Opening the Matrix
Friday, January 30th, 2009Exodus 13:15
…all that openeth the matrix… There appear to be two ways to interpret this phrase. I do not know which is correct, but I suspect the first:
- “Firstborn” refers to the firstborn child of his father. “Openeth the matrix” is a figure of speech extending from the fact that most households, even in a polygamous culture, will have only one man and one woman, and should not to be taken literally. Every house with male children must have a firstborn and only one firstborn. If the first child born in a house is a female, she was the one to “open the matrix,” but she is not called the firstborn. If there are two or three wives in a house, there will be a first child born of each wife, but only one firstborn in the house.
- “Firstborn” refers to the firstborn child of his mother. If a man has ten wives, each of whom bears sons, then ten sons must be redeemed. “Firstborn of man” in verse 13 should be understood to mean “firstborn humans.”
Bo 5768 – Egypt Is the World
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008Genesis 11:5
And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die… Although the Torah is explicit that the firstborn males of God’s people belong to him, it is implicit that the firstborn males of all other nations also belong to him. No matter one’s cultural inheritance, God’s intent for the firstborn is to act as his family’s kinsman redeemer. In taking the firstborn, as opposed to the youngest or the strongest, God denied the Egyptians their kinsmen redeemers. It was the ultimate declaration of ownership.
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Bo 5767 – Choosing To Live
Tuesday, January 30th, 2007Bo, one week late.
Ancient Egypt was obsessed with Death. They wrote about death. They worshipped gods and goddesses of death. They built gigantic monuments to the dead. They amassed fortunes in metals, tools, and slaves, thinking they could take them with to the other side.
They rejected the God of Life.
In many ways our own culture mirrors theirs. We talk about death. We sing about it. We imitate it. We constantly invent new ways to cause it. We are always at war.
We have chosen to embrace death and to reject the God of Life.
Stephen Baars wrote that choice equals life. He was right in a way. Pharaoh chose to kill the children of Israel and his people’s children were killed. A later pharaoh chose to reject God’s reasonable offers. Choice and life were then taken from him and his people. Every choice either adds to or takes away from our life.
Choose life.
If you choose to spend your days watching television, you are choosing death. You are surrendering active participation in your own life in favor of passive observation of someone else’s life. More often than not, that other life is a fiction. It is not real and can never be real. It is death. Video games aren’t much better. You might be participating, but it is still fiction, and it can still never be life.
In order to live, you must choose to live. You must get off your couch and do something. Take a walk, learn a skill, have a conversation, sing a song, go to church, anything that advances and builds your life.
But be careful. Doing something isn’t always the same as living. There are many active choices you can make that will still take away from your life. Sports and physical activity enhance life, but somewhere there is a line beyond which sports become an invitation to death. Socializing, singing, dancing, laughing, drinking, and eating are all wonderful parts of life, but they can all steal from your life if taken in the wrong measures or in the wrong company. Love definitely adds to life, but imblanced or untimely expressions of love only bring death. Both God and the Devil are in the details.
We should thank God that he has set us free from slavery so that we can make our own choices. We should also thank God that he has given us guidelines to help us make good decisions, to help us choose life.