A Hard Saying
Tzav "Command"
Leviticus 6:8-36
Jeremiah 7:21-8:3
Psalm 107
John 6:50-60
With the mouth, you perform a lot of functions. You speak with it. You eat with it, and you are intimate with it. All three things you do with your mouth – speaking, eating and kissing, intimacy. Now, if the same organ performs multiple functions, there is something that those functions have in common. If this organ can do more than one thing, then somehow, all these things that it can do share a common purpose.
Eating binds your soul into your body, because if you don't eat with your mouth, you will die. That's the reality. There's not going to be a body much longer. So, in that sense, it gives life to your body.
Speaking connects the will of Adonai in heaven to the earth. So, the words that you speak out are connections. Whereas part of the mouth is to keep you connected in the land of the living, to keep you connected on this earth in a living state, the words of your mouth keep you connected in a living state with the will of the Father. Just like His words created a physical world and created life, that's what a mouth is supposed to do - create life; to nurture it, to uphold it, because the same Spirit that dwelled in the Messiah, dwells in you. You speak life into the creation.
Speaking doesn't just bond you with heaven; speaking bonds you with people on earth. It’s part of how you form that vav, the connection, with other people on earth. When you speak, you’re either tearing down a relationship or you're building it up, or hopefully, nothing worse than just holding it static. So, that bond could occur with speech, even with writing.
Kissing, that's an expression of intimacy. That's another function of that organ. It could be between a husband and wife, with your children, relatives, friends, and so forth. It’s binding you to that person in a unique relationship, whatever that relationship may be. You might even kiss a valuable, missing item once found. A dropped Bible or prayerbook is brushed off affectionately and kissed in Jewish tradition, as if to demonstrate remorse for handling the Word of Adonai carelessly.
So, the mouth is a very important doorway, or threshold. Something can pass through it. Something might pass through the threshold that will give you life, and keep you bound and connected on earth - a food, a drink. But there may be things that pass out of that mouth, that can also maintain connections on earth, connecting heaven with the earth and the creation, or connecting you with other people and speaking life into the lives of other people, maintaining those strong connections.
That mouth is like an altar. It's what passes through it that is critical. It can be a blemished beast that you put on the altar, and it’s a deadly abomination.
Or it can be a clean, unblemished beast, and it can do all sorts of life-things.
It can make peace. It can make repentance. It can forgive. It can do all sorts of things as a threshold, like an altar, because an altar is a threshold of spiritual authority in Revelation. It’s the altar that literally speaks. It has a mouth. And so, an altar is a threshold. The food that we put in the mouth passes over that threshold - what goes in is important in spiritual terms.
Make sure that what's going into your mouth is clean and kosher in all respects so that what goes out of the mouth is also clean and kosher, uplifting. If toxins go in, your spirit can filter them through another avenue out of the body. Downward. Don’t overload the system.
Speech is a tool that expresses the heart. It's coming over that altar of the mouth, and if a believer misuses speech, he or she is misusing that threshold, which symbolizes authority. With the mouth humans misuse what authority they have on earth. It’s an incorrect function. It’s a wrong function. It's not what the mouth was made for, and the result is going to be sin.
For example, if you're using your mouth inappropriately, it’s like driving in a nail. It takes a hammer to drive in a nail. What if you picked up a sledgehammer to drive in the nail? Not only will the function of the nail be irrelevant, you will have broken everything you are trying to put together around the nail. You'll smash what you are trying to connect. And so that's what the mouth does. It's an altar; it's a threshold of authority, and when you're using that mouth to smash things up like a sledgehammer, it's not what your mouth was created to do. Disciples of Yeshua are also craftsman like him, and we are sent out to repair the broken world. Speech often destroys what disciples are supposed to fix.
Misuse of speech is the misuse of the intimacy that we could have with Adonai. He is the Speaker, and then we become the speaker. If we break that bond by yielding our mouths to that which is profane, then that's breaking the connection. It's also going to break the connection with the person we’re speaking to or about.
Instead of building that connection, the sacrificial altar becomes the opposite of a place of relationship and knitting people together. Yeshua said if you have something against your brother, put the gift down, go make it right with your brother, and then bring your gift back to the altar - that's what the altar is for, is to wield authority over how we connect and have relationships with one another. We want pure relationships, so we want a pure altar, and we definitely want pure speech moving over this altar.
The altar is the mizbeach HaShem. It's known in rabbinic thought that the altar sacrifices are the process of the world eating. That sounds a little strange - the process of the world eating. So, when that the sacrifice takes place, when the beast is put on the altar, they say the world is eating. The food is required on the altar in order to keep the world in the world, basically.
It’s just like your soul - if you don't eat, then the body dies. When there are no sacrifices on the altar, humankind will die. If we're looking at Yeshua as the sacrifice on the altar, it explains his hard saying: "If you don't eat my flesh and drink my blood":
- “This is the bread that comes down out of heaven, so that anyone may eat from it and not die. I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats from this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I will give for the life of the world also is My flesh.”
- Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. The one who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. The one who eats My flesh and drinks My blood remains in Me, and I in him…So then many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, “This statement is very unpleasant; who can listen to it?” (Jn 6:50-60)
If Yeshua is the Word that holds things together, if everything is held together by Him, then basically, his being put on that altar and our eating that sacrifice is the process that we go through to live. We're eating Yeshua's flesh, and we're drinking his blood, and that is what keeps us alive. It connects us with the Father in heaven. It's a figurative picture, but it makes sense. Because if we don't do that, the soul of the world will go away. We would die, just like if our body didn't eat, we would die. If Yeshua is not that flesh and that blood that we eat -that is the holy altar that we eat from – then the world is going to pass away.
There would be no protective power in the earth that would hold things together. Yeshua is the Word. He's that necessary food of the world, but the Word has to pass through the mouth in the form of speech. That good speech that we speak crosses that altar, and it upholds the world. That's how the world is going to eat and to be sustained.
Evil speech is going to bring death and decay. It’s going to cause more entropy. The more of Yeshua that we speak, the greater the life in the world. The more evil that we speak, the less life in the world. That is a kind of a mysterious way of putting it, but "For by Him, all things were created, both in the heavens and on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominions, or rulers, or authorities, all things have been created through Him, and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him, all things hold together." (Col 1:16 – 17).
Yeshua is that living Word, and he is what gives life to the world. He came into the world in flesh so we could see that work and what it means to submit the mouth, the altar, the threshold of the mouth, to the work of the Holy Spirit, transforming the world. The altar is also known as the shulchan Adonai, or the table of Adonai. Adonai calls the sacrifices, "My sacrifices, My bread," or the korbani lachmi. Yeshua identifies himself as that bread of life. Adonai doesn’t literally eat the sacrifices, but His supernatural fire consumes them, and He “eats” the intention of the heart. That is what “feeds” Him, our devotion and desire to return to Him.
In Jewish literature, there is a reference to the fire of the altar appearing in the shape of a lion when it consumed the sacrifices. This altar fire was initially lit supernaturally; it was the Levites’ and priests' job to make sure it never went out. Humans do not create the fire, but they tend it and guard it. This memory of the fire taking the shape of a lion reminded me of a commentary about Samson’s Riddle and the sacrifice offered by the priests: ‘this is the sacrifice of Aaron’ (Lev 16:3).
“Usually, the people supply sacrifices, while the priests perform the rite. The priests are later allowed to eat part of the sacrificial meat. The priest may thus be described as ‘eating’ [the food supplied by] other people. In the case of the sacrifice in question, the priests offer a sacrifice of their own, therefore being themselves eaten [by God]…LevR connects this verse with Samson’s riddle ‘from the eater comes out food’ (Judg 14:14). The one who eats others, namely the lion, is now being eaten, namely, containing honey. The lion becomes a metaphor for the priests, who usually ‘eat’ others, but in the case of this sacrifice, they are the source of food for others.”
An offering of a living creature shows a strong resemblance to the human being. The beasts and human being were created on the Sixth Day, but the human spirit was to rule over the animal soul. Beasts were to reproduce after THEIR kind. Human beings were to conform to the image of Elohim and reproduce after HIS kind. The point is to subdue, discipline, and humble the craving and sinning soul...for sin derives from nothing but a beastly, animal root. (Sefer HaChinnuch §116) The sacrifice of an offering repairs the human heart and “the defect of the erring animalistic spirit and the eminence of the intelligent spirit, now rectified and clear.” (ibid §120)
The Sixth Day of Creation reminds us of the Hebrew letter vav, which means a connector, peg, or nail, holding two things together. Heaven and earth. Man was created on the sixth day, represented by the letter vav. Adam was after the kind of Yeshua, who holds all things together.
This is expressed in the midrash (LevR, 168): “Samson was wondering [about this] and said: ‘The lion usually eats all [other] animals, and now, food is issued from it!’ Thus Aaron and his sons eat all the sacrifices, and now a sacrifice is issued from them.’”
In this type and shadow, Yeshua, our high priest, is also the fiery Lion of Judah AND he consumes the “beast” seeking to dominate humankind. Yeshua was consumed on the altar on our behalf, yet now the “honey” issues from him, and we consume it! The bee’s (devorah) root is Word (davar). We are the bees consuming the Word Yeshua. We share in the altar. His Words are our words. The Holy One “eats” our obedience to sacrifice the beast within, and it upholds the world.
Yeshua is our sacrifice, and he is that process of the world eating, sustaining the creation, holding it all together, just like human food keeps the Spirit and the body connected. Yeshua’s sacrifice is that sustaining Word, food of creation. It has always been a difficult concept to really think about, but Yeshua says He's the bread of life. He has come into the world to resurrect us. This is why our clean ashes are stored beneath the altar, awaiting resurrection from the dead.
Yeshua was the Word of creation through which everything held together. Evil speech, evil words, and evil doctrine led to a rebellion that tore things apart. It destroyed the vav, the connections Adam and Eve were supposed to be in the Garden.
When the Spirit of Elohim was breathed into him, that's all that Adam could breathe out, that which is pure and clean and holy, and that which upholds the world. When the Word Yeshua is breathed into and out of us, it is the food of the world.
The Sukkot tour filled up faster than anticipated!
Scroll all the way down to read more about the waiting list with Blossoming Rose. Kisha and I are also planning a limited mobility tour in November or December.
We do NOT plan to live stream on YouTube on Shabbat. B'azrat HaShem, we'll see you next week.
SHABBAT SHALOM!
