Acharei Mot – Torah with Joseph

Read the transcript below, or watch a video of the teaching by Joseph Shulam.

Shalom, my name is Joseph Shulam. I’m the Director Emeritus of Netivyah Bible Instruction Ministry from Jerusalem, Israel. We are continuing the cooperation and the partnership with Brad TV in Korea in doing the whole Torah, the whole Law of Moses from Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy according to the reading that is read in all the synagogues in the world.

This next Shabbat, the whole world of the synagogues of the Jewish world will be reading a portion that’s called Acharei Mot, after the death of the two sons of Aaron, starting in Leviticus Chapter 16:1, ending in Leviticus 18:30.

The Torah portion is from the Law of Moses, but we also read from the prophets and we also read from the New Testament. So, from the prophets, we’ll be reading from Amos 9:7-15. And from the New Testament we are reading from Galatians 5:1 to the end of the chapter, to Verse 26.

One thing I want to say as an introduction to this portion and to Leviticus in general. We are living in a world that everything is very casual especially in the Western world, in United States and in Western Europe, everything is very casual.

It used to be that IBM required all of their workers to come to work with a white shirt, a tie and a dark jacket, at least, if not a dark suit. And they had to have their shoes polished. And they couldn’t come to work with a suit and sneakers, but that has changed. Everything became less formal, more casual.

There’s advantages and disadvantages. But when it comes to the service of the Lord for the Levites and the priests, they had a strict dress code, a strict dress code for every one of their functions. When the priest went up on the altar to offer the animals as sacrifices, he had to wear certain kinds of clothes, with a certain kind of cloth, from linen cloth.

Whereas when they officiated in public in the holidays, they had to wear all these fancy garments and the breast plate of gold with the 12 stones of the 12 tribes of Israel and the hat with the diadem with the name of the Lord, the four holy letters, and granite on the hat between their eyes. Everything was very formal.

Now after the two sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, died because they brought strange fire into the altar. The text starts this way; Chapter 16:1 of the Book of Leviticus. “Now the Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they offered profane fire before the Lord and died.

The Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell Aaron, your brother not to come at just any time into the Holy Place inside the veil, before the mercy seat which is on the Ark, lest he die, for I will appear in the cloud, above the mercy seat. And Aaron shall come into the Holy Place with the blood of a young bull as a sin offering and of a ram as a burnt offering.’” Okay?

The days of casual entrance into the Tabernacle of God are over. That’s what God is telling Moses to tell Aaron. So, first of all, he’s not telling Aaron, he’s telling Moses. Why is God telling Moses and not Aaron himself? Because there is hierarchy. We don’t like hierarchy.

We believe now as a part of Western culture in equality. The French Revolution brought a change in Western civilization. With the cry of the revolutionaries that overthrew the Kings of France “Louis, Louis, Louis.” The way the song says. Yes, they cried, “Liberty, equality and fraternity for all.” Well, liberty we got. Equality, we’re working on it. Fraternity, we’re far from it.

In fact, what has happened with the liberty and the equality is that they’ve driven fraternity way out. We’re now tribal. We’re now individuals. We’re now each man to himself. This is a breakdown of some of the very, very important building stones of democracy.

But here it is. God tells Moses to tell Aaron and his sons, “Don’t just come into My house casually. When you come, first bring a bull. Sacrifice a bull, so that you will be atoned before you come in, even if you don’t know what your sin was if you don’t know what your problem is. At least the bull, as a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering, will mitigate any possible problem between Me and you. Don’t come empty handed into My house.”

That’s what God is telling Moses to tell Aaron his brother and his sons who officiated as the priests in the House of the Lord, in the Tent of the Meeting, in the middle of the desert, in the Tabernacle. But not only that, they have to wash their bodies before they put on their linen garments; before they bring the sacrifices and the offerings of the ram, before they bring the bull as a sacrifice for their own sin. Even if they don’t know that they sinned they have to be sure that when they come into the House of the Lord, they don’t come empty-handed.

This is not only the case of Israelite worship. If you read Canaanite, Babylonian, Assyrian religious records, you find out that this was kind of the culture of worship. Even when they worshiped idols. In Babylon and Assyria, the Canaanites, the Philistines, even when they worshiped idols, they had to have a certain degree of respect in entering the House of the Lord.

It’s an important lesson, dear brothers and sisters. It’s an important lesson that all of us need to learn. The rest of the Chapter 16 deals with all the intricate procedures that the priest had to carry on before they could approach God, even to worship Him, to bless Him, to praise Him. You don’t come in there and do whatever you want. There is protocol. There is the veil. There is the burnt coals on the sensors that produce the good smelling smoke inside the Tent of Meeting. This was true, not only our design for the Tabernacle and the design for King Solomon’s temple. It was not a unique design for Israel. It was the design for the temples of the idols as well.

I participated in 1960s in a dig together with Professor Yigael Yadin in Megiddo. Before us, there were Garstang and Schliemann and other German and European archeologists that started at the turn of the 20th century, 1903, to dig in Megiddo. And they discovered a complex of three temples one next to the other, probably to three of the main idols that those Canaanites and inhabitants of the land at that time worshiped.

All of them had more or less the same design as our Tent of Meeting, in the wilderness and at Solomon’s temple. What is it consisted of? A courtyard for the people, the worshipers to gather around and then a second courtyard for the Levites and the priests to prepare for the sacrificial offerings that was done.

For the priests themselves that entered into the Holy Place, not into the Holy of Holies, but into where there was the candelabra, because it was dark. They had to have a light 24 hours a day and there was the altar of incense which is the altar of prayer, we could say today. And then the altar of sacrifice, that we don’t have today, but we have the image of of Yeshua on the cross that was the everlasting sacrifice that ended all the other worship in Jerusalem according to Daniel 9.

So this procedure that the Law of Moses gives us in Chapter 16 is tedious for Christians who don’t dig deep into the word of God, in the Law of Moses like the Jews do. It’s tedious, how to do this and the other thing, and this incense and the altar and the prayers and the sprinkling of the blood and all of these tedious things, they don’t speak to us. And you will probably not hear many sermons about this in your church.

But the main lesson that I want to pass on to you from Chapter 16 of the Book of Leviticus is that God cares about details. And the details are very important because we are not to be casual with the almighty God, creator of the universe.

And it is a special occasion and a special privilege to approach God in prayer. To talk to God. It’s not like talking to your buddy. We’re talking about the one who created the heavens and the earth, the sun and the moon and the stars and the trees and the grass and the flowers and the elephants and the whales in the ocean, we, me and you too. He created all and gives us life and breath and everything that we are and we have.

Yes, casual is very modern in a postmodern, in a modernistic world, but it’s not a part of the way we approach our God or even Yeshua Ha Mashiach, the son of God.

We need to have much more circumspect, a much more honorable, much more formal attitude toward our prayer life, toward our approach to God, toward our study and hearing from the word of God. Yes. Yes. I think that it’s an important lesson, dear brother and sisters. The causality that, especially in the West. I know in Korea, it’s much more formal. You will not see a pastor coming in with shorts and sandals on Sunday morning to preach from the pulpit.

I’ve been many, many times in Korea from the 1970s on. Until the corona viruses stopped kind of my trips to Korea. But no, in most of the churches in Korea the pastors on Sunday morning are very formal and the music is more formal. But in the West, I’m sad to say, it’s way too casual. And I don’t know how God feels about this but I know how He felt about the children of Israel in the wilderness and what kind detailed instruction He gave them about every detail that is connected with His relationship with them and the people and with the priesthood and with the Levites inside the House of God.

So that’s the first point that I want to make about this portion. And the portion starts with reminding us that the children of Aaron, the priests, the sons of the High Priest of Israel died because they brought strange fire. God was so angry with them that fire came from Him and devoured them. Boom! Burned them on the spot.

So yes, our worship, our offerings, our attitude toward God has to be taken much more seriously. Let me talk about the offering because this section talks about the sacrificial offerings and the blood and what part of the animals that the priest could get, and what they eat and what to do when they enter. All of these details are here in this portion of after the death of the sons of Aaron, that starts in Chapter 16:1 of the Book of Leviticus.

Here it is, dear brother and sisters, our offerings. We have instructions in the New Testament how to give offerings, how to give to charity. And I must say that we don’t really see many of our brothers and sisters in the Christian, Evangelical, Protestant world pay attention to the instructions that God gave us from his mouth, not of Aaron and Moses. From the mouth of Yeshua, Jesus Himself.

As we give charity, as we give to the church, as we give to the poor, as we give for the widows and the orphans if we give for mission work, as we give for the life of the community, we have instructions that when we give charity, it should be done with humility and not with blows of trumpets and announcements and not to visually exemplify how the money is taken. You don’t have to advertise and show to everybody else that you are contributing. It has to be done much more humbly, the way that the gospel tells us, “Let not the right hand know what the left hand is doing.”

Giving in secret is a big blessing for everybody. And you will not go to a Jewish synagogue on the Sabbath day and hear anybody talk about money. But I could tell you right now that the percentage of the money that Jewish community gives to their charities and to their synagogues is higher than most churches that talk about tithing and 10% and so forth, and the blessing and the reaping and the seed, all these things. The reason is because people feel that holiness, that privilege of giving to the Lord. And I think that this is what the reading the Book of Leviticus makes that quite clear, sincerely.

And one of the things that I want to say is that when the law was given in the camp of Israel there were a lot of non-Jews, not Israelites. They were the Hivites and the Kenites, the Canaanites and others that were tribes of non-Israelites, non-Jews, non-Hebrews that joined Moses and the people of Israel when they left Egypt. When they saw what the Jews did, they put the blood on the doorpost, they did the same. And they had the privilege of joining together with Israel out of slavery in Egypt. And they ended up settling with the children of Israel in the land Canaan.

We know Yael, the one that gave a good headache to that Hittite general, Sisera. Yeah, with a tent peg stuck, hammered into his head. Yeah, she was... The English translation... The wife of Heber. No, Heber is not a name of a person. Heber means from the band of the Kenites. The Kenites were one of the tribes that came out of Egypt together with their Israelites non-Jews, non-Israelites, Gentiles.

And the Torah opens up the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the ability and the privilege of sacrificing to God creator of the universe, together with the Israel in the Tabernacle.

In Chapter 17:12, we read,

If you live together in the compound of Israel you’re not supposed to eat blood.

And we have the command in Acts 15, where the disciples and the apostles and the elders of church in Jerusalem discussed what to do with the Gentiles. Shall we circumcise them or not? They decide not to circumcise, not to convert them to Judaism but they commanded them, taken from Genesis 9 that they should not eat blood. That’s a command in the New Testament, in Acts chapter... By the apostles and the elders of the church in Jerusalem for all the Gentiles. Not to spill blood, not to eat blood or meats strangled. Yes. And it’s not a command that is only for the first century. It’s a command for all the Gentiles throughout the generations of the disciples of Yeshua from among the nations.

And yes, what can I say? I know that in Korea and Asia eating blood, drinking blood of animals is not uncommon. But I didn’t write the text of the Book of Leviticus and I didn’t write the text of Acts 15. You can’t blame me. I’m only a mirror reflecting what the scripture says for my brothers and sisters to walk closer to God, to Jesus to Yeshua and more according to the word of God which is in the Law of Moses and in the New Testament itself.

“So, the strangers that dwell among you,” I’m going to read it from Chapter 17 of Leviticus, Verse 13. “Whatever man of the children of Israel or the strangers who dwell among you, who hunts and catches any animal or bird that it may be eaten. He shall pour out its blood and cover it with dirt, the life of the flesh is in the blood, its blood sustained its life. Therefore, I say to the children, you shall not eat the blood of any flesh, for the life of the flesh is in the blood, whoever eats it shall be cut off from the people.” That means, rejected from the people. So that command is in the New Testament, by the apostles in Acts 15, is in Genesis 9 long before there were Israelites, long before Abraham was born. And it is also in the Law of Moses, as it is in the Book of Acts.

I am going to end my teaching from this portion called Acharei Mot after the death of the sons of Aaron. And the next portion is going to be very exciting, very important. And I urge you to stick with Brad TV and watch next week. The portion is called Kedoshim. Holy, holy people. It is very important for all of us. And please tune back into Brad TV and watch next week. Shalom from Jerusalem.