The Priesthood That Gave Up Its Freedom, and the Lessons for Anyone Who Serves God Today

Service in God's House Costs You Your Freedom of Choice

The first part of Parashat Emor gives instructions for the priests of Israel who are serving in the Temple. And what those instructions make clear is that being a priest means you are not a free person. You have to separate yourself from the rest of the people of God. You cannot come as you are into the holy sanctuary — you have to prepare for it and wear the right clothing. You cannot follow the fashion of your generation and get any kind of haircut that you wish.

When a good friend dies, you can't go to the cemetery and participate in his burial, because you are a priest of God, and going to the cemetery might make you ceremonially unclean. You have to always be ready to perform your duty in the Temple of the Lord. You can't desecrate your body with tattoos or with cutting marks on your body. You can't take just anyone you choose to be your wife — you have to take a wife who is a virgin and from your own people (for today, this means a fellow disciple of the Messiah).

How many men will be willing to become preachers today if there were these limitations on their freedom of choice? Today many want to have the honor of being servants of God, but not many would be willing to make the choice of being set apart, sanctified, as servants of God.

The principle that Yeshua gave in the Gospel of Luke is something that ought to put the fear of God into every one of us who wants to serve God:

This principle includes financial issues and family, and time schedules, and our relationship to the national authorities and the taxes and every aspect of our lives.

The Levitical Priesthood vs. Today's Casual Ministry

As evangelicals and Messianic Jews, we have adopted a very free and casual attitude toward our ministry. Often times the pastors and church or Messianic synagogue workers seem to take their responsibility very casually and informally. The treatment of the ministry can at times be deemed like a private business. The attitude of the pastor or Messianic rabbi could be that his service in the church or synagogue is actually his, as he is the owner of the church or ministry. Sometimes the ministry is even called by the name of the pastor or the leader. The Levitical priesthood was a much more structured and formal calling that required greater discipline and team work with the other priests and assistants.

Even until today, if your family name is Cohen or any variation — Spiro, Katz, Kahanah, Cahoun, and many other names that are all names of priestly families from the tribe of Levi — you can't touch the dead person or enter into a cemetery for a funeral, even of a close family member. This tradition is very old and from the Torah itself. The rules for those priests who serve God — the clothing of the priests specified, the way they wear their hair specified, what they eat specified — is a level of seriousness about serving God that we in our day have largely lost.

Let's take an example from Leviticus 21:5:

And Leviticus 19:28:

The first text speaks specifically to the priests who serve in the Tabernacle as we mentioned above. The second text speaks to all the people of Israel.

Tattoos are a hallmark of pagan culture. Humans are known to have had tattoos for the last 12,000 years. The practice of cutting and tattooing bodies was spread around the world before 5000 BCE. When I see Christians and even pastors who after they became believers go and tattoo themselves, I see their ignorance of the word of God.

I have one tattoo of a Star of David that I did together with all the boys and girls in my neighborhood in Jerusalem when I was 13 years old. The reason that all the kids in our neighborhood did the same tattoos of a Star of David was because most of the parents of our friends had numbers tattooed on their arms by the Nazis when they entered the labor and death camps in Poland, Germany, Austria, Holland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania. We all did something stupid because we didn't know the Torah and most of us didn't know God. I would remove the small tattoo from my arm, but I am keeping it to remind me of how stupid I was as a young teen.

The New Testament confirms this important lesson that we need to heed:

Freedom in Christ is not unlimited. It has God-given boundaries that we ought to honor and keep.

The Feasts That Yeshua Kept — And That We Are Still Commanded to Keep

The second major topic of Parashat Emor is the catalog of the feasts of the Lord starting with the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week. There is an important pattern in the bible in regards to the number 7. The first verse of the Bible in Hebrew has seven words: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Seven words in Hebrew. And if you start following that pattern of seven in the whole Hebrew Bible, you'll find that there is a geometrical pattern of seven that follows through much of the dealings of the children of Israel throughout history. The world was created in seven days. And the seventh day is the first and the mother of all the feasts of the Lord.

The Sabbath is not a burden. It is a privilege. It is not a punishment from God. The rest is a gift. The person who has been working hard all week has earned it. You have a right to rest. You're not a slave. You're a free person. In Isaiah 56, the Sabbath is given to the Gentile too — not only to Israel. Take care of God's business on the Sabbath day. Enjoy yourself. Take care of your family.

There is a Jewish law — stated clearly in the Torah — that three sins you die for rather than break: incest, murder, and the handing over of your friend, your brother, your partner, to the enemy. Those are the three commandments you choose to die before violating them. All the other commandments — including the Sabbath — you can break them in order to save lives. A few years ago I was hearing the Orthodox Jewish rabbi of the city of Odessa in the Ukraine — which was heavily bombed by sea and by air — and he is a doctor, and he said it very clearly:

Some Christians think that Yeshua eliminated the Sabbath by healing on the Sabbath day. No. He had to heal because life is more precious than any of the commandments. Healing on the Sabbath is commanded. It is not breaking the Sabbath.

The topic of the Lord's feasts is one of the most challenging topics in the entire Christian world — not because of what is written in the New Testament, but because of what has happened in Christian history between the 4th and the 6th century. The paganized Christian churches were alienating themselves from Israel and the Jewish nation. John Chrysostom, in his "Against the Jews," Homily 3, gives you some of the most striking documentation of this systematic anti-Jewish and anti-Torah and anti-Old Testament campaign that the Catholic church set in motion. It is all well documented and there is no question about it.

But here are the facts: the Biblical Feasts are not Jewish Feasts — they are the Feasts of the Lord. These same feasts are the feasts that Yeshua and His disciples kept and celebrated and gave special meaning to, with clear identification with the Torah and with the prophets, well into the second century after the Messiah and even into the fourth century. The Passover is clearly commanded to be celebrated to the church in Corinth:

The law and the prophets and the gospels and the letters of the apostles are all one unit. They are a unit that starts in Genesis and ends in Revelation. If you ignore any part of it, you are missing something that will make your picture of our faith in God and in the Messiah incomplete — like a puzzle with one piece missing. Don't trust anybody except the word of God and the Holy Spirit first, and after you trust the word of God and the Holy Spirit leading you, only then trust your pastors and the leaders of your church.