Va'etchanan – Torah with Joseph

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

Shalom, my name is Joseph Shulam, and together with Brad TV in partnership, we are doing the Torah portions that are being read every week, every Sabbath, in every synagogue around the world. Starting in Genesis ending at the end of Deuteronomy, that takes the whole year to go through the Torah portions.

And we are now entering the second portion of the book of Deuteronomy, and it’s called in Hebrew, Va’etchanan. The whole book of Deuteronomy is Moses’ farewell speech. He’s giving his last speech before the children of Israel cross the Jordan River to the land of Canaan, and he goes up to Mount Mizpah, across the Jordan River, a high mountain which he can look at most of the land of Israel on a clear day from that mountain.

I certainly hope God gave him a clear day the day that he went up there to Mount Pisgah. And now we are starting in chapter three verse 23, and the word Va’etchanan means pleading, pleading.

Moses had to plead with God, “Please God, please let me cross the Jordan. I’ve worked so hard 80 years to bring these people to this land and I don’t get to cross the Jordan River into the promised land that You gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. God, please, I am pleading (‘va’etchanan’), I am pleading, let me cross.”

I’m reading the text now from Deuteronomy 3:23-25:

Well, God, in chapter 34 of the book of Exodus, described Himself as Lord, merciful and mighty with everlasting grace, gracious, that shows grace to the generations. That’s the nature of God when God describes himself to Moses in chapter 34 of Exodus. And Moses goes up on the rock and God reveals himself to Moses. He said these words, I’m gonna repeat them.

You would think that this God that proclaims Himself merciful and mighty would give his faithful servant, Moses, that little bit of grace and allow him to cross the Jordan. What’s the big deal? Well, for Moses, it was certainly a big deal and for God it was a certainly a big deal.

Because look at the answer that God gives to Moses, in Deuteronomy 3:26, “But the Lord was angry with me,” Moses said. “On your account and the account of the people,” Moses like a good Israeli, like a good Jew, says He is not angry with me because of me. You are to blame that God is angry with me.

It’s very Israeli folks. It’s very human. I’m repeating from verse 26 of chapter three of Deuteronomy: “But the Lord was angry with me on your account and would not listen to me. So the Lord said to me, enough, enough of that. Speak no more to Me of this matter. Of this subject.”

In other word God said, “Moses, shut up. I don’t want to hear about it anymore. This is the last time I’m gonna listen to you begging Me to let you in across the Jordan River to the promised land.”

Pretty, pretty harsh. It’s pretty harsh. And it’s hard for us to understand it because many times we ask things from God, and God either doesn’t answer us, which can happen. Or he answers us and says, “No, not right now, maybe later, maybe never.”

I’ve asked so many things from God, like healing my wife and healing my eye and lots of things. Didn’t happen. God said, no. He said no to me, more than one time for things that I thought for Him would be the snap of a finger. But He said, no. Joe, no.

I hope by the end of this lesson today we’ll understand better why God sometimes says no, and what we need to understand is that even the no is grace. Even God says, no, well not right now. Or come later, it’s all for our good. For all things work together for the good of those who love the Lord.

And that is a very, very famous, not only biblical principle, Jewish principle. We have a blessing that says, thank you for everything, even for what seems to us a calamity, a disaster. Yes, all things work together. We need to take that deeply into our heart.

But Moses is not the only one that God said no to. Some of the most important people in the Bible got a no from God. Among them, Yeshua Himself. Yeshua Himself.

Here is a text, Matthew 26:39-42. Yeshua is describing what’s happening. “And He went a little further and fell on His face and prayed,” we’re talking about the garden of Gethsemane. And He prayed and said, “Oh My father, if it is possible let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”

Again, a second time. Verse 42, a second time He went away and prayed saying, “Oh My father, if this cup cannot pass away from Me unless I drink it, Your will be done.” Yeshua accepts God’s decision, God’s verdict. Even though He is begging God “Let this cup pass away from Me.”

Like Moses, He is begging God twice. And it’s found in all the synoptic gospels. In Mark 9 verse 41, and Mark 10 verse 38, and in Luke 22 verse 42, which means that all the three gospels that are called the synoptic gospels because the order of the stories is the same, have the story.

The writers of the gospels that wrote after the events, all agreed that this story is so important, that this event is so important, that God said to Yeshua, “No, I’m not going to take this cup away from You. I sent You to the world to drink this cup, to be a sacrifice for the salvation of mankind. I sent You to Jerusalem to be crucified. And You know that very well because You Yourself told it to Your disciples and to Your enemies. Yes, You may want to escape this cross, this cruel tool of execution. This tool that could make people suffer days, hanging there by their hands and by their feet, stretched out. Every breath is painful. In the sun.”

Passover. Close to the season we are in now, hot, maybe even dusty with a dust storm. And You are hanging there Yeshua. You are hanging there because the father said, “No, son You’Ve gotta drink that cup. You’ve gotta go through it. That is Your purpose in life. That is Your mission. That is Your calling.”

Seems cruel because we have made an image of God that is not real and it’s not true. Of a gracious old senile man sitting on a cloud, not knowing whether it’s Tuesday or Wednesday, administrating our solar system, the sun, the moon, the stars, and obviously our own ball called earth.

Yeah, but that’s not the God of the Bible. Not the God of the Bible. Every one of us, every human being, a believer in God, not a believer in God, a Muslim, a Shinto, a Buddhist, an atheist, a Messianic Jew, a Christian Jew, a Christian from all the different colors and denominations of Christianity, every single one of us is born with a mission.

Nobody’s here to just catch space and breathe air. Every one of us is born with a mission. The problem is that we don’t all know what our mission is and sometimes it takes a lifetime to discover.

And sometimes it’s too late to carry our mission after we get old and decrepit and sick. But we come into this world with a purpose. We are all created in the image and in the form of God. We all have divine qualities. Every human being has divine qualities that the animal world doesn’t have.

Here are some of them. The ability to imagine things that are not yet in existence and to bring them, to create them into existence. The ability to take two elements from nature and mix them together and make something new that didn’t exist before. Like we’re talking about bronze, like different metallic alloys that are man made. People took copper and they took iron and they mixed them, and made bronze.

And I could give you a lot more examples from chemistry because my degree in university is from chemistry also. Beside Bible and archeology and history of Jewish thought I have a degree in chemistry. So I can give you a lot of examples.

Yes, we have that ability to imagine a divine quality. Imagine what doesn’t exist and with our hands and with our minds and with our talents and with our gift, make it happen. That’s a divine quality.

We have the ability to do things for one another that are above and beyond conception. In Israel, one of the things that is above and beyond conception, is the number of young men and women that sacrificed their life, that jumped on the live grenade to save their buddies instead of running.

That went into the fire of the battle in the Golan Heights when the Syrians attacked on Yom Kippur, 1973. Knowing that if they don’t go, many of their buddies and soldiers will die. And they went and sacrificed themselves to be able to stop a column of Syrian tanks.

I can give you the names of these people. Some of them survived, many didn’t. Yes, that altruistic character that some people have and many more should have, especially disciples of Yeshua, of Jesus. That is a divine quality.

The same quality that motivated God to send His son to the world so that nobody will perish but that everybody will have access to everlasting life. Yes God said to His son, to Yeshua, “No, I am not going to take that cup away from You.”

He said to Moses, “No, I am not going to let you cross the Jordan.” But He did the same thing to Elijah. Elijah had that magnificent event on top of Mount Carmel where he was alone with his servant against 450 prophets of Baal, and he had victory. God answered his prayer. A prayer of nine words.

Boom, fire came from heaven, burned the altar, burned the water, the ditch dug around the altar, everything burned. Great victory. It took the prophet 450 prophets of Baal, cut their throats in the River Kishon below Mount Carmel.

You would think, oh wow, what a success? Thank you God, what a success I had. I was able to whip my enemies and Your enemies. As they say in Tennessee, whooped them.

Yes, but that wasn’t Elijah’s reaction. Elijah’s reaction was the opposite. He had that big success. What does he do? He goes to the Sinai desert. He goes to Mount Sinai. He enters a cave there and he wants to die.

Look what he says, 1 Kings 19:4:

Got clinical depression, post trauma from the victory he had at Mount Carmel, excuse me. He wanted to die. He wanted to starve himself to death in the continuation of the story in the book of Kings.

Well, God sends an angel says, “No, sir, you’re not gonna do it. I’m not going to grant you what you want. I have more for you to do, buddy. I have more for you to do, get up and eat. Wash yourself, wash your face, refresh yourself. You have a mission to go. You have a mission to finish. You’re not finished yet.”

Now what’s interesting is that in the story of the transfiguration, Yeshua is there with some of His disciples, we don’t know which mountain. It’s a mountain set apart. Traditionally it’s Mount Tabor, or the highest mountain in the region, Mount Hermon. But Mount Hermon is a range, not a set-apart mountain. Mount Tabor is, it’s kind of like a half an neck sitting in the middle of the valley of Jezreel.

And there, He goes up by Himself and the disciples are somewhere underneath Him but they can see Him. And they see Elijah and Moses come to meet Yeshua on top of that mountain. And they talk to each other.

We don’t have a recording of what they said. We wish we did. If Yeshua had an iPhone He could have put it on record and recorded what Elijah and Moses said to Him. But we can guess.

They came to encourage him. To say to Him, “Listen, we have been there. We have died and we have gone to heaven and we know what it is like. And don’t worry, You’Ll be okay, go for it, Buddy, go die on the cross for the sake of Your people, Israel and for the sake of humanity. Go for it.”

But they may have told Him, “Listen, God knows what He is doing.” “When we ask God,” Moses says, “When I asked God to let me cross the Jordan, He said to me, no. I was very sore, I was very angry, I was upset, but I knew that God knows best. What’s for me best, what’s for His people best, and what’s for the world best. So I had to submit when He told me you’re not crossing the Jordan, and that’s that, my anger dissipated, ended, because I knew God knows what He is doing.”

Elijah the same way said, “Yeshua, don’t worry. I wanted to die, God didn’t let me. I’m glad He didn’t let me die because I continued my mission and it became international. Not only dealing with Ahab and with his wife Jezebel and with their sin. Yeshua, don’t worry. It’ll be short. It’ll be quick. In 40 days, You’ll be going back to the Father sitting on His right hand. The pain that you’re going to suffer is worth it. Not to You, but it’s worth it for Israel and the rest of the world.”

Now we think that we are here put in this world arbitrarily, but nobody is here arbitrarily. Not Yasser Arafat, not Saddam Hussein, not Adolf Hitler, not Boris Johnson or our prime minister, former prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, or our present prime minister, Bennett, Naftali Bennett.

Everybody that is born here, whether you are a king, a prince or a pauper, whether you are sitting in jail for a crime you committed, everybody’s here for a purpose. And God has use of everybody because we are all His children.

Even the Adam that was put in the garden of Eden wasn’t put there to be sitting there all under the juniper tree on a big, easy chair, rocking chair, listening to Louis Armstrong. Oh, what a wonderful world.

No, that wasn’t why Adam was put in this world. We read from the book of Genesis 2:15-17.

English translation is weak. The Hebrew says:

That’s what this text says in Genesis 2:15.

What do you think happened? Here is our human nature. Here is our human nature, folks. The tree, that was said, “Don’t eat,” that’s the tree that Adam and Eve ate from. That’s our nature, but God’s nature also doesn’t change. God’s nature also doesn’t change. And He knows what we don’t know securely yet. That really all things.

And when it says all things, it means the good, the bad, and the ugly things that happen to us in our life they work for the good of those that love the Lord. Not only for our good, the implication is those that us. No, that text implies more than us, for all those that love the Lord.

If you benefit in God’s kingdom, the people around you will benefit too. If you are blessed by God, the people around you will be blessed by God too, through you. You become a tool in God’s hand.

So yes, God can tell us no. God will tell us no, but in our portion of the Torah toward the end in Deuteronomy 4:29, we find the following verse. God is talking to Moses: “But from there you will seek the Lord your God.” No, I’m sorry, mistake. God is talking to all of Israel through Moses. Not to Moses, but through Moses. Verse 29 of chapter four of Deuteronomy:

Now, if you read Acts chapter 17, Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill, you’ll see that this becomes a central motive that God’s purpose for us is to seek Him and verily to find Him, even if we grope for Him in the dark like blind. ‘Cause if we seek Him, we will find Him.

I want to encourage you brothers and sisters in Korea and around the world, seek the Lord, find Him, you’ll find your joy, your happiness, and the very purpose of your existence in the Lord. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the father of our Lord, Jesus Christ, Amen.