The Gospel According to Yeeks

“Judah, your brothers shall praise you;     your hand shall be on the neck of your enemies;     your father's sons shall bow down before you. Judah is a lion's cub;     from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He stooped down; he crouched as a lion     and as a lioness; who dares rouse him? The scepter shall not depart from Judah,     nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until tribute comes to him;     and to him shall be the obedience of the peoples." (Genesis 49:8-10) The past few years, God seems to be teaching me a lot from Genesis. Today I thought I'd document down another one of those all so familiar texts but have so much more than meets the eye. The phrase in v10 - "until tribute comes to him", I have since learned can be translated as "Until shiloh comes" (not to be confused with the Old Testament location, Shiloh). Walter Kaiser Jr argues in his book, "The Messiah in the Old Testament", that th...

Some day I will perhaps use "V for Vendetta" to illustrate how words itself need context to see what is their "true" meaning. In the movie, the first few lines of the poem "The Fifth of November" are cited: Remember, remember!     The fifth of November,     The Gunpowder treason and plot;     I know of no reason     Why the Gunpowder treason     Should ever be forgot! The purpose of citing these lines were to incite a spirit of rebellion against the neo-fascist regime of the day. The poem in its original form however is actually meant to DETER people from following Guy Fawkes, i.e., we are meant to remember the Fifth of November so that we would never commit the same treason. Here is the poem with a few more lines of the original added:    Remember, remember!     The fifth of November,     The Gunpowder treason and plot;     I know of no reason     Why the Gunpowder t...

I shared this with our youths (not so clearly) and our Discipleship Seminars classes (a bit more clearly) recently. One can see the "Gospel in Genesis" if we pay attention to the life of Judah: Judah, the fourth son of Jacob, in Genesis: Birth (Genesis 29:31-35) When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben, for she said, “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; for now my husband will love me.” She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” And she called his name Simeon. Again she conceived and bore a son, and said, “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” Therefore his name was called Levi. And she conceived again and bore a son, and said, “ This time I will praise the Lord.” Therefore she called h...

I do not read much of Joshua. So it was to my pleasant surprise that I noticed a theme recurring within this book that perhaps adds some perspective to the offense of the Cross to a Jewish person. In the Book of Joshua, upon completing conquests of certain parts of the land, the Israelites would then hang Canaanite Kings on trees. This described the "cursed" state of the Canaanite Kings in Deuteronomy 21:22-23 “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree , his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God . You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance. It is thus somewhat surprising to see that this law was applied not to Israelites, but to the Canaanite Kings. First the King of Ai in Joshua 8:28-29: So Joshua burned Ai and made it for ever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day. And he hange...

Genesis 2:7 "... then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground ( adama ) and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man ( adam ) became a living creature." (Genesis 2:7) Genesis 3:17 And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife     and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you,     ‘You shall not eat of it’, cursed is the ground ( adama ) because of you;     in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; Genesis 12:3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonours you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth ( adama ) shall be blessed.” Genesis shows strong links between the ground ( adama ) and the man ( adam ). Genesis 2:7 shows the man being formed from the ground. Genesis 3:17 shows the ground being cursed because of the man But Genesis 12:3 tells us that the ground has hope. All the families of the ground ( adama ) find their hope in an ...

In preparation for a series of things that I will be busy with next year, I am currently making my way through "Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible" by Stephen Dempster. Dempster argues that the order of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh (TNK spelling out the Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim) has a literary purpose. Unlike the Old Testament order, it begins with Genesis and ends with Chronicles. In this arrangement, the ending of Genesis and Chronicles display remarkable similarity. At the end of Genesis, Joseph about to die tells his brothers: “I am about to die, but God will visit  (Hebrew root: paqad ) you and bring you up  (Hebrew root:  alah ) out of this land to the land that he swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” (Genesis 50:24) At the end of Chronicles, Cyrus sends the exiles home to rebuild the temple: “Thus says Cyrus king of Persia, ‘The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he h...

"But he who is joined  to the Lord becomes one spirit with him." (1 Cor 6:17) It dawned on me after recent studies in 1 Cor that this is alluding to two passages. The first one is Genesis 2:24 - "Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh." The other is actually Deut 10:20 - "You shall fear the Lord your God. You shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear." It's amazing to see the same imperative "hold fast" used in these two passages. The first talks about the oneness of human marriages, the second with regards to our relationship to God. Paul makes the argument that sexual immorality is more than just sex. We become " one flesh ". The choice is between a prostitute and bizarrely, God Himself.