Friday, July 27 2007

Leviticus 24-26

The Tabernacle lamps were to be kept alight at all times; as with everything else, they too represented Christ (see The Light Of Life, God Is Light and People Of The Light; also Lightening, Not Lightning):

"The Lord [see YHVH, Adonai, Jehovah, LORD] said to Moses [see also The Education Of Moses], "Command the people of Israel to bring you pure oil from beaten olives for the lamp, that a light may be kept burning continually. Outside the veil of the testimony [see also Why Was It Torn?], in the tent of meeting, Aaron shall keep it in order from evening to morning before The Lord continually; it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations. He shall keep the lamps in order upon the lampstand of pure gold before The Lord continually." (Leviticus 24:1-4 RSV)

Also there was the bread, which also provided the symbolism of the Christ (see the Fact Finder question below).

"And you shall take fine flour, and bake twelve cakes of it; two tenths of an ephah shall be in each cake. And you shall set them in two rows, six in a row, upon the table of pure gold. And you shall put pure Frankincense with each row, that it may go with the bread as a memorial portion to be offered by fire to The Lord. Every Sabbath day Aaron shall set it in order before The Lord continually on behalf of the people of Israel as a covenant for ever." (Leviticus 24:5-8 RSV)

Blasphemy was among the offenses to which Stoning was the penalty, as decreed by The Lord (see also Why Did Christ Put Moses To Death?).

"Now an Israelite woman's son, whose father was an Egyptian, went out among the people of Israel; and the Israelite woman's son and a man of Israel quarreled in the camp, and the Israelite woman's son blasphemed the Name, and cursed. And they brought him to Moses. His mother's name was Shelomith, the daughter of Dibri, of the tribe of Dan. And they put him in custody, till the will of The Lord should be declared to them.

And The Lord said to Moses, "Bring out of the camp him who cursed; and let all who heard him lay their hands upon his head, and let all the congregation stone him." (Leviticus 24:10-14 RSV)

Leviticus Chapter 25

Good soil management was not the invention of modern science (see also The First Scientist). The Lord long ago instructed people in how to properly care for the land.

"The Lord said to Moses on Mount Sinai [see also Why Did Paul Say That Sinai Was In Arabia?], "Say to the people of Israel, When you come into the land which I give you, the land shall keep a sabbath to The Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in its fruits; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath to The Lord; you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. What grows of itself in your harvest you shall not reap, and the grapes of your undressed vine you shall not gather; it shall be a year of solemn rest for the land." (Leviticus 25:1-5 RSV)

The year of Jubilee was the name of the joyous festival held every fifty years. During the jubilee year the land remained fallow, property returned to the original (tribal) owner, slaves were set free and all debts were reprieved (read the entire chapter for details). Jesus Christ spoke of it in its ultimate fulfillment, that He will bring about e.g. "The Spirit of The Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of The Lord." (Luke 4:18-19 RSV)

"And you shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall be to you forty-nine years. Then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall send abroad the trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants; it shall be a jubilee for you, when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you; in it you shall neither sow, nor reap what grows of itself, nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you; you shall eat what it yields out of the field. "In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property." (Leviticus 25:8-13 RSV)

Leviticus Chapter 26

Salvation is a choice. Those who obey will be granted eternal life, while those who refuse to repent will be cast into the lake of fire and obliterated. That principle was and is the basis of the physical choice of life or death that all are given as well.

"If you walk in My statutes and observe My Commandments and do them, then I will give you your rains in their season, and the land shall yield its increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall last to the time of vintage, and the vintage shall last to the time for sowing; and you shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land securely." (Leviticus 26:3-5 RSV)

"But if you will not hearken to Me, and will not do all these Commandments, if you spurn My statutes, and if your soul abhors My ordinances, so that you will not do all My Commandments, but break My covenant, I will do this to you: I will appoint over you sudden terror, consumption, and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away." (Leviticus 26:14-16 RSV)

Fact Finder: What is the symbolic significance of bread to Jesus Christ?
See Bread of the Presence, Christ, The Bread of Life and Christ's Feast of Unleavened Bread

Today's Word
The Holy Bible was primarily written in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. Today's Word examines the pronunciation and literal meaning of one of those actual words of the Holy Scriptures and how it is usually translated into English-language Bibles.

The Hebrew word pronounced ale-yone means high or above. It is most often translated for use in English language Bibles as high or upper.

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This Day In History, July 27

1054: Siward of Northumbria and Malcolm defeated Macbeth at Dunsinane, a peak in Scotland.

1214: Philip II of France defeated an allied English, Flemish and German army under Otto IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, at the Battle of Bouvines. This broke up the coalition and secured Philip's position.

1245: Frederick II of France was deposed by a council at Lyons, which found him guilty of sacrilege.

1540: Thomas Cromwell, principal adviser to King Henry VIII of England, was executed for treason.

1586: Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first tobacco to England from Virginia.

1675: Henri de Turenne, French military leader in the Thirty Years' War, was killed during the Battle of Sasbach during the Dutch War.

1689: General Mackay led troops loyal to William of Orange to subdue the Scottish Jacobites under Dundee. The royal troops were utterly routed at the following Battle of Killiecrankie and over 2,000 were killed.

1742: The Peace of Berlin between Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Prussia ended the first Silesian War.

1866: A transatlantic cable laid by the steamer Great Eastern established reliable communication by telegraph between the United States and England.

1909: Orville Wright established a world flight record when he and a passenger remained aloft for just over 1 hour.

1921: Canadian medical researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin for the first time. It proved an effective treatment for diabetes.

1953: After over 3 years of war, the armistice at Panmunjon was signed between the United Nations and North Korea to end the Korean War. The agreement saw a 4 kilometer buffer zone created to separate the two Koreas. During the war, 116,000 United Nations and 1,500,000 Chinese and North Korean troops were killed.

1954: Britain and Egypt initialled an agreement to end British occupation of the Suez Canal Zone.

1955: Austria regained its sovereignty after 17 years of occupation by foreign troops (German troops just before and during the Second World War, primarily US, British and Canadian troops after).

1964: Winston Churchill, the longest-serving Member of Parliament in British history, made his last appearance in the House of Commons.

1980: Mohammed Reza Pahlavi died of cancer while in exile in Egypt. The Shah of Iran from 1941, he lost control of his country and fled in 1979, when revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini succeeded him.

1989: Christer Pettersson was found guilty and jailed for life for the 1986 murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. He was later acquitted and the crime has remained unsolved.

1990: Belarus declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

1996: During the Olympic Games in Atlanta a bomb exploded in an entertainment park, killing two and wounding 110.