Add your burnt offerings to your
sacrifices and eat flesh. For I did not speak to your fathers, or
command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt,
concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this is what I
commanded them, saying, "Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you will
be My people; and you will walk in all the way which I command you, that it
may be well with you." (Jer. 7:21-23)
Some have misunderstood this passage and
charged the Bible with self-contradiction, not understanding a peculiar
Hebraism: When the Bible says, "not this, but that," it doesn't mean that
God never really meant the former thing or that the former thing never happened,
but rather, "this first thing wasn't the main issue, but this second thing was."
Thus, Jeremiah's words should be understood to mean, "I didn't primarily speak
to your fathers about sacrifice, but about obeying My commands." It is no
mere happenstance that God opened His mitzvot (commandments) with a
dissertation about properly treating one's neighbor rather than a collection of
ceremonies. That is not to say that the ceremonies are without value, only
that they are without value to those who mistreat their neighbors!
Prominent among the commandments are the
strange laws about setting one's bondservant free on the Sabbath year. It
was for violating this commandment--indeed, for initially giving the slaves
their freedom and then depriving them of it again!--that
Adonai took away the freedom of
the whole nation. Indeed, many miss the significance of 2 Ch. 36:21
because they don't realize this: The reason that the Holy One set the
number of years of exile according to the number of Sabbath years missed was not
because He was so much concerned about harvesting on the Sabbath year, but
because He was concerned about freedom being given on it! Indeed, the
rabbis recognized that this sin was so severe that they reversed the normal
order of the Haftarah reading to that one would read the promise to never
destroy Israel after reading the depths of her sin!
Yeshua came to give us freedom; not freedom
from Torah, but freedom from sin and fear and death. Because we have known
His grace, we have been set free indeed, just as Israel was set free from
bondage to the Egyptians. This is why the attempt of some Jews, who were
not believers in the Messiah (Gal. 2:4) trying to force Gentiles to become Jews
by the ritual of circumcision so vexed Sha'ul: How could those who have
tasted of the freedom of deliverance by God want to put others under a yoke of
slavery? God freed the Jews from bondage to the Gentiles so that they
could become the nation of Israel; how then could Israel demand that Greeks stop
being Greeks, Romans stop being Romans, Persians stop being Persians, etc., when
the Eternal One had made it clear from the beginning that His plan was to save
the whole earth--indeed, to call even the Gentiles by His Name!
Therefore, we should respect one another's
freedom to be accepted fully in the way in which we were called, whether Jew or
Gentile, male or female, bachelor or married. Such distinctions have not
ceased to exist, but they have ceased to divide, for One
Lord has set us all free together!