It's not hard to see injustice in the world today. It's everywhere. And the notion of "it's not fair' shouts at us from the playground's fence which is locked as a prevention to the tears of the daughter prevented from seeing her dying father because the border to his state is similarly locked. The reason for all the closures, they say, is a virus and the need to keep it away from others.
But some bypass the border restrictions if they have money or a football league and its wealth behind them. That only amplifies the unfairness of border closures, at least to those of us who are prevented.
On an ordinary day, such reasoning is accepted. Take for example, the sexual offender/criminal. We want, after his sentence at the jail is complete, him to be released (that's fair), but not in my backyard. That would be unfair.
So the closed playground, or the closed state borders, the closed neighbourhood-- all these moments in time, even in our times, are real and evidence the cries that are justified, "It's not fair!"
'Fairness' is the modern word for the more ancient term 'justice.'
Monday evening, the 6th of September, across the world, Jewish people will pause their already-paused life due to the virus of COVID-19, and begin the 10 days of prayer and consideration called the '10 Days of Awe.' Rosh Hashanah begins the calendar watch as we hear the sound of the shofar, traditionally blown 100 times each day during the first two days of the year 5,782. Jewish people consider this the number of years since the original couple from the Bible was created. That's how long it has been since Adam and Eve were created and placed in the Garden of Eden. That's also how long it's been since the first cries of 'It's not fair!' were heard in the world.
After all, how were they supposed to know what would happen if they disregarded or as we have learned for centuries, disobeyed the Almighty? The information was limited; the declaration of what was allowed and what was disallowed was scant. Some in our day would say the legislation was confusing. All we have recorded from the Bible is "The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2.16-17)
Not much to go on there. An entire patch of land, perhaps the size of New South Wales, and yet, this deity told the man of the household to enjoy the lot. All except for one tree, don't eat from that one, or there will be consequences.
If you have ever had children, or ever were one, you know that as soon as instructions like this are given, after a certain age of the child, the invitation to disobey seems larger than the call to obedience. Sure enough, the story unfolds as a certain serpent slinks along on all fours and invites the woman of the couple, who hadn't heard the message directly from the Lord herself, to have a bite. Sure enough, she does, and then the man joins her in this fatal snack.
Boom! What follows is the monologue of the judge sentencing both the man and woman to ongoing troubles and death and sentencing the serpent to slide on his belly from then on. The three curses, on each of the participants in that Garden scene, are still with us to this day. But some will cry, "that's not fair!" For 5700 years Adam's descendants would work by the sweat of their brow and have other troubles. What did we do? Why is this punishment being doled out to us?
From verse 17 of chapter 3 of Genesis we read, "Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil, you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground. Because from it, you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust, you shall return.” (Genesis 3.17-19)
Listen to the curses, yes, we call them curses, not only consequences but penalties harsher than a 6-week suspension from rugby or a small notice in the sports section after Tom Brady in 2014 with Deflategate.
To the woman, God declared three (and some say 10 (Nathan, page 9)) penalties. "To the woman, He said, “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth. In pain, you will bring forth children, yet your desire will be for your husband. And he will rule over you.” (Genesis 3.16)
That all seems so unfair, so unjust. I mean, ok, it's justice. Yes, we see that. God was in charge of the Garden. It was his place after all. They were brought in to tend to the setting like Peter Sellers in "Being There" they were Chauncy Gardeners. I get that. But seriously, one little mistake would cost them forever the chance to stay in the Garden. Even Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, and Nash later went to Woodstock and wanted to 'get themselves back to the Garden."
Don't you want to cry 'foul?' Don't you want to say, 'that's not fair!'
We'll talk more about the punishments, especially to the serpent in a while.
On Rosh Hashanah, the saying goes, it is written and on Yom Kippur, it is sealed. May it be written, and may it be sealed that you have a new year that brings fulfillment and joy, peace and prosperity, health and wisdom. That's a lot of 'may it be.' Some would say, it's a lot of wishful thinking. On what is it based after all?
These 10 days we ponder the God who made Adam and Eve, and who, we are told, is Sovereign over all the earth. Here in Australia we understand the term ‘sovereign’ while in the US, where I grew up, that’s an odd term. But a sovereign is more than a coin, it’s the ruler, the dominus, actually the KING is the best term for that. God wants to be king in our lives the next week and a half.
Of course, 10 days does not make a person a subject of a king, as that’s something we work on throughout our lives. But there is time to render yourself the subject of the king during this period and thus ensure that his kingship, his sovereignty, his kingdom will rule in your life going forward. That’s actually the point of this season. To reconcile ourselves to him as Judge and King. That’s why we have round challahs. They represent God as King and Sovereign. It’s an image of his crown. Yes, of course, it’s about the continuity of the calendar that goes around and around, and on and on, but it’s more than that. I wear a mitre, like a king’s crown and a white robe. It’s royal. God wants us to remember his kingship this day and these 10 days. He is the king and in Bible days, the king was the judge. Remember King Solomon and the two women fighting over the same baby? As the king he had to consider the court his own and make determinations. He was the Judge.
In our days, we often think of a judge and the instructions the judge gives the jury. The jury, a court within a court of 12 of the defendant’s peers, listen and make those decisions mostly in criminal cases here in Australia. The judge is left to sentence what the jury decides. But in the court in heaven, there is one judge and he is also the jury. To be sure, each of us has a role to play in sustaining one another in the family of God, but when it comes to judgment and punishments, there is one Lawgiver and one eternal Judge before whom we all must stand.
That could sound ominous to you. It probably does if you ponder your own sin and the penalty or penalties those deserve. Yes, the Judge, the Jury, the prosecution led by the District Attorney, are all in agreement. But that’s not the worst of it. You see, even your own lawyer who knows the law will tell you that your sins have separated you from the Lord. (Isa. 59.1-2) There is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and does not sin. (Ecclesiastes 7.20) The soul that sins, that one shall die. (Ezek. 18.4) This sounds fairly hopeless, doesn’t it?
We need a lawyer, an advocate who can argue something or that can fix our desperate situation. Where is such a one?
For that we have to go back to our Bible reading and listen to the declaration by the Almighty against the serpent. There we see and hear a hint of hope in this most desperate situation.
It’s in verse 15.
I will put enmity between you and the woman. Between your seed and her seed. He will crush your head and you will crush his heel.
There we see a hint of how this meeting with the King might actually turn out to be different in our days. Strange, isn’t it that we should look back 5700 years to find a hint of hope?
I’ll get back to this hint in a few minutes.
For now, what do most Sydneysiders do when confronted with their own loss, their own failures, their own dismal desperation? After all, this is New Year’s Eve, and we in Sydney know how to bring that in, not only for us, but for the rest of the world. We light up the bridge and the harbor, and make resolutions, don’t we?
We resolve to do better.
We resolve to make a change in our diet or in our exercise regimen. We hope, often against hope, that something will be different in our lives, but often by the 10th of January, all those hopes are dashed.
But, you might argue, we are religious and thus our resolutions are of a different calibre and quality. And you may be right. So maybe your ‘read the Bible in a year’ program did prove successful that one year. Maybe your ‘fasting on Mondays and Thursdays’ lasted until Passover, but then again, maybe it didn’t. We couch our change mechanisms in religious terms, but that won’t fix the problems at all. In fact, at times they make the problems that much worse.
When confronted with our own insufficiencies, we promise to reform. But that fails.
Then we have to look elsewhere, away from ourselves, to a power that is both outside us and who is stronger than us. Who or where is that help?
King David sang, “essa einai, el hehorim” in Psalm 121. He found out that his help was not on the mountains or we might add, not on the harbour. His help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth.
Here then, my friends, is the conundrum. We have the demands of God, for wholesome life choices and responsible love for him and our neighbour. We have the justice demands measured against our failures and what we call ‘sin’, or rather, what God calls ‘sin.’ So how is it that our help comes from the Lord, maker of heaven and earth?
The answer is in our Bible text tonight. The curse on the serpent was in answer to Satan’s boasts.
Listen to his boasts, to which God replied.
Satan said he would kill Adam and wed Eve. God answered, “I will put enmity between you and the woman.” He thought he would be the king over the whole world. God’s answer was ‘cursed are you from among all cattle.” Your thought was “I will walk upright” but God answered you were to crawl on your belly. Your thought was “I will eat the world’s dainties.” God said, you will eat dust all the days of your life.”
But there is one that the rabbis seem to miss. In our text, the enmity between the serpent and Eve is carried on through generations. We read that the seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. This ultimate victory over the Satanic forces of the world catches my attention every year.
The victory for which we all long, every year when we litanize our sins, the victory over sin itself, and the way into the presence of the Almighty, is not from our own reformation or our own realization. The victory is in our repentance to the One who is the serpent-bruiser. Conquering sin and Satan is the work of the Messiah.
In fact in Bereshit Rabba 23, a rabbinic commentary on Genesis, we read, “Eve had respect to that seed which is coming from another place. And who is this? This is Messiah the King.”
The one to bruise or crush the serpent is actually King Messiah. Now this begins to make sense. The only one who can fix things between us and the Lord is the Lord himself. It would take a royal to go before the king and plead our case. Only an in-house royal could accomplish what we, the members of the masses, so desperately need.
And thus he did. Yeshua came from heaven to a patch of ground smaller than New South Wales, a village outside Jerusalem in Bethlehem approximately 2000 years ago. Why did he come? The words of the song say this:
In the darkness we were waiting
Without hope, without light
Till from heaven You came running;
There was mercy in Your eyes
To fulfil the law and prophets
To a virgin came the Word.
From a throne of endless glory
To a cradle in the dirt.
To reveal the kingdom coming
And to reconcile the lost,
To redeem the whole creation
You did not despise the cross.
For even in Your suffering
You saw to the other side,
Knowing this was our salvation
Jesus for our sake
You died.” (written by Brooke Ligertwood, Scott Ligertwood, and Jason Ingram)
There is the victory for us in Sydney. For those of you on the zoom call in New Zealand or in the USA. Up in South Korea or Japan, and wherever you live. The promise of the Bruised One who would bruise the serpent and win for us the victory is fulfilled in Yeshua, born in Bethlehem, but he already ever existed.
On this evening of Rosh Hashanah, take away more than extra calories in round challot and apples dipped in honey. Take away more than the shofar blasts. Take away the joy of knowing you are forgiven and redeemed. God initiated this in the Garden of Eden. And you can rejoice in this season of rejoicing because GOD has taken away your sins.
Yes, there will continue to be football players who get away with high tackles or mistreatment of others. Yes, we will feel the bother of COVID even though we will hit the 80% vaccinated here in NSW. “It’s not fair!” may be a cry you feel, if not repeat, when others get ahead of you, or ahead of those for whom you barrack. Your favourite café may never reopen. The bad guys will appear to get away with murder.
In the end, when Yeshua comes back to earth, restoration will happen. Peter pronounced this early in his public ministry:
“But the things which God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that His messiah would suffer, he has thus fulfilled, therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; and that he may send Yeshua, the messiah appointed for you, whom heaven must receive until the period of restoration of all things (Acts 3.18-21)
The call then is to repent and return. That’s still my call tonight.
INVITATION
In a moment I’m going to ask you if you would like to receive Yeshua as your messiah and saviour. I’m going to ask if you want the one who was Beaten to beat the serpent on your behalf. His justice is everlasting. His fairness is unto the ages.
Yeshua took it on the chin, and in his wrists and feet, and died a criminal’s death so that you could have eternal life.
Do you want that?
Do you want God’s justice?
If so, pray with me just now.
If you prayed that prayer, just now, will you write me to let me know? bob@jewsforjesus.org.au I’d love to write you back and encourage you and be available to answer any queries you have. Or at least I’ll try!
We don’t ask God to inscribe us in the Book of Life any more. That’s already been done. We don’t ask him to seal you any longer. That’s been done by the Spirit of God.
We ask God to give you a good and sweet year. L’shana tovah um’tookah to you and all yours in 5782 and well beyond.
Let’s listen and sing along to that song, please.
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Bibliography:
The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, Judah Goldin (Translated), Schocken Books, New York, 1955.
Actual text read
Gen. 3:1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Indeed, has God said, ‘You shall not eat from 1any tree of the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; 3 but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” 4 The serpent said to the woman, “You surely will not die! 5 “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and ayou will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they aknew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves 1loin coverings.
Gen. 3:8 They heard the sound of athe LORD God walking in the garden in the 1cool of the day, band the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 Then the LORD God called to the man, and said to him, “aWhere are you?” 10 He said, “aI heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.” 11 And He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” 12 aThe man said, “The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate.” 13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “aThe serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 The LORD God said to the serpent,
“Because you have done this,
Cursed are you more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you will go,
And dust you will eat
All the days of your life;
15 And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her seed;
He shall 1bruise you on the head,
And you shall bruise him on the heel.”
16 To the woman He said,
“I will greatly multiply
Your pain 1in childbirth,
In pain you will bring forth children;
Yet your desire will be for your husband,
And he will rule over you.”
17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’;
Cursed is the ground because of you;
In 1toil you will eat of it
All the days of your life.
18 Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you;
And you will eat the plants of the field;
19 By the sweat of your face
You will eat bread,
Till you return to the ground,
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.”
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