Sacred Absence: The God Who Is Not There
For the past week or so I have been researching the Bible codes. The hidden words and phrases coded into the Torah (the first five books of the Old Testament) and the Tanakh (the complete Old Testament). I have gained a bit of knowledge about Jewish Rabbinical history and Jewish thought today. The codes were first discovered by individual Rabbi’s as far back as the 1400’s.
It got me thinking about the Jewish religious experience. God shut their religious system down at the death of Jesus. (Mathew 27:50–53) And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. The four inch thick curtain at the entrance to the Holy of Holies, in the Temple, was torn from top to bottom. An act by God signifying the end of the Old Covenant, and the beginning of the New, in Jesus Christ.
As I read about the Old Rabbi’s, their writings in the Talmud’s and Mishnah, and the Mysticism they invented, one thing stood out. Though they have a fear of God and reverence for the Torah and the Tanakh, the God who instituted them is absent from their experience. The popularity of the Bible codes ten or so years ago, set off a great stir in Israel. Books were…
