Holy Hormones Bible Study: Teaching — not Entertainment
The modern Western Church: more sanitised than Sanctified
FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD #9
Spoiler alert: This graphic does not depict what the Bible describes.
Disclosure: I’m not a Messianic. I’m an NT Saint who has been exposed to my OT Heritage.
This post continues the rag-tag series on the closer examination of some of the aspects of the Passover/Last Supper. If you have come in part-way through the series, there is some explanation in the earlier episodes to be found in FEAST OF UNLEAVENED BREAD
Prelude: At the height of the War in Vietnam, in the late 1960s, I was sitting in front of two chatty ladies in a cinema. The newsreel was showing the napalm bombing in glorious Technicolor and one of the ladies became audibly distressed. To comfort her, her friend said, “Don’t worry, its only a newsreel.” It had a calming influence.
Hang on to that thought and read on.
Skinning the lamb
No specific instruction regarding the skinning of this particular sacrifice has been found by this author. However, in his book, “The gospel in Leviticus; or, an exposition of the Hebrew ritual,”1 Joseph Augustus Seiss, explains how the Christ is the Personification of all the Offerings, the Ultimate Passover Lamb, described in Leviticus Chapters 1–7. All of those were skinned so it is not unreasonable to deduce that the Passover Lamb is also skinned.
(There is one exception, the Red Heifer (Numbers 19:1–10)2 which is not a sacrifice but part of a method of purification.)
What has this to do with Easter? When was Christ skinned?
The descriptions of the appearance of the Christ, indicate that He was literally skinned alive by the Roman flogging, John 19:1.
Where do you get that from?
The OT Prophets.
Isaiah 53:2b tells us is that Jesus’s normal appearance was just like any other man’s — He was an ordinary-looking bloke || “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.”
The Messianic text, Isaiah 50:6, gives a glimpse at the way He was treated || I gave My back to those who struck Me, And My cheeks to those who plucked out the beard; I did not hide My face from shame and spitting.
Isaiah 52:14 describes the inhuman cruelty He suffered at being scourged prior to His crucifixion to the point that He no longer looked like a human being. || His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness.
Just in case that was just skimmed over.
His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness.
This was not just a bad hair day!
The New Testament reveals the Old
It is written in the famous Isaiah 53:4–5
Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes (H2250) we are healed.
Many a sermon has been delivered to New Testament Saints correlating the 39 lashes allowable by the Sanhedrin to the sic“39 known diseases” and how the scourging by Pilate healed all of our diseases. However, the word translated stripes, H2250 — ḥabûrâ, is a singular noun, NOT plural; it should be stripe = bruise, stripe, wound, blow, welt. But there is more being conveyed in the original language than in English.
H2250 is the noun form of the verb H2266 — ḥāḇar = to unite, join, bind together, to be coupled. Paying attention shows the Christ was not whipped by Jews but by Romans, who had no constraints on the number and ferocity. The flavour of H2250 plus H2266 is that the welts overlapped and merged into each other to result in effectively one large wound — all the skin was gone. There were many blows but one resulting wound.
There was also the pulling out of the beard, Isaiah 50:6.
JESUS WAS EFFECTIVELY SKINNED, JUST AS WERE ALL THE BLOOD SACRIFICE OFFERINGS IN THE TABERNACLE/TEMPLE!!!
ALL versions in Bible Gateway, plus additional translations found elsewhere, sanitise the whole state of affairs. They ALL have stripes.
THE ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS ALL MISS THE SAVAGERY OF THE SITUATION!!!
This puts a different slant on, “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.”
We hear so much about being forgiven it becomes a cliché. FORGIVENESS COSTS! DON’T TREAT IT AS A COMMON THING.
If you are interested, there is more on this topic to be found here.
PASSOVER/EASTER STORIES: BLOOD AND UGLINESS FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE Why all this blood and ugliness? Is God a Savage?
So what?
The Isaiah 53 tract doesn’t mean much until John 19:1–5 || So then Pilate took Jesus and scourged Him. And the soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and put it on His head, and they put on Him a purple robe. Then they said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck Him with their hands. Pilate then went out again, and said to them, “Behold, I am bringing Him out to you, that you may know that I find no fault in Him.” Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, “Behold, the Man!”
So? Still so what?
There were two candidates for the Cross that day named JESUS, SON OF THE FATHER. Jesus the Christ and Jesus Barabbas. The Jews had already chosen the Christ to die in John 18. Bible teaching from the Koinonia Institute,3 John: A Comprehensive Commentary by Ron Matsen, teaches that when Pilate said, “Behold, the Man!” the Greek, in context, implied that he was saying, “This is the man you chose,” because the Lord was unrecognizable for reasons already mentioned.
Did Pilate know he was on the tail end of a Prophecy?
It is written in Zechariah 6:12–13 ||
Then speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, saying:
“Behold, the Man whose name is the BRANCH!
From His place He shall branch out,
And He shall build the temple of the Lord;
Yes, He shall build the temple of the Lord.
He shall bear the glory,
And shall sit and rule on His throne;
So He shall be a priest on His throne,
And the counsel of peace shall be between them both.” ’
A disturbing pattern concerning translation is emerging in this project
As this series has progressed, the English translators have not fared well. They have not always done their Exegesis but apparently just followed each other like sheep. The question arises, “What else is shonky?” How can those who, “Follow the Teachings of Jesus,” be so pedantic in declaring that they have the truth while declaring everyone else is wrong when they can’t be sure they know what Jesus teaches?
On another level, this negligence forgoes the opportunity to demonstrate the integrity of the Books in the Book. When Jesus said, “The Book is about Me,” (or words to that effect) He wasn’t kidding. Linking Leviticus to the Gospels, via Isaiah is another nail in the coffin of the naysayers.
But, Praise God, both the original languages are sound. It is the sheeple who are wobbly. Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, American Jewish scholar of renown, quips, “All Translators are robbers.” Some of this is unavoidable because of untranslatable colloquialisms; some is just downright slackness.
There is much more to be said on this topic but let’s keep going with the series and see what else transpires.
Is my trust in God’s Word rattled because of these discoveries?
Absolutely not!
We are being short-changed. The Gospel is far better news than we are being told!
If you have come across the series, INSPIRED? INERRANT? INFALLIBLE?, you will know that Yehovah is doing His part. It is the Saints who are shonky. But all of the Theological Snobs (including me) can take comfort in 1 Corinthians 8:1–3 || … We know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love edifies. And if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, this one is known by God.
What has this to do with chatty ladies watching the gory newsreels?
At the time, there was a dislocation between reality and daily existence for the players in the cinema. I can see something wrong with being less disturbed watching people boiling in their own blood in a newsreel than a movie star feigning the same in an exercise in fantasy. If you can’t, I can’t explain it. Perhaps it’s just me.
Someone has made the observation, “The church has become a nice organization where nice people gather in a nice building listening to a nice pastor telling them how to become nicer before going to have some nice coffee.” (Not all Churches, of course. God always has His Remnant.) There was a version of the Bible in Australia about the turn of the century, aimed at non-believers, which eliminated the word “blood” because the publishers didn’t want to offend sensibilities and chase potential converts away.
Our society has become sanitized. We live in the land of doggy doo-doos but that’s not the word that springs to mind when we stand in it. As the late American Bible Teacher, Chuck Missler, often said, “Jesus didn’t come to perfume the cesspit to make it more pleasant to live in. He came to get us out of the cesspit.”
Is it any wonder the church is experiencing atrophy?
It is written in Isaiah 55:11 || So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.
But I have a question
Why is it that the average veterinary surgeon in the West has better technology to detect and treat illness/injuries than most village doctors in the 3rd World?
The forgoing evidence has not been presented to convince any reader but to allow a personal decision to be made. There is much more to know about this subject. Perhaps you’ll pay another visit, sometime.
All Glory to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
(We all have a plank in our eye. It’s bigger than we think.)
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1 Seiss, Joseph Augustus, 1860, “The gospel in Leviticus; or, an exposition of the Hebrew ritual,” Library of Congress, https://archive.org/details/gospelinleviticu00
2 Numbers 19:1–10 https://www.chabad.org/library/bible_cdo/aid/9947#lt=primary
3 Koinonia Institute https://koinoniainstitute.org/
