Sabbath study, vi: man’s duty to God
With great privileges are accompanied great responsibilities.
Genesis’s account of Creation Week describes God’s creation of mankind on the sixth day of the week:1
And God prepareth the man in His image; in the image of God He prepared him, a male and a female He prepared them.
And God blesseth them, and God saith to them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over fish of the sea, and over fowl of the heavens, and over every living thing that is creeping upon the earth.’
And God saith, ‘Lo, I have given to you every herb sowing seed, which [is] upon the face of all the earth, and every tree in which [is] the fruit of a tree sowing seed, to you it is for food; and to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the heavens, and to every creeping thing on the earth, in which [is] breath of life, every green herb [is] for food,’ and it is so.
However, Adam and Eve fell short of God’s perfect moral standards and sinned against His command to not eat from the tree of knowledge and good and evil, plunging not only themselves but all of their descendants into the curse of sin and its corollary: separation from God unto death.
The fullness of God’s unadulterated law—given to a sinful humanity—encompasses the Five Books of Moses, demarcated commonly within the human reckoning into 613 components, and is a sophisticated study too lengthy to expound upon every one in a single sitting especially when considering type → antitype shadows and substances concerning the sacrificial and/or so-called “ceremonial” laws.
In order to understand God’s Law a.k.a. Torah, it is critical to comprehend its fundamental root purpose. The prophet Micah declared:2
With what do I come before Jehovah? Do I bow to God Most High? Do I come before Him with burnt-offerings? With calves — sons of a year? Is Jehovah pleased with thousands of rams? With myriads of streams of oil? Do I give my first-born [for] my transgression? The fruit of my body [for] the sin of my soul?
He hath declared to thee, O man, what [is] good; Yea, what is Jehovah requiring of thee, except to do judgment, and love kindness, And lowly to walk with thy God?
In Jesus’s ministry, a certain scribe asked the Messiah what the greatest commandment in the Law is, to which inquiry the Lord and Savior explained:3
The first of all the commands [is], Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God out of all thy heart, and out of thy soul, and out of all thine understanding, and out of all thy strength — this [is] the first command; and the second [is] like [it], this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself; — greater than these there is no other command.
There is no contradiction between the Old and New Testaments; the two rather are complimentary witnesses of the same truth. During the Old Testament period of the Law and Prophets, Jehovah’s expectations to His people were summarized as:
faithfully walk with God out of a pure heart
faithfully practice the righteousness of God towards other human beings out of a pure heart, a.k.a.:
execute justice within one’s gates
show mercy
In a nutshell, it encapsulates very particularly the Ten Commandments: the former four on the first tablet of stone concern what a human being is required individually before God,4 and the latter six on the second tablet concern a person’s dealings with their fellow human beings.5
Now, the substance of the Law can be understood as encompassing two components in two different ways, a.k.a. four “realms” total (albeit not in a direct two-way table sense). The one angle here is recognizing its requirements as “bifurcated” in the sense of a person’s duty to God and the duty towards fellow mankind; the other angle is of course justice and mercy. These four perspectives encompass the fullness of God’s perfect standards and are reflected in the Day of Atonement—I already explained previously the role of justice and mercy as represented respectively by the sacrificial goat and by the scapegoat and how Jesus fulfilled them:
Now, the other two animals sacrificed in the typifying Levitical priesthood was the bullock for a sin offering, and a ram for a burnt offering.6 While the sin offering accounted for man’s sins at a more “communal” extent and dealt with highly specific transgressions, the burnt offering represented man’s faithfulness at the personal level towards God—after the Great Flood, Noah’s first postdiluvian action was to build an altar to Jehovah and offer burnt offerings to his Creator who spared him and his family from the destruction that consumed all the rest of mankind. Within the Genesis Flood chiasm, the record of Noah’s building of an altar to God comprises the B’.ii’ sub-branch almond (eventually I will explain the Great Flood narrative chiasmus of Gen. 6:9-9:29 in far greater detail):7
And Noah buildeth an altar to Jehovah, and taketh of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and causeth burnt-offerings to ascend on the altar.
And Jehovah smelleth the sweet fragrance, and Jehovah saith unto His heart, ‘I continue not to disesteem any more the ground because of man, though the imagination of the heart of man [is] evil from his youth; and I continue not to smite any more all living, as I have done; during all days of the earth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, do not cease.’
Within the at-large chiasm, it corresponds to B.ii that describes his absolute obedience to God:8
‘…and of all that liveth, of all flesh, two of every [sort] thou dost bring in unto the ark, to keep alive with thee; male and female are they. Of the fowl after its kind, and of the cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the ground after its kind, two of every [sort] they come in unto thee, to keep alive. And thou, take to thyself of all food that is eaten; and thou hast gathered unto thyself, and it hath been to thee and to them for food.’
And Noah doth according to all that God hath commanded him; so hath he done.
The explanation for why these two sections correspond in the at-large chiasm, in spite of a lack of any crisp-clear lexical match compared to the other chiastic links, is simple: they are complimentary passages conveying Noah’s perfected individual personal obedience towards God both before and after the Flood as complimentary components of one harmonious lesson. Just as Noah out of faithfulness towards his Creator obeyed all of Jehovah’s commands to preserve life in the Ark he built for the deluge to come, so too out of faithfulness did he after the deluge—upon walking on an earth purified of its abhorrent human inhabitants—put God first out of a pure heart and offered burnt offerings to Him.
Yom Kippur, a.k.a. the Day of Atonement, pointed towards a single sacrifice by the image of the invisible God9 who would atone for all of humanity’s sins in both the realm of man’s shortcomings before God and also their sins towards other humans, also representing the harmonious unison of justice and mercy, foreshadowed by the four separate animals in the Levitical type—for the ram and bullock:10
ram for a burnt offering: typified Jesus’s sacrifice that atones for man’s shortcomings at the level of their personal and individual conduct before God
bullock for a sin offering: typified Jesus’s sacrifice that atones for man’s shortcomings at the level of their communal conduct towards other people
These two sacrifices in the Levitical type of the Day of Atonement concern the relevance of all the Mosaic Law that God’s people were given to live up to, a.k.a. the entire Torah as summarized by the two great commandments stated by Jesus to the scribe. As for the two goats, to repeat in abridged/summarized form what I had highlighted previously:
sacrificial goat: typified Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s principle of justice, dying in the stead of human sinners to bear the price (death) in their stead11
scapegoat: typified Jesus as the fulfillment of God’s principle of mercy, carrying sin away from the presence of God’s holy city to cast it away from His people forever and ever12
In one final divinely ordained sacrificial offering—the earthly death of Jesus Christ on the cross—the Lord and Savior perfected His people who are sanctified.13
What then does it behoove God’s people, having been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb through penitence-defined faith, to do? While each person’s individual role within God’s body of people varies,14 the baseline non-negotiable principle of faithfully practicing justice and mercy is universal—the prophet Zechariah declared what Jehovah commands of His people:15
These [are] the things that ye do: Speak ye truth each with his neighbour, Truth and peaceful judgment judge in your gates, And each the evil of his neighbour ye do not devise in your heart, And a false oath ye do not love, For all these [are] things that I have hated, An affirmation of Jehovah.’
The faithful adherent of God, who is to walk as Jesus—the image of the invisible God—walked,16 must therefore follow after Jesus’s example of perfected justice and mercy in its restored harmony. There is no completed justice without mercy, nor does there exist completed mercy without justice. Anyone who wishes to separate the two is living under a satanic delusion that denies the fulfillment of the Day of Atonement in the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’s one-time sacrifice for sin, whether they reject the scriptures altogether or even if they are a “Christian.”
In the world today, many “Christians,” namely in the West, are accustomed to an attitude of jettisoning any overly harsh moral indictment of immoral conduct by simply telling the victim to forgive the one who wronged them, rather than out of a pure heart in righteousness-driven anger demanding justice that entails a punishment of the wrongdoer—all too often, the modern lukewarm17 Christian world chooses to blame the victim for not being “forgiving” enough towards the one who wronged them, this attitude extending to a blank check protecting clerical elites from scrutiny and reproach by using “mercy” as a vague gateway for permissibility and license.
But such a lopsided view of mercy negates the fundamental purpose of mercy itself; there is no such thing as mercy if the notion thereof extends to showing undue “mercy” towards the impenitent and sadistically unmerciful, because that is a denial of mercy for the wronged innocent people who deserve it. Mercy for the righteous and innocent demands the execution of justice against the unrighteous and guilty—a balance is only a balance if one side goes up as the other goes down. The just and innocent cannot be elevated upwards unless the unjust plunge downwards.
Have ye not known that the saints shall judge the world? and if by you the world is judged, are ye unworthy of the smaller judgments?18
Mankind’s duty is to fear God and keep His commandments.19 The corollary is rigidly consistent at the level of human-to-human conduct, even if one grapples temporally in the flesh in their personal lives at the level of their individual relationship with God: exhibit the justice and mercy of the perfect Creator of the universe by consistently speaking out against evil behavior and its human practitioners while selflessly extending authentic compassion out of a pure heart to the innocent and oppressed.
Gen. 1:27-30.
Mic. 6:6-8.
Mk. 12:28-31; cf. Matt. 22:34-40; Lk. 10:25-28.
Cf. Ex. 20:1-11.
Cf. Ex. 20:12-17.
Lev. 16:1-4.
Gen. 8:20-22.
Gen. 6:18-22.
Col. 1:15.
Cf. Heb. 10:5-9.
Cf. Rom. 6:23; II Cor. 5:14-15; I Thess. 5:9-10; I Pet. 3:18.
Cf. Mic. 7:19; Jn. 1:29-31; Heb. 13:11-12.
Heb. 10:14.
Cf. I Cor. 12.
Zech. 8:16-17.
I Jn. 2:6.
Rev. 3:14-22.
I Cor. 6:2.
Ecc. 12:13-14.