Heart & Soul - Part 4 (Growth)
May 8, 2022Today's message was given by Pastor Patrick Tanton. A video of the message can be found here.
Frankly, I couldn't come up with a Torah reference that dealt specifically with an individual's growth. No doubt that's due to my limited familiarity and not the actual lack of a reference.
However, in the macro sense (society level) as opposed to the micro sense (personal, individual), a huge amount of planting, feeding, and pruning took place in the wilderness with the Israelites fresh out of Egypt.
I won't deal with the planting (more like uprooting from Egypt) and the feeding (manna, water, laws given, etc.) in the wilderness. Rather, I'll focus on the pruning that God did with the Israelites while in the wilderness those 40 years.
First, we'll set the stage. God takes the Israelites out of Egypt not just to free them from slavery, but more importantly to create a society of people to take God's message of ethical monotheism to the world. As you might imagine, this raw group of now ex-slaves existing in a totally pagan world were not entirely prepared to grasp what God would teach them. The very notion of a trustworthy and invisible God who created the universe and was the one true God proved very hard to swallow. They weren't at all used to it, and there were very many pagan distractions. Many of these newly-freed Israelites just couldn't wrap their minds around this new, very non-pagan God.
In order to create a society that would accept, and behave according to, this new (to them) God, some serious pruning had to occur. Just as we as individuals must prune unhealthy and/or distracting "branches" in our own lives, so to the Israelite society would have to be pruned of their unhealthy and/or distracting "branches".
A word of warning first... Most of the pruning I'll be noting involves death, death of individuals, of groups, and ultimately of the entire first generation to leave Egypt. To put it bluntly, God isn't messing around. We can chat about this aspect at group sometime, as desired. For now, we'll just have to accept the fact that God needs to build a strong, faithful community to take on the world.
The first such pruning occured a few months after leaving Egypt and a mere 40 days since receipt of the Ten Commandments with the story of the golden calf. Those who participated in this return to idolatry and debauchery were killed by God by a plague (of unknown nature).
The book of Numbers is full of Israelite rebellions against God, from mere complaining to outright defiance. Prager jokes that it's called the Book of Numbers due to the number of complaints by the Israelites. It's really called Numbers due to the census taking (counting) of the Israelites. If named properly based on the Hebrew, the book would be called "In the Wilderness" based on the first word/phrase of the text.
To name a few of the prunings in Numbers:
- The fire and the quail (11)
- Spying out Canaan, rebellion upon report of spies (13)
- A sabbath-breaker stoned (15)
- The insolence of Korah (16)
- Israel sins in Moab (25)
That's some serious pruning to create a healthy nation.